Genesis Knight wrote:According the ReviveDC guys, Tux actually lied about some of his rips and stole work from others. Check out the NFOs on their releases for more info.
This is true. I'll go into some more detail here. I'm the head of the ReviveDC Project.
Basically, Tux's claims of sourcing GDIs and always doing his own work were very much…not true 99% of the time. Occasionally in his NFOs he
would admit to taking Echelon's files, but most of the time he didn't.
Off the top of my head, here's releases he took work from:
Dino Crisis: The scene release downsampled video in order to fit a 75 minute CD-R. CRCs match between the scene release and Tux's. Dino Crisis fits perfectly to a 700mb CD-R with no downsampling. Claimed to have downsampled himself.
Record of Lodoss War: This was outright thievery. This game has some seriously mean copy protection in it. We missed it on the ReviveDC release and had to nuke it and we still haven't cracked it. He claimed that the PAL version didn't have the protection and that he took his files from GDI, but he really took the files from another scene release and just said it was his.
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis: This was just sloppy work. He took all of Echelon's audio (and didn't mention he did), then dummied the game out by 85mb. He could've easily spread the downsample over the audio and done better than Echelon's audio. We also have better audio encoders now.
Silver: Same story as Dino Crisis. Scene was done for 75, the game fits fine on 80.
I know there's some other games we've caught him on. His optimizing was sometimes… not so optimized as well. For example, Resident Evil 2 is a WinCE game so it has an EXE file it runs. Somehow Tux missed this, and the EXE file was in the innermost portion of the disc. He said he was having trouble optimizing it because the laser kept returning to the inner area of the disc… but he could've just moved out the EXE.
atreyu187 told me his Crazy Taxi was also taken from another scene group, which is kind of ironic considering all of his selfbooting guides focus on Crazy Taxi.
He did some other pointless things like downsampling just because he thought the video bitrate was too high. I have no idea why the hell this would be done. He did this to several games when the video plays without lagging as it is and would have fit the disc.
For ReviveDC we only source from GDIs and we dump from GD-ROMs where possible. We don't do any pointless downsampling, and we really dig into the games to save room where we can. For example, on our Resident Evil 3 release we found we could kill 100mb of data from the game by hardlinking. This let us leave the audio untouched and putting the video into VBR there was no noticeable quality loss, versus the DCRes version where the audio was monoed and videos downsampled. We're basically what DCRes claimed to be, but we're actually doing it. Fun fact: I originally started ReviveDC on SOR in May of 2008, before DCRes. DCRes came along a few months after with kind of a similar name.
Oh, one other thing we've got on DCRes; 45000 data/data format. This mimics the LBA of the original GD-ROM and is generally a more reliable selfboot format. Some Dreamcasts don't play audio/data 11702, which is what the DCRes releases are.
