Dreamcast with an external hard disk drive It's a topic that's been beaten to death, I know. This is a post for people who are more informed than I. I do believe that the method for booting DC games off of an external hard drive is a bit different than we had all previously thought. My extrapolation on the subject is as follows. - First thing's first. Crack open a DC and read all of the commands going to and from the drive via packet sniffing on the ribbon cable(this has probably been done already) - Create a small PCB that can take the GD ribbon right off the mobo and convert it into USB. You could, if you were so inclined, make a switch to go from USB back to GD drive and have a nice simple USB interface on the back of the unit) - Create a piece of software that can emulate a GD-ROM drive's commands and load GDI images off of your hard drive. Preferably cross-platform(win,mac,linux). - Fire up the application and load the game(or not) first. -- If the software is turned off when the DC is booted up, you'll probably get a System Error on the hardware. If you don't load a software image, the DC hardware boots directly to the dashboard as long as the DC GD-ROM emulation application is running. - Fire up your Dreamcast and you're playing your favorite homebrew app of choice. Imagine the homebrew possitiblies. Drag and drop the latest build of your game into the software app, the Dreamcast acts as though it had a disc ejected and would reset the console to the main dashboard. Just press "Play Game" on the dash and your latest image would boot. I do wonder how plausible this scenario is though. It is sound in theory to me. What are your thoughts? Nothing is ever really easy or difficult -- it just takes less or more time. -DC
Considering the advancement with the SD card adapters you might not need bother with a Hard Drive. I think the next step will be a custom bios so you can launch directly instead of loading the likes of dream shell from a disc.
The problem I have with posts like this: if someone is smart enough to engineer what you're suggesting, they don't need your help outlining the basic theory behind it. We're all aware this is possible, but if you can't do it yourself... Also the statement "Nothing is ever really easy or difficult -- it just takes less or more time" is nonsense. Plenty of coding and engineering tasks are extremely basic but take large amounts of time, and on the flip side some tasks are extremely complex but may require only a short burst of insight from a true genius.
That's the most accurate analysis I think I've ever seen in regards to software/hardware development and hacking since I've been here. ++
Of course it would be a lot easier to focus on the expansion bus. Facts: 1) The expansion bus is where the fully working (not mockup) DC Zip Drive connected to the system. 2) The DC Zip Drive was a standard, off-the-shelf, IDE drive. If you want to hook up a hard drive, look there. -hl718
Have a look here, some stuff about getting IDE working with it http://cadcdev.sourceforge.net/hdwrprj/navi/ and another project at getting it working under NetBSD on the DC http://www.fuzzymuzzle.com/Kiyoshi/IDE_HDD.htm Both a bit old now though.. As for emulating the GD, I would have thought that would involve some sort of CPLD or something to do what you are asking. Dan
The SD interface is the answer, I bet we will see that soon I can't disclose anything more yet, as it's in progress...
Sounds siimilar to a project ive been on and off with for a short while. External GDROM SCSI to ATA/IDE (no digital audio tho , don't need it for this application and also doesn't fit the pinout) Close up of the SCSI to ATA. Altera DE1 FPGA dev board <-> IDE <->Dreamcast GDROM connector. Yellow/White pin header is for my LA to do bus monitoring. Close up of the ATA <-> GDROM. Admittedly i wasn't working on Dreamcast stuff but it should transfer across pretty easily. I initially went for a man in the middle setup between a GD rom and an ATAPI dvd rom drive. Easier because of the matching block size but ping pong a couple of FIFO's for the DMA and you can use SD or CF.
Nice , pretty much the same thing Emukidid has done for the Gamecube a while ago. CDDA support in the works ?
