Burning .mdf/.mds
- Thread starter bigcheese
- Start date
It might work to use cdemu and then copy the virtual disc with cdrdao, but I don't know the details of how to do that.bigcheese said:
You might see recommendations to just burn the .mdf with k3b or to use mdf2iso; both of these approaches will fail to properly produce a mixed-mode disc (the advice is commonly offered because it happens to work for DVD and regular CD-ROM images). That said, they might produce a working disc if the game only has a data track, or if it has an audio track that is not actually used by the game.
The MDF contains the actual data stored in the data area of the CD, while the MDS contains information about the track layout and modes that are contained in the CD's Table of Contents. Generally speaking both of them are needed for a proper burn. However, burning programs can often figure out the sector format on their own and produce a working burn from the MDF alone if there is only one track (this is rare for Saturn games). DVD doesn't have "tracks" or "modes", so the MDS file is usually not needed for single-layer DVD images.bigcheese said:
Amon
Staff member
Aren't those alcohol's file type? With mdf as the data nd the mds as the header track info. There is a tool out there to convert. http://mdf2iso.berlios.de/ or http://freshmeat.net/projects/mdf2iso/
ExCyber is right, your best bet is to use cdemud.
It can be rather annoying to set up initially, but once you do, you'd want to mount the image that way and use the device instead of the image file in your emulater, or re-rip it into something else from the mounted image.
I wrested with this fairly recently, none of those tools work well -- I've never ended with a working image. Don't believe you can just mount the mdf as iso format as some tutorials would have you believe either.
It can be rather annoying to set up initially, but once you do, you'd want to mount the image that way and use the device instead of the image file in your emulater, or re-rip it into something else from the mounted image.
I wrested with this fairly recently, none of those tools work well -- I've never ended with a working image. Don't believe you can just mount the mdf as iso format as some tutorials would have you believe either.
dibz said:
Not sure if the original poster ever figured this one out or not, but I recently found the *perfect* way to do this on a Linux system...at least it works fine for me.
Like a lot of other people have said, it is best to mount the mds (table of contents) with cdemu, but getting all of that setup is another subject.
Once that's done, just treat it like a normal unmounted cd in in your drive. On my system, the first virtual device that's created when I load an image is /dev/sr0.
dd if=/dev/sr0 of=whateverGame.iso
That command will give you an iso for the data track. You will see an error when it gets to the audio portion of the image, but that's normal. Then use cdparanoia for the audio portion:
cdparanoia -B "2-" -d /dev/sr0
And then you will get a series of wav files; you will still need to rename them appropriately.
Of course, there's still the matter of writing your toc before burning with cdrdao. I've found it's easiest to generate a cue with SegaCueMaker and then use cue2toc to generate a toc for use with cdrdao.
