Chankast Help

[celly]

I'm no noob to emulation, I just can't get this to Chankast to work.  Hold on, here is my problem, I can get it load but none of my backups work or any mounted images off Daemon.  Anytime I mount an image or load a disc, it says "Please insert Disk" or it will take me to the music cd load screen.  Yes the CDI images are selfboot, yes the backups are selfboot. 
And yes I have tried NullDC.  That always brings up errors and doesn't work.  Chankast has at least loaded to the DC main menu. 
I have an actual Dreamcast but I want to run an emulator through my MAME frontend and I'm too cheap to buy a VGA box to connect it to my PC.   

Thanks for the help guys.

[IchigoNoTenshi]

What game are you trying to run?
I've recently downloaded Soul Calibur and tried running it through nullDC and Chankast to no avail.
Now I'm no programmer, but I'll check it out to see if there's something up.

[scorp111]

I would go NullDc it is way better than chankast and has better support. Even though it use's the the chankast vid plugin the Nullpvr is better. I run most DC games at full speed on my rig, If you need any help I will be glad to help you.

[xod]

First of all, chamkast seems to have some obstacle (!) to launcg commercial games, I could only get the derivative ChankaEx release to work, and only *after* laaunching it from an admin account.

Also, the casue of failures might also be due to the bios flash file (dc_flash.bin) and the real/virtual gd-rom/cd belonging to different regions. I could not get soul calibur to work until I did this (to reduce huge mess):

I unzipped the nullDC (I know you use chankast) into three separate folders; bios-j, bios-u, and bios-e. I then hacked the dc_flash.bin and created one dc_flash.bin for each region which I placed into appropriate "bios-X/data" folder. Then I used the japanese region installation of nullDC (in folder bios-j) for soul calibur (becasue the SC I dl'ed is japanese) and had no problems launching ever since.

If you want to know how to hack the BIOS flash (dc_flash.bin) read this post: http://snesorama.us/board/showthread.php?t=32711
Read the paragraph titled "Emulation Notes:" in MOon's post. It's really easy.
For convenience I include the paragraph here:

Emulation notes:
Do not attempt to burn this. This is a complete GD-Rom dump of the game.
No normal CD/DVD writer supports it. If you want to run this on real
hardware follow the Echelon ripping guide. In case you're wondering, ripping
this game may result in data loss. Currently, only 2 emulators support
complete dumps - NullDC and Makaron. No boot disk needed. Dunno 'bout
Makaron, but to make this run on NullDC make sure your dc_flash.bin is the
correct for the game's region (PAL in this case). You can change the region of
your dc_flash.bin by opening it with some hex editor, going to pos. 0x1A002
and changing it's value to:

0x30: Japan region (NTSC, Orange swirl),
0x31: USA region (NTSC, Orange swirl),
0x32: Euro (Pal, Blue swirl)

Not too far the same string (y11Dreamcast; y is 0,1 or 2]) repeats. Change
there too. To run the game, just use the image plugin and select the *.gdi
file.

[celly]

Thanks for the reply guys.  Since then, I've got both Chankast and NullDC to work.  Both run CDI's but neither will play any of my CDR backups.  All of them will not work, nota one will play through the emulator.  Its a big frustrating.  I've changed setting, plugins, bios and its all the same.  In anycase, I have a big hdd but I'd just like to use what I have.

[xod]

Well, I haven't had time to troubleshoot/read needed info on this myself, because I cannot make my only left original gd-rom, Chu Chu Rocket to work (in nullDC, haven't tried chank*), not only as a disc image but also directly through the disc (with v1.0.0 1.6 beta, since zNullGD does not exists/work with v1.0.3).