Death Tank, the standalone rip

Taelon

Established Member
... but I just have to bring this up. The standalone rip of Death Tank clocks in at less than one megabyte, and it just seems an awful waste to use an entire 700MB CDR to burn it...

OK, so what do I actually want? Perhaps I'm just wondering if Death Tank could be included as a selectable option of sort with another game... perhaps a "boot menu" to load either Death Tank or game XYZ. Is that doable?

Also, re: DEATH TANK ZWEI, how close to (or far from) a standalone rip are we with that one? (Mere curiosity, I'm not ASKING for it.)
 
Originally posted by Taelon@Feb 12, 2003 @ 08:06 AM

OK, so what do I actually want? Perhaps I'm just wondering if Death Tank could be included as a selectable option of sort with another game... perhaps a "boot menu" to load either Death Tank or game XYZ. Is that doable?

Depends on how good your programming skills are.
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Originally posted by mal+Feb 11, 2003 @ 11:20 PM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(mal @ Feb 11, 2003 @ 11:20 PM)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteBegin-Taelon@Feb 12, 2003 @ 08:06 AM

OK, so what do I actually want? Perhaps I'm just wondering if Death Tank could be included as a selectable option of sort with another game... perhaps a "boot menu" to load either Death Tank or game XYZ. Is that doable?

Depends on how good your programming skills are.
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[/b][/quote]

Hehe, don't be cruel
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Anyway, why would you include Death Tank as an option when CDRs are so cheap? You'd end up including it in every Saturn game but you'd never play it... who plays Mario Bros. instead of SM World or Yoshi's Island? It's annoying to see that game in all Super Mario Advance cartridges
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I've only played Death Tank Zwei and it's a GREAT game, a standalone rip would be nice if it didn't need the save file. And before you ask: I don't have any programming skills
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Hell, you're right. Me gonna burn that M.F. tonight.
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Heh, I'll probably just go ahead and pad it with a 699MB dummy file
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(reposted without edit - the smileys weren't showing up. d'oh)

(reposting AGAIN - WHERE ARE THE SMILEYS???)

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humm, 700mb cds...

won't saturn go crazy try to read it?

The protection ring takes some space (in original cds
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) thus, the maximum "user data" capacity should be around 600MB
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... then again, if you are using a modboard, it won't try to read it
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I've had this doubt for a long time... never tried it, though..
 
Originally posted by IBarracudaI@Feb 11, 2003 @ 09:21 PM

humm, 700mb cds...

won't saturn go crazy try to read it?

The protection ring takes some space (in original cds
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) thus, the maximum "user data" capacity should be around 600MB
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... then again, if you are using a modboard, it won't try to read it
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I've had this doubt for a long time... never tried it, though..

All my saturn backups are 700MB and I don't have a modboard, works just fine
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And I don't see why Death Tank Zwei Standalone is important at all.... I found deathtank to be better but maybe thats just me
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---Ammut
 
I'm actually trying to create a bootloader for pretty much the same exact reason you asked. Read the bootloader thread in dev central...give me enough time and I'm sure we'll figure out how to get death tank one and zwei on one cd.
 
slinga, very cool.
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Ammut, sure the Saturn can read 700MB CDs, but what I think Barracuda meant was it might or might not have trouble reading CDs that actually CONTAIN that much data, to where the laser would have to go all the way to the edge of the disc, which is normally reserved for the copyright ring. So he was wondering if that would at all cause a problem for a modded Saturn... which is a good question. Ohwell, but I decided that dummying the Death Tank image isn't worth it anyway, how long can it take to load one meg, right
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As for my smileys, they weren't showing up on the stupid OS/2 machine at my office, but they showed up here at home... must not have been a bug in the forums after all. Whew.

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I have yet to see this death tank game in action, does anyone happen to have a screenshot or screenshots of the game?
 
Taelon, MasterAkumaMatata did some experiments and concluded (amongst other things) that padding a Saturn CD made no real difference to loading times.
 
mal: makes sense, now that I think about it. The Saturn's drive is, after all a CLV drive ... same read speed of 300KB/sec (2x) over the entire disc surface, the disc's spinning speed adjusts itself according to where the laser is... Conversely, dummying makes sense on the DREAMCAST, because its drive is a CAV drive (unless it's playing CDDA audio that is)... So, yeah.
 
sorry, didn't fully understand your question beforehand...

I do believe the Saturn can read 700MB cds, even if they are full-I don't think its smart enough to "think" about the copyright ring, it only is programmed to check for it. A good test for this would be to use the VCD player with a full 700MB cd, I believe this does work right???

Just a thought.

---Ammut
 
Originally posted by Taelon+Feb 12, 2003 @ 02:38 PM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Taelon @ Feb 12, 2003 @ 02:38 PM)</div><div class='quotemain'>Hell, you're right. Me gonna burn that M.F. tonight.
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Heh, I'll probably just go ahead and pad it with a 699MB dummy file
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<!--QuoteBegin-mal
@Feb 13, 2003 @ 08:06 AM

Taelon, MasterAkumaMatata did some experiments and concluded (amongst other things) that padding a Saturn CD made no real difference to loading times.[/quote]

True, but since Death Tank stand-alone is so small, it makes it harder to perform the swap trick as the laser doesn't have much to read. It's best to dummy pad the ISO file using Dummy Add (DA.EXE) or AutoDummy (AutoDummy.exe).

Dummy Add gives you two options:

[*]pad to fill up to 74 min

[*]pad to fill up to 80 min

AutoDummy gives you three options:

[*]pad to fill up to 74 min

[*]pad to fill up to 80 min

[*]pad to fill up to a user defined length in minutes and seconds
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Dummy padding the ISO is better than adding a dummy file because it pads the image file without having to manually rebuild an ISO file with a dummy file in it, not to mention rebuilding an ISO file requires you to extract the IP info from the original image file and then insert it to the rebuilt ISO file. Also, since Saturn games tend to boot from the first file listed alpha-numerically, your game won't boot if you name your dummy file to come before any of the game files.

There is one drawback with using Dummy Add and AutoDummy though. They both require you to have a BIN+CUE image (i.e, raw image). Since Death Tank stand-alone is a regular MODE1/2048 cooked image, all you have to do is convert it to MODE1/2352 with CDmage, name the converted MODE1/2352 image with *.BIN file extension, and edit your cue sheet accordingly.
 
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