New Chinese Sandisk adapter for Sega Dreamcast! Updated!!!

[Anthony817]

Obviously not for retail games that are meant to load from the VMU, but for new homebrews and emulators that are being updated specificaly for use with this, then yes, it can save directly to the device without having to use the VMU.

You can however backup your saves to the card, and I think that using VMU Backup CD, you should have every save ever needed on your DC via the SD card. I think Dream Explorer, aka VMU Tool won't work with the SD cards sadly, but the other program os a great alternative.

[Anthony817]

So, I said I was going to do a review of this thing, and how well the build quality is, and my experiance with my new 32GB SDHC card.

Here is the packaging it comes in.




Ok, so the first thing I noticed when I was opening one of these, is the actual serial port connector has been fashoned with a peice of plastic to act as a spacer to keep the device firmly placed in the serial port. This is not a bad thing, and actualy looks quite nice if you ask me. You will never notice it when it is plugged in anyway.





I did order an orange one, to keep the NTSC theme going with my Dreamcast, but apperiantly the orange ones sold out first, as I did specify to them I wanted the orange one, but they gave me an email saying that option was not available.

So far, I have gotten retail games Gigawing and Mars Matrix working, the later of which had some stuttering issues duing the Capcom logo, but once in game it worked fluidly as expected with full audio.

As far as homebrew goes, in my experiance with Neo Geo CD games, it works great, Double Dragon was fine by me. Aes4all should be updated in the future to be more compatible with the SD cards and use them as ram for the carts, so arcade games MIGHT work full speed in the future, but as of now, the low ram the DC has has kept emulation very slow for that system.

Dcplaya2.0 was updated with a SD card plugin, so you can browse the media directly from the SD card, but this hasn't worked for me with either my 2gb or 32gb card, and could be a common bug, but it should get worked out in the future I hope.

In the future Dreamshell will get updated with more features that I can't elaborate on just yet, but I assure you it will be more than worth it, and time spent waiting on these to come to your house. Mine took a little over 2 months, and you can do what I did and get a 32gig card on Ebay for $42 and fill it up with all kinds of GDI, CDI and homebrew binaries.

[d123456]

Thanks Anthony817,

Thanks for all the great research you have done. This is still an amazing development and I hope you will keep us up to date. Some of us will again perhaps buy a DC again once it´s working even better in the future.

[Upsidedown Fuji]

Awesome and very promising update. I am very interested to see what the next version of dreamshell brings. I may pick the adapter up just to give me something new to tinker around with. I love simple plug-n-play mods.

[Anthony817]

No problem folks. Just glad I can be of help to so many others, and I did bite the bullet here, as I had no idea even if the 32gb card would work in the first place, but now that it is established, we now know these things are worth a little over 10 bucks!

Anyway, just think of all the apps and homebrew in the works for this SD card adapter, man, 2011 is an exciting time for Dreamcast gamers, what with the multitude of new indie DC games coming out, and that leaked full version of Geist Force that never seen retail shelves!

Anyway, if you would like to see some sites that are supporting projects for the SD adapter mods, Chui is a programming God. He is working on his Amiga emulator so you can just add roms to the SD card and save and load savestates from it directly with no need for a VMU!

http://chui.dcemu.co.uk/index.html

Next he is updating the SNES4All emulator, to use the card, and we HOPE to make full speed Snes emulation a reality if it can use the cards as ram to make them fully playable, and this was also hoped to happen with AES emulation as well.

[deathclaw]

No problem folks. Just glad I can be of help to so many others, and I did bite the bullet here, as I had no idea even if the 32gb card would work in the first place, but now that it is established, we now know these things are worth a little over 10 bucks!

Anyway, just think of all the apps and homebrew in the works for this SD card adapter, man, 2011 is an exciting time for Dreamcast gamers, what with the multitude of new indie DC games coming out, and that leaked full version of Geist Force that never seen retail shelves!

Anyway, if you would like to see some sites that are supporting projects for the SD adapter mods, Chui is a programming God. He is working on his Amiga emulator so you can just add roms to the SD card and save and load savestates from it directly with no need for a VMU!

http://chui.dcemu.co.uk/index.html

Next he is updating the SNES4All emulator, to use the card, and we HOPE to make full speed Snes emulation a reality if it can use the cards as ram to make them fully playable, and this was also hoped to happen with AES emulation as well.

Unfortunatelly, I don't think SNES will be ever perfectly smooth on the Dreamcast, because even on the PS2 it's not perfect and it has a much powerful CPU

[Anthony817]

Never say never. Look at Bleemcast, that emulates PS1 games better than a PS3 does on a Dreamcast with full screen Anti Alaising and in 480p with VGA, so you can't say the system isn't powerfull enough, we just need some NASA coders to make it work hehe.

Chui is a pretty smart fella, so if he can get Neo Geo CD games emulated perfectly 100% on Dreamcast, I don't see why he couldn't achieve it with enough dedication and time on his hands.

I know, maybe I am just dreaming, but I want my system to keep on casting dreams!

[deathclaw]

Never say never. Look at Bleemcast, that emulates PS1 games better than a PS3 does on a Dreamcast with full screen Anti Alaising and in 480p with VGA, so you can't say the system isn't powerfull enough, we just need some NASA coders to make it work hehe.

Chui is a pretty smart fella, so if he can get Neo Geo CD games emulated perfectly 100% on Dreamcast, I don't see why he couldn't achieve it with enough dedication and time on his hands.

I know, maybe I am just dreaming, but I want my system to keep on casting dreams!

You're right, Bleemcast is a really good example. I wonder - how did they manage to do that?

However, individual emulation may be the cause - can you emulate more games than just those few ? (Gran Turismo 2, Tekken 3, Metal Gear Solid).
I guess it's simmilar to Xbox 1 emulation on the 360.

[vlame]

So can this be used as a VMU replacement?

I don't think so, if someone made a program that could copy saves over to it perhaps but games will not save to a unit like this.

[deathclaw]

So can this be used as a VMU replacement?

I don't think so, if someone made a program that could copy saves over to it perhaps but games will not save to a unit like this.

I think it's possible. You would just have to change Dreamcast's firmware so that it would think the SD card is just an ordinary VMU.