We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

I busted my ass for hours trying to rip the map graphics from the disc. Here are the problems:

Admirable!

I’m not too familiar with Dreamcast internals and don’t know anyone who is, but there probably are custom formats involved (that’s just how it is in the game industry; don’t make it right or nothin’, just is). BIN files usually indicate that they put anything in there and didn’t bother with a more descriptive name. Game data, executable code, meaningless black squares, it’s not certain. The MDT extension doesn’t ring any bells; it’s probably some proprietary container or at least descriptive format from the sound of it (it could even possibly stand for “metadata”). EVT is also probably a custom format, but yes, there is a very good chance it contains game scripting and stuff like that just because of the extension name.

Since these things don’t seem to have too much standard stuff, at this point, someone who’s interested in the data can do two things to find it: trace through the code (yyyeah, have fun with that), or keep making educated guesses and corrupt various parts of the data until something breaks in a meaningful way, then try to narrow it down till you have what you want, e.g. an image or part of it turns into noise (it might still ultimately require some sort of looking through the code, but this way is better for telling whether that’s going to be necessary). The latter method is easier and faster for the most part, but I imagine it’s still not terribly fast when you’ve got an entire disc to scour. And I suspect in this case it would still require determining the image format to extract anything usable, and that’s certainly no picnic, even if it’s only sleuthing and not completely reconstructing it.

In other words, it may just come down to the old fashioned Nintendo Power method :\

I guess I need to focus a LOT more on satellites and shit.

Yes, satellites are an important part of the spinning-plate balancing act you have going in the early game.