Redream cover tutorial

[GatorCountry]

Alright, my second version of the tutorial should be much better. I'm going to us a fresh up as example.

 

Redream's cover art come from the game files themselves. For any official Sega retail release, any game that came out for Dreamcast during the lifespan of the Dreamcast, this function will work perfectly. Some of the better, or more professional indies on the aftermarket scene it will work for too but for most indies, homebrews, and especially any of my own ports, what you'll get is a black box with whatever text information Redream could pull. If you download Satazius Next you'll get a black box that says Satazius Next in it. If you download Tyrian you'll black box that say bootdreams.

I did Satazius a while ago so let's just look at Tyrian:

 

If BootDreams is not popping out at you screaming fix me there's something wrong with you.

That's my Tyrian.cdi and I'd like to make it come up nice with cover art but I can not mess with the game files and add the image to the game, so we'll need a work around.

I'm gonna launch Tyrian and take some screens for an upload I'll post after this tut. While I do that we'll get the code we need for the work around.

I use the old version of Redream, the stable, MobCat posted a screen below of the exact download, it's still available.

I don't use the new version for this but I do for gaming because it is superior. It does not save images with the games so using it for this could be real difficult. If you use the stable redream all you need to do is look at the picture for the game.

In my folder:

You can clearly see 56F9FDC7 relates to Tyrian in old Redream

With new, WinCE enabled and usually superior Redream all you get is the .sav files:

Either way what you're after is the code. In this case it's 56F9FDC7 but other games will have other codes. Obviously if you only have a new it's easy enough without the screenshots but with a full folder that's pretty difficult to pull off.

So now we now Redream labels Tyrian 56F9FDC7. We're not concerned with the .0's or .1's. I realize the first file says 56F9FDC7.0.png, All you care about is code up to the first decimal

Now make or download you cover art. Make sure it is 512 X 512, and name it the code of the game. for this exampl 56F9FDC7.png. I don't know if other extensions work, I just use png myself. save it in your cache folder. 

 

Launch current Redream and there you go, cover art applied:

Oh dip! I hit the image limit. I'll show the finished work in another post I guess. 

 

[MobCat]

Screenshots 

Ok soo can't tell if i'm stupid or not but redream seems to download most of the cover art on it's own...?

The way it was worded made it seam like all games would be broken? I don't know a lot about dreamcast games but it would seem the numbers in your cache folder relate to the games SN in some way.. Like how PS games are always something like SLUS-00067. So i'm guessing the reason why some of these cover arts are blank is because they are mods or homebrew that have made up SNs, so redream can't find a cover for it.

So it's cool you can fix it at all but might not be as big of a thing as I randomly thought if all the retail games are just gonna download on there own.
For your uploads I would say if it is a mod or homebrew, just add a little note that redream doesn't know what this game is so, your cover art will be missing, please download it from here.. But yeah making it the cover art for the post works too.

But also again, it's cool you can even change it at all, so if you wanna make custom cover art you can, just reload redream. looks like it only downloads new covers if an old one can't be found in your cache folder.

[GatorCountry]

Sorry @MobCat , I should have specified.

 

Most games period should automatically have cover art. Redream is very good about it. All original retail games will come with cover art and even most aftermarkets. This is just to take care of the ones that don't. Most my ups were made by me so most of them don't. 

 

To my understanding these images are actually saved in the bootfiles before you compile bootfiles. Which is my wall atm, I can fiddle with plain files but not create bootfiles.

 

So if you take my Last Hop Pink Bullets upload and pop that into your redream folder then load redream, bam, looks good and that is the cover art I used for the thread. Most your experiences should be like this. I didn't make that game or the boot files for it so it's more pro. 

 

Conversely if you just downloaded my Satazius Next, because it was me who made the cdi convert all you'll get is a black box with Satazius Next in plain white text. I don't know how to compile bins myself so I don't know how to include the image in the cdi. So I popped online, stole an image of the cover, and made it work with ReDream as explained above. Again, this is because I can mix and match files to get a working game but lack the ability to generate my own files.

 

Another user let me know you shouldn't need the old stable version and their WinCE version saves with images just like the old version. I just tried it myself and it didn't work for me but it may be worth one's time to check it out for themselves. I'll delete my files and redownload and retry and when I'm done I'll re-write this so it's better

[MobCat]

All good 

And yeah I wish I knew more about DC stuff. i'm sure there should be tools out there to make these bins for building your own cdi's... Well it seems like someone should of built a tool for it at least >__<'

[GatorCountry]

As you can see, 56F9FDC7.png in the cache folder is working just fine as my new cover art for Tyrian.

 

Hope this helps, sorry for the jank format I had forgotten about the image cap.

[MobCat]

1 hour ago, GatorCountry said:

Hope this helps, sorry for the jank format I had forgotten about the image cap.

Jpgs are fine for here 

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[Strixy]

I'm searching to do this, but in the stable version it saves as "screenshot0" as name, while in the development version same but into a directory. So, it is not possible anymore to do this?