Linux, Wine, SSF, and mounted ISOs

[evilakito]

Ugh, I'm getting so pissed off! Here is my situations:

I've not yet installed Windows on my new computer and am using Ubuntu for now. I decided to try out my emulators under Wine. To my surprise, they seem to work quite well.

Of course, I'm having a nightmare with SSF. I put in a Guardian Heroes CD and it worked perfectly last night, but performance is very inconsistent and today I'm having issues with it freezing up in various places. Just for the hell of it, I thought I'd try playing with a mounted ISO instead of the CD, but that's where the fun began. In Windows, this is the easiest thing in the world to do; just mount it with Daemon Tools and go! Don't get me wrong, I'm having no trouble mounting the ISO, but SSF (and other emulators I've tried) only allow me to load from my actual, physical drive. I've even assigned a drive letter to the mount directory and everything through the Wine configuration, but I still get nothing.

I've searched through tutorials and forum posts and could not find any good instructions (which seems to be the norm with Linux issues), nor could I even find details of other people running into similar problems. All solutions I've found only cover things I've already tried.

I know it's a long-shot, but has anyone here gotten this to work before? What do I need to do?

[ReyVGM]

I think you'll have to wait until you install windows to play without issues. At least that's the only way I'll be able to help if you still have problems.

[jorpho]

Did you find cdemu.sourceforge.net/ ?

[susanismyalias]

I could not get SSF working with WINE when I had Ubuntu.

[Weasel]

The only Ubuntu-friendly solution for Saturn emulation is Yabause (available through APT repositories). Unfortunately, Yabause sucks for just about everything and performs worse than any other emulator I've seen, so it's not even worth trying from my perspective.

[King Frost]

I'm not really into Saturn emulation so I haven't tried to run SSF through Wine yet. Your best bet would be to rip the game CD in bin/cue format using a similar command:

cdrdao read-cd --read-raw --datafile my_game_rip.bin --device ATAPI:0,0,0 --driver generic-mmc-raw my_game_rip.toc

The "device" parameter could be different depending how your hardware is plugged. Hopefully SSF can use the bin/cue format.

Warning, technical information ahead! The problem with CDs and Linux is that the raw block device for CDs only returns the first 2048 bytes of each sector while a real CD sector is 2352 bytes and this is expected by emulators. Because of that, Linux software wishing to access the extra data in each sector have to use a special API which is a pain in the ass (it's used by cdrdao). I don't know how this handled in other OSes, all I know is that having sector size which is not a power of 2 is a major pain in the ass to deal with, I blame the CD designers for that. I think that this issue is fixed with the DVD standard but I'm not 100% sure.

[jorpho]

I just read about Furius ISO Mount, which apparently also offers similar functionality to Daemon Tools in Linux.