Sega CD (152 Games) (Shrunk) (No Duplicates) (No Hacked ROMS) (Extras)

First and foremost, I want to say I have a slow connection, so keep that in mind and if you do not like it avoid this torrent, until at least helpful community members will get this, to help with seeding.

This is a quite large pack and that means this will take a handful of days to upload to someone with better upload speed. It is not impossible, but it will just take 3 times more time than the Gameboy Advance, which I shared. I can spend a week downloading them, altering them, testing them and putting them together. I can even spend as much as it is needed to upload them. One thing I can't do, is make my upload speed faster.


Now with that said..

If you are going to skip reading, do not complain if some games do not work. You can ignore my rambling, but at least you have to read the Emulators section, or else a lot of the games might NOT work! I have tested every single game, up to the point of starting a new game and entering in the first game screen and all worked!

This is yet another odd romset and it more or less is like the TurboGrafx-CD one that I uploaded. This does not contain any Japanese games and it only contains the officially released games, for Sega CD. All of these are USA roms, with the exception of 4 games that were only released in Europe. I was pondering whether I should include unofficial and bootleg games in this, but I decided against it. My Romsets are meant to be working games and if anything, I can't know if unofficial releases will be working right. I would add them to the Extra folder, like I usually do, but they would be way too large, for something "extra".

BUT!

I know some people might want to play the unofficial games too, so rather than letting you slowly go through lists of sites, trying to see which ones you have and which ones you do not, I compiled a list of any "unofficial" games that I found, but in the end I did not include. I also added links for the respective sites for them. Keep in mind that I did not test any of these, so I can't know if they work right or have problems.

One thing to point out, is that the top games in the list are released by Gooddealgames. As I am getting it, Gooddealgames bought the right of the unreleased Sega CD games (it does that with many unreleased older games) finished and fixed them and then released them. I would include these, but reading around I would find some people complain they are still buggy, so I decided to skip these.

http://hastebin.com/qoyinizowi.avrasm / http://hastebin.com/raw/qoyinizowi (the first one is a dark background with kind of whiteish letters txt and the second one is a normal black and white txt)

Now for some ramgling that you can skip. When I uploaded the Sega PICO romset, I mentioned that I did so, cause I wanted closure for Sega's nostalgic consoles, like I had with Nintendo. I forgot though that Sega actually had an addon, that when I was younger in made me feel so jealous of people that had a Mega Drive (Genesis) and along the chance to get a CD addon with "awesome games". I do remember towards the end of Super Nintendo's age, there was this CD addon rumored for SNES and I felt so awesome, thinking I could experience what people that got the Sega CD did.. I am glad it did not happen to be honest, since the money went towards the new generation! XD

Enough thought with Nostalgia. Now, some people might realize it, but for the ones that do not the games are altered and shrunk, so they take less space. The reason they have become so small, is because the normal games come with WAV audio, which means uncompressed sound, that takes a lot of space. Without exaggeration, sometimes ALL the space of the CD can be JUST the audio. For example the game can be 5MB and the audio over 600MB!

The process was me downloading them, extracting them, re-encoding all audio files, altering the .cue file (it will be what you will be using to run the games) so it will not have weird naming and work with the new mp3 files, then testing to make sure every game works normally and with sound and finally packing them back.

This time I had no control over the quality, or else I would have probably went for a bit of a higher quality, but like I mentioned on the TurboGrafx-CD tests, normally when we listen to music, be it on youtube or elsewhere online, it is 128kbps usually.

From the tests I did there, I could not hear any quality loss to the audio, even down to 64kbps audio. The audio became muffled only when I lowered the audio quality lower than 64kbps. Keep in mind that I am not an Audiophile and my speakers are normal speakers. I am not sure if an Audiophile with high quality speakers would be able to understand the difference.

I only edited the AUDIO. For people that do not know about Sega CD, you need to understand that the video quality was not that good (with today's standards it is SO bad). I did not alter the videos and their audio quality in no way and even if the video quality looks glitchy, that is because of the source. This includes the instance where the audio that plays along with the videos, is bad. The only Audio that was altered by what I did, was the Audio that plays when there is NO VIDEO playing.

To give some extra info about the audio compression, I want to point out the difference of space they take up when their audio is the uncompressed WAV and the compressed MP3. For this comparisson I will be ignoring the 19 FMV games, that are in separate archives from the rest of the games.

The games with WAV audio take up 56GB, if not more and with MP3 audio 25GB. That is almost 60% smaller size. When they are compressed with 7zip, with the WAV audio they take up about 33GB and with MP3 audio 10.7GB. I use them in compressed form, since Launchbox has the ability to extract them on the spot when I want to play something and then run the game with the predifined emulator.

Now the reason I did not include the FMV ones, is because like I mentioned these do not get much smaller. Their normal WAV version is 14GB and the MP3 one is 12GB. Alike, when compressed with 7zip their normal WAV version is 9.1GB and the MP3 is 7.3GB. There is some reduction, but it is not like the other games that the reduction is much larger. Of course, there are some games with FMV in the main romset too, but I think you are getting my point.

The reason I spent all this time writing these, is because I do not want people that get it and are a bit picky like me, worry too much that they have a low quality copy of the games. If you dislike the audio quality loss, you can visit Emuparadise, Theisozone, Freeroms and DopeRoms and get these uncompressed.

In Theisozone, there is actually a complete romset of all the games unaltered and 7zipped. I do not know what it includes and I do not know if they work or not, but I have just seen it. Just thought I would share for people that want the original files all in one. http://www.theisozone.com/do...-trurip-collection-174-roms/


So, it is the 33GB reduction in size, that brings the quality loss.

Welp, I did my best to explain in detail, about what I did and how it will affect the games. It is up to you to decide if you want them or not. Time to move on to some details about the Romsets.


Main ROMSet
Oh boy, this one is a bit complicated. First of all let me say this. ALL the 7z files in the main folder, are the main Romset. So if you want all the 162 games, you need to get them all and then extract them all in the same directory.

If there were multiple versions of the same game, I would always choose the 32X one, over the normal one and always the newer version over the older.

I have split the Roms in 3 different categories. The categories are the "Normal" one, the Live Action one and the Others one. If you want to see in detail what each of the Romset parts include, this time I included a txt file, that lists the games for each part of the main romset. You can also look at the list here; http://hastebin.com/eketarolaq.md / http://hastebin.com/raw/eketarolaq (the first one is a dark background with kind of whiteish letters txt and the second one is a normal black and white txt)

The Live Action category includes 19 games, which take up 7.32GB of the torrent. These are FMV (Full Motion Video) games, that are interactive and each game is quite large because of this. Of course, the quality of videos is low, but Nostalgia and an open mind, can actually enjoy such games for what they are. This category includes the SegaCD_Romset_LA_Part1/2/3.7z and the SegaCD_Romset_LAShooters.7z, with the last one being only shooter games (the ones you move the crosshair around).

The Others category, includes 10 "games", which take up 1.47GB of the torrent. These are separate because if anything they do not look to me like games. One is just an encyclopedia, another is just music, another just video. I just felt that these 10 should be in a separate folder, which of course you are always welcome to download :D

Finally the "Normal" category includes everything else. The only thing I can think to say, is that the SegaCD_Romset_Part4.7z (4th part) includes less games than the other 3, since the games on part 4 are the largest found in the romset, not including the FMV ones.

Extra
In the extra as you can see there are only BIOS files. The BIOS pack for SegaCD + 32X includes all the BIOS needed to play games that are Sega CD and 32X, from any region.

I have included two separate US BIOS too. The one in the pack, is from a 1st Generation Sega CD, where the other two are from a 2nd Generation Sega CD. The difference between 2.11 and 2.21, is that the CDX 2.21 one, skips the starting sequence, where the player has to push start. Keep in mind I tested all the games with the 1st Generation BIOS, so I can't say if the other two would work as good. I just added them in case someone has trouble and needs them, or prefers them anyway.

Games List
I have compiled a list of the Main Romset games in different formats, from normal text, to rtf and two different type of excel formats. The txt and rtf obviously can be read by the default Windows document readers, Notepad and Wordpad. The txt is simple where the rtf looks like a nice list in boxes, looking like an excel.

The Excel ones, ods and xml, are for either OpenOffice or Microsoft Office and they have filters to filter out versions and regions. If you download more than one of my romsets, you can always combine the Excel pages, by copying them all in a single Excel file. Just suggesting that for people that do not want to have a lot of different excel files.

I am only suggesting the Emulator and Frontend. I do not include them in the pack!

Emulator
THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT! For testing all the games I used Kega Fusion and all games worked normally without any problem. Some of them that were buggy or would not work, I deleted and looked for a working version, that at least would pass the start screen of the game and enter the game.

The first thing though you must make 100% sure that you set, is in Kega Fusion's Options turn the PERFECT SYNC ON! If Perfect Sync is not activated, a LOT of games will not work and not only that, some that will work, will glitch out or have buggy sound. But no matter what, this needs to be activated to avoid problems. IF you ever find a game that does not work, try to turn it on, but at least for me, that option actually was what fixed a lot of problems and made a lot of games that did not work, actually work correctly!

At least from my tests, there is only a single game that will not work no matter what settings you try and that is Rise of the Dragon. After searching I found the reason being that the latest Kega Fusion (3.64) is buggy with Sega CD games. Indeed I tried that game with 3.63, which actually worked normally and I even played a bit to make sure it was not a fluke. You can either look around the internet for 3.63 or you can download it from this link, which I have uplaoded it to. I have set it so Perfect Sync is activated and also included the BIOS and set them up to work correctly, no matter where you place the folder. But if it does not work, you can check the options and see if something is wrong.
http://s000.tinyupload.com/i...file_id=19339624046376358098
this is the Virus total of this file, for people that worry
https://www.virustotal.com/e...b2930cb/analysis/1461704639/

Frontend
Finally I want to suggest LaunchBox. Launchbox is a frontend for multiple emulators and if anything it is the best I have found out there. It is easy to import games in it's interface, it suggests the best emulator to get when for each console, when you try to add an emulator and it has the best interface I have found. Weirdly, I like the free UI it offers (LaunchBox) and not the paid one that people that buy it can get (BigBox). The LaunchBox UI shows every game in a list with a picture of the cover or a screenshot from in game and that is really nice for me. The paid UI it offers just shows a list and only when you choose the name you can see any pictures of it. It can automatically look into picture databases and download pictures for a lot of the games. You can check the screenshot to see what I mean.

You can follow this tutorial, which will help you combine the ultimate emulator, with the ultimate frontend :D This Video might be for RetroArch, but it has a quick tutorial about Launchbox in it too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oeozvnb_-eI

Retroarch is more or less a multiplatform frontend, that can internally use emulators from all systems out there. It is a bit intimidating, but if you combine that with Launchbox, you will have a single Emulator (with made different internal ones) and a really nice free frontend for it :)

Personally I use separate emulators and Retroarch only when it is about using emulation for older systems, like atari for example.

Phew :) Have a wonderful week, enjoy the games and enjoy the nostalgia!