Dreamcast GDRom Dive replacement finally found!

[Anthony817]

http://dknute.livejournal.com/39276.html

[Ziggy]

Whoa, that looks amazing! But expensive

I clicked the link, but didn't read yet.

[Anthony817]

Yeah, looks like he must have used a tiny motherboard from one of those netbooks, at least it appears to me to be the case. Anyway, this is way better than the SD Adapters ever were! It has like 100% compatibility!

Anyway, if that is the case, then I think you should be able to find like a 5 year old netbook that would be sufici9ent enough for the job very cheaply.

[Lokkenjawnz]

No, he did not use a netbook motherboard. Read the post, it explains exactly what he's done. Basically he's using an FPGA, which I believe is the main board there, though I could be mistaken as I'm not too knowledgable about them, to fake a GD drive to talk to the Dreamcast. Effectively, the FPGA runs software that emulates what the GD drive would normally do, and send data to the console in the same way, so the console really can't tell the difference. This is done in software running on non-specialized hardware though, so as he mentions it's not entirely perfect yet, though it does run at least a few games correctly. He says he'd like to use a smaller board in the future, and to make it cheaper.

Basically, this might be a viable solution to using an SD card instead of a disc, but it's a fair ways off right now, it's at a very early stage right now.

[Anthony817]

He is thinking of using a MCU board if he can work it out, as the board he is using is a prototype board, and kind of expensive.

This is what I have found so far.

He is using this device here for developing it.
http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?No=83

And this is what he was talking about possibly using in the future here.
http://cgi.ebay.com/MCU-BOARD-STM32F103 ... 0562467483

[D.D.D.]

YES YES YES YES YES! I will absolutely get this!

[Hatta]

Effectively, the FPGA runs software that emulates what the GD drive would normally do, and send data to the console in the same way, so the console really can't tell the difference.

So it's very much like a flash cart or floppy drive emulator like we've seen so many of. This is the first time I've seen one for optical media. Cool stuff. Hopefully these can be made for less than $150 or so. That's about the price point the more advanced flash carts tend to reach.

[Anthony817]

Yeah, he wants to try and shrink the technology down to something much cheaper. What he is using now cost upwards of $125, but smaller boards can be as cheap as $50.

http://cgi.ebay.com/MCU-BOARD-STM32F103 ... 0562467483

The Wii has something like this already called WODE, Wii Optical Drive Emulator.

[Inazuma]

This looks awesome. Someone please let us know when/if we can buy one for ourselves.

[Ziggy]

The Wii has something like this already called WODE, Wii Optical Drive Emulator.

There's also the WiiKey Fusion which will let you boot games off an SD card. And, as I recently found out, because it works in Gamecube mode people were able to get the Fusion to work on an actual Gamecube. So you can completely bypass the optical drive in a Cube and boot games off an SD card.