The dc-card-maker.sh is a simple bash script that allows to prepare an SD memory card to be used with GDEMU optical drive emulator for the Sega Dreamcast console and the GDMenu homebrew. The script extracts games from zip archives, puts them on an SD card in appropriately named directories and generates a GDMenu disc image with a pre-generated list of menu entries, which avoids scanning the SD card every time GDMenu is launched.

This script comes with no warranty of any kind, use at your own risk. Read the "Usage" section carefully to understand what the script does before using it. I did my best to make the script safe and not cause any data loss when used as intended. That being said, backup data on your SD card before using this script. If anything goes wrong the script should terminate without causing any data loss, but potentially leaving mess in the target directory. This mess is recoverable but will require some scripting on your side (or a lot of manual work).

• genisoimage
• hexdump
• sed
• unzip
• cdi4dc
• cdirip
• Python (to run gditools.py and iso9660.py in tools/ directory)

Script tests presence of genisoimage, cdi4dc, cdirip, and unzip at start. sed and hexdump should be available by default on all Linux distributions.

cdi4dc and cdirip usually don't come in distribution repositories and you likely need to build them from sources. Grab the sources for cdi4dc and sources for cdirip, compile them, and place the compiled binaries in the tools directory. If you already have these programs on your system you can either add a symlink to them in the tools/ directory or edit the script to remove the ./tools/cdi4dc and ./tools/cdirip checks at the beginning and then use the system copies of cdi4dc and cdirip towards the end of the script.

The dc-card-maker.sh script has to be invoked with three arguments

./dc-card-maker.sh game_list.txt source_dir target_dir

where:

• game_list.txt is a text file that contains a list of zip archives with games to place on the SD card, one archive per line. Games will be added to GDMenu in the order specified in the file, so you can arrange the order to your liking. The easiest way to generate the file for the first time is to have a single directory that contains the archives (see next bullet) and list its contents to a file (ls source_dir > game_list.txt). After each run the script places a copy of game_list.txt in the target_dir - this file can be later used to create an updated list when adding new games to the card. IMPORTANT: don't point this first argument to target_dir/game_list.txt. This will result in the script trying to read the file and at the same time deleting it and writing to it. This is a bad idea. Instead, copy the target_dir/game_list.txt somewhere and pass that copy as the first argument.

• source_dir is a directory that contains ZIP archives specified in game_list.txt above. The script was designed with TOSEC archives in mind, but it should work with any archive that contains a GDI or CDI disc image, provided the files are not placed in a subdirectory inside the archive. The exact name of *.gdi/*cdi file is unimportant - the script takes care to rename it appropriately.

• target_dir is the destination directory where the script will place the extracted games and the generated GDMenu image. This directory should be the root of you SD card, but you can also use a directory on your disk and only later copy the generated directories to an SD card. (I use this approach since having the target directory on an SSD is much faster - if anything goes wrong rerunning the script takes a lot less time.) Each game image is placed in a numbered directory (as required by GDEMU), with directory 01/ being reserved for the GDMenu image. Each game subdirectory, in addition to the GDI/CDI image, contains archive.txt file with the name of a ZIP archive from which the game was extracted. It is important that archive.txt files remain unchanged - otherwise updating the card will not work correctly.

When using dc-card-maker.sh script for the first time use an empty target_dir. Once populated by the script the target directory can be further updated, allowing to add, remove, and reorder games without the need to extract and copy game archives again. All you need to do is update the list of games in game_list.txt file supplied as the first parameter to the script. You can add new archives to the list, as well as reorder and delete existing ones. If the game image is already present in the target directory it will be used, with no additional copying being done. Newly added games will be extracted from the archives and added to the target directory.

IMPORTANT When updating the card all numbered directories are temporarily renamed to end with an underscore (01 becomes 01_, and so on). They are then renamed back, possibly with different names if the games were reordered or new games were added earlier in the list. Games that were removed from the list in game_list.txt are left in these temporary subdirectories. These directories are reported to the user when the script ends. At the very least the list will contain 01_ with a backup copy of previous GDMenu image. (Note that by now that image is probably outdated anyway if the list of games has been modified.) It is user's responsibility to remove these backup directories. The script will refuse to run if the target directory contains directories ending with an underscore. This is all done to minimise the risk of data loss due to user mistakes.

On its first run the script extracts game names from the GDI/CDI images. Extracted name is placed in a name.txt file inside the game's directory on the SD card. You can edit these name.txt files to provide custom names to display in GDMenu. For example, you might want to change all names to be displayed using lowercase letters, but keep the first letter of each word capitalized. Here's an incantation that does that:

find target_dir -name "name.txt" -exec sed -i -e "s/[A-Z]/\L&/g; s/\b\(.\)/\u\1/g" {} \;

Once you edited name.txt files to your liking run the script again with the same parameters to generate an updated GDMenu image with new names.

• make a ticket, ensure that your contribution is desired and will be accepted
• update the documentation if needed
• no tabs, spaces only
• no trailing whitespaces
• newline at end-of-file
• send PRs or just fork the project and do whatever you want (well, whatever the license permits)

dc-card-maker.sh is distributed under the terms of GPL2 license - see licenses/LICENSE-dc-card-maker-script file.

This repo also contains the following additional software and data files created by other people:

• tools/iso9660.py was written by Barney Gale and is distributed under the terms of MIT license. See licenses/LICENSE-iso9660. Original repository: https://github.com/barneygale/iso9660

• tools/gditools.py is taken from gditools library written by FamilyGuy, and is distributed under the terms of GPL3 license. See licenses/LICENSE-gditools file. Original repository: https://sourceforge.net/projects/dcisotools/

• data/1ST_READ.BIN contains a binary image of GDMenu written by neuroacid. Exact license unknown, but this binary has been released to the public by the author and is freely distributed on the internet. See README-gdmenu.txt for details.

• data/ip.bin and GDEMU.ini are taken from GDEMU_SD written by MadSheep.

• Structure of ip.bin
• GDEMU details
• GDEMU operation