Dear All
I am trying to run a dreamcast emulator (chankast) on wine.
I am using suse 10.3 in a kde desktop environment.
The emulator works, it launches, it starts with the initial dreamcast menus etc. etc. but I cannot make the application recognize the drives in which the games are.
The developers of the application say that it is much better to use one disc image and mount it ona virtual drive and then chankast should recognize it and launch.
I got one of those images, i put it on a folder in my hard-drive and set it up as a drive (D or H).
Still these are not recognized by chankast. Should I give some special instructions to mount these drives? or more in general, can you make a virtual drive through wine somehow?
I think that it would be great if we could run these emulators on wine, some of the dreamcast games are just fantastic.
Could anybody please be so kind to have a look?

There is another emulator nulldc, but it requires some special libraries to be installed.
Has anybody thought about making scripts for these two apps?

to mount the images there are two programs one is gisomount in gnome or AcetoneISO in kde and gnome you can test it to mount these images


about nulldc having wine installed do this to test the program

1. download nulldc installer and run it.
2. unzip this file http://www.sweetpotatosoftware.com/files/microsoft.vc80.crt.zip move the files to the nulldc program files
3. Run "winecfg" and add the nulldc Executable "mabe nullDC_100b1.exe " in the apps lis, and choose verison to emulate winxp, next in the audio section select "Hardware Acceleration" and choose "Emulation" and select "Driver Emulation".
5. next to do is run the emulator and if you can test with this comman : WINEDEBUG="-all" wine nullDC_100b1.exe




edit: my english is not perfect

Edité par icaro581

EDIT: Woops ! icario581 was faster to answer

Hi algarues,

I didn't already try to use a disc image in wine but I can give you a tip that may help you (I think).

To my mind, your emulator didn't recognized your dis image because it wasn't mounted under Linux.
So, if you mount your disc image then set the folder where it's mounted as a drive (as you previously did with the not mounted disc image), it may works.
To mount a .iso image, type the following command (as root):


If your disc image isn't a .iso file (if it's a .nrg or a .mds) or if you want to use a GUI to mount your disc image, you can install AcetoneISO. You can download packages and tarballs HERE.
Attention ! Take care to run the following commands (as root) after installing AcetoneISO (it will not works if you don't):


Hope it will help you.

Bye

Edité par Ghostofkendo

Dear all
Thank you for your quick reply.
I think one of the major problems with chankast is that it can only recognize .cdi images, which are made with discjuggler and cannot be mounted by default by linux and neither by applications like acetoneiso.
Another thing is that I did some searching around and found forums in which it is said that the cd plugin does not work in linux. That is not entirely true, as games on cd are not recognized as such, but rather as music cds. Strange...
I' ll give a couple of tries and then let you know
Thanks again

Dear Icaro 581
OK I tried nullDC as you told me
take into account that what I have tried is the first version of the emulator
Basically....IT WORKS!
I tried shenmue and used the image reading plugin
I also changed some of the settings from what you suggested, for instance I used full audio and run the game either as windows2000 or windows 2003
running it as window xp does not work
emulation in itself is very fast, the game goes at 230% of its normal fps.
It starts but then it hangs at half of the intro
Since it is the first version of the emulator it could simply be that the emulator would stop there.
There are newer versions, but they recquire the last directx9 and some other microsoft libraries (which you can download anyway).
do you think you could give it a try?
here below is the last message from the wine debug
wine-pthread in free(): warning: junk pointer, too high to make sense
wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0xff000066 at address 0x7ed0116c (thread 0035), starting debugger
Just let me know
Thank you anyway, for a few seconds it has been quite thrilling

Sorry IT FULLY WORKS!!!!!
when i tried it the first time, it was on pcbsd
then I tried it on suse and it fully works!!!
I mean, you can play it and so on! GREAT!!!
When you lunch the application you get the message that the application tried to load unproperly the c runtime library. Ignore that and go on.
can you still please give a look on how to use the latest version?

About the last version of nulldc the link is :
I think that this version is an ALPHA Version

The c runtime library can be downloaded i dont know if this will make better the emulator, but i you want it ... it can be downloaded of has Micr0s0ft (Hasecorp)

The latest version works even better! No error at startup. And everything runs very smoothly.
Of course there are very, but very little graphical errors, but that is probably a limit of the emulator and you can barely notice them.
Would the graphics improve if I installed in wine also the windows version of my graphic card?
Thanks a lot for your help icaro581!
All I can say is that the games library for linux users now include several dreamcast games!
Should you mark this thread as a solved problem?