WHAT DO I NEED? Dreamcast You need to have a Sega Dreamcast in order to play the games posted in these groups. There are currently no Dreamcast Emulators.
Boot Disc Currently in order to play the game images you are required to use a Boot Loader disc. At this time there is only the Utopia Boot Loader Version 1.1 which supports game images with no CDDA (Digital Audio). Hard Drive Space The current maximum a blank CD can hold is around 700mb. Images can span multiple CD's and the actual image can be larger due to the extra information needed by the disc writing software to reproduce the image. 1GB of space is about average to hold the archive and image of a single CD game. CD-Recordable or CD-Rewritable Drive To recreate a disc image you require a CD-R or CD-RW drive. These come in a variety of speeds, manufacturers, SCSI/IDE/EIDE/ATAPI, etc. The model you have or are looking to purchase should be supported by CDRWin and/or NERO which are the generally accepted standards of image creation. Bandwidth and/or Patience
Because of the large size of game images, you can wait hours to days depending on your connection speed. A Good News Provider Enough stress cannot be placed on having a good solid news provider. While certain ISP's have decent news servers (AT&T and MindSpring come to mind), most have so so or horrible ones. If your provider sucks, then posters will be too busy reposting incompletes or missed parts to post new games. You should spend the few extra bucks to get a solid provider. Easy News, Altopia, Newscene, Super News and Giga News tend to have a good history and should be checked into if you are in the market for a provider. News Reader To be able to post and recieve messages/files you need a news reader. Forte's Agent is simply the best news reader available. You can find both the free and the retail version's at Forte's web site. To simplify posting images it is recommended you also pick up Power Post 2000. WinRAR/WinZIP These are the compressions of choice when posting images. You can find WinRAR here and WinZIP here. SFV Validation All proper image posts have a *.SFV file with them. This is a small file used to validate an archive for quick checking of complete or damaged archives. You can verify these archives with either QuickSFV or WinSFV. CDRWin/Nero As most images are designed for use with these two programs you will need one. CDRWin can be found at Goldenhawk's hompage and Nero can be found at Ahead Software's homepage. |
