Dreamcast GD-IDE and ATA-G1 boards by DragonCity

It seems there is a new IDE solution for Dreamcast courtesy of the French site DragonCity.

It lets you connect an IDE hard disk or via adapters a SATA / SSD or Compact Flash drive. This adapter works with Dreamshell bios or DreamShell Boot Loader CD.

• You can always use the GD-ROM drive!
• Ability to move the GD-IDE to another console
• Ability to boot from a Dreamshell SATA / SSD
• Nothing to cut, your console remains intact!
• Ability to boot bios WITHOUT Dreamshell with cd boot

Sources.
http://www.dreamcast-news.com/2018/04/dreamcast-gd-ide-et-g1-ata-par.html
https://dragoncity17.wordpress.com/2018/03/16/sega-dreamcast-g1-ata/

 

You have to build it yourself, so most of us can't use it. Also, what state is Dreamshell compatibility/performance wise now? Used to be terrible.

 

i like how its dragon "city17" with dbz font. ONE OF US

IIRC the newest release has WCE support for IDE for some games

 

Took a look, I think you still have to patch ISO's and the latest is 2 years old. Bad.

 

About 80% games are compatible.
There was a little update of isoloader last year for Shemue I.
You can run homebrew emulator and a lot of games.

Megavolt is working on a new update with 2 hdd and a video player for ide dvd.

For now swat is mobilized on the russian soccer world cup, he'll go on dreamshell after that.

Maybe he could give a date of the next release.

thedoctor45 from dreamshell forum has done a pack with all homebrew (except last homebrew selling than alice dream tournament, 4x4jam etc... but you have half life, propeller arena for example) all emulators and all of official games running dreamshell.
I can share with you in PM the torrent of about 80Go of games !

Dreamshell is the cheapest system you can install and those cards are about 25euros with bios.
the gdemu are at 130e are very hard to catch and the usb gdrom are at 200e

 

I add that is a very good system and now you have some hardware ready to install easily.
And some games pack ready for it.
Swat and megavolt are very concerned and answer quickly. The community is helpfull as they can.

For me is't a very lead system. Of course there is a lot of work to do.

 

Yeah, while I have played on a modded Dreamcast with GDEmu that a friend let me borrow for about 6 months in 2016, I still want and prefer the idea of an internal HDD running Dreamshell becasue to me the idea of a desktop-like environment on the Dreamcast is way too awesome to pass up. I always felt like Dreamcast was the first of the modern PC-like consoles, so I always dreamed of an internal HDD with one. Dreamshell adds so much functionality to the system that other solutions really don't provide.

So they are working on the possibility to have up to 2 HDD's with Dreamshell now in addition to the possibility to connect DVD drives? Man Dreamshell really does just keep getting better and better.

Plus, as fafadou mentioned above, this is the cheapest option for many people who really aren't full of money like myself. Waiting ages just to be able to order a GDEmu at such a short notice isn't always feasible, and don't get me started on USB-GDRom, that is so expensive that I would rather place that money towards an upgrade on my ancient PC since I am mostly a PC gamer when it comes to modern games.

But while compatibility still might not be 100%, and there are certainly some caveats to the solution, it is still an attractive path for many people to take.

 

Yeah for now the perfect system doesn't exist unfortunately... Until a mini dreamcast HD will be released ?

 

I think you are more likely to see someone developing schematics of the original Dreamcast motherboard with modifications. Something similar to what has been happening with the Amiga - potentially even with FPGA...

Ted.

 

Iirc OzOnE was working on a drop-in replacement motherboard for the DC with true digital-digital HDMI output and other features found in popular mods. You would have to desolder the CPU and GPU along with some other stuff from a DC motherboard though.

 

g1 ata is a good solution cheap and here and now upgrade. unlike gdemu which is a jackpot to get. one year now i try to get one for a friend without luck. the compatibility of g1 ata will improve with time im sure.

 

Thanks for the topic

 

He posted pictures of the first version on Twitter, the only issue there is the barrier to entry. BGA soldering on a few chips will make it near impossible for all but a few. It will still be sweet to see it running on a smaller form factor when it's done though.

 

Oh wow do you have a link to the pictures?

 

Check out @AshEvans81’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/AshEvans81/status/988883304341491718?s=09
I guess it was a render rather than the built PCB, but still cool to see

 

Wow thanks so much!

 

Wonderful !!
gdemu and hdmi on board !

 

I run the GDemu 5.3 + g1-ata IDE with a ide-sata adapter + 2x bios mod on the same console. I play originals off of the GDEMU because of..well, compatibility and the lack of seek times being a non-rotating device obviously, g1-ata for a SATA disk with emulators, homebrew, dcload-ip and whatnot, but HDMI is available for everyone with the Akura HDMI or for nearly nothing if you decide to do the mods yourself (not digital-digital though). New mods will always continue to come out since the community is of such a substantial amount of contributing members AND console buyers, so I say dont wait for tomorrow unless you know it will turn out the way you NEED it to be. Find one with the mods you want at say..ebay, learn how to solder, buy cheap parts, and do the mods you want yourself. Suddenly theres a Dreamcast HD Remake from Sega which ends up costing what you paid for your modded motherboard or whatever. Atleast I for one hate to modify the Dreamcast case, and happened to be (in luck) very early on during the GDEMU-run which I see now have exploded in prices, and while I could easily just have bought a final complete DC with all the mods I've mentioned, I wanted to NOT spraypaint the buttons black or whatever, or have a reset button in anything other than the power-LED, just adding a short spring and replacing the assembly for it. But either way I do *really* recommend replacing the original power supply either way, be it Retro-PSU, DreamPSU or some kind of PicoPSU. With anything, not exclusive to the GDemu, It WILL fail on you when you want it the least. It probably was the cheapest electrical part in the console to begin with. It WILL have an impact on the lifetime of the internals of the whole console as far as I know electronics which is not so very fond of heat it never was meant to be having - the PVR (GPU, will produce enough heat on its own I promise you), maybe even requiring you to replace not just the PSU in the end because of the buildup of heat during longer than 30+minutes of gaming. And unless your TV/monitor lacks a VGA input, I would not jump the gun on the HDMI mod "just because you can" - the native signal is analogue, so any HDMI mod must include a ADC or a really much less doable mod for people without genuine electronics experience like micro-soldering, which again might tempt you to add an upscaler to the mod since at that point you're already adding SOME input lag (not something you'll notice, but its there alright). Maybe even then, you miss that CRT feeling, so you want the scanliner mod (which the Akura has). At the end you might just be sitting on a Dreamcast with just about every mod there might be viable (or unviable) to have (which again is highly subjective), and you might want to do it again, so you sell it for some cash giving you some salary for your work, then buy a new one, repeat.
Suddenly, like in the Linux community, you're experienced enough to be one of the people who can, in this case, deliver such mods for other people wanting them and thus contributing to the community as a whole because you are expanding the userbase. This is what usually happens. And who knows what a so-called "complete mod, plug&play" may turn out to cost you anyway? And who knows what you "need" in the near future, like a digital audio output to your new hifi or something, and without you having done the mods, you wont know the quality of them either (not speaking about a whole motherboard here now lol, just seperate mods).

For those who might be wanting to play their actual discs you have in your collection or whatnot, ie the way it was meant to be played when it first came out, I now have 3 used but fully functional GD-Rom drives PLUS 1 *brand new* I have sat on for ....like 7 years, sealed ofcourse. It was meant in case mine ever gave up, but it never did.. Now looking to actually try to connect one to a PC to better understand the high-density area of the format. Find it extremely interesting that they just.."Hey yamaha, make it a double would ya?" and the fact that it is still supported at Yamaha for the arcades that still use them.

Anyway, just my 2 cents on this and just to be clear: I find it sad that the production run of the gdemu was so short to not meet the demand with enough supply or a similar solution (no, not you usb-gdrom) that is so good on compatibility and software support (ie gdmenu, firmware updates etc), so when or IF rather, there comes a better or equally brilliant device, I will gladly sell mine for what it initially costed me in the first place if someone needs it, not 50 times more "because I can" like it is now. It all comes down to money.. So sad.

 

Man that is a wall of text...

Actually, the DC's native output from the GPU is digital. It is sent to a DAC which outputs it as analog RGBHV, RGBS, Composite Video, S-Video, and analog L/R audio. The HDMI mod taps into the digital signals before it is converted to analog. Using an FPGA with custom code, it converts the signal into a usable HDMI signal. At this point, lag is (basically) nonexistent so any lag added is by the display and not the mod. (The HDMI mod is technically faster than the analog output but we're talking nanoseconds here) It even has a couple of nice linedoubling modes that don't add lag like an upscaling mode would iirc.

The benefit to the HDMI mod over the Akura (or the analog output in general) is that the DC's messed up aspect ratio is corrected so displays won't squish the image like with the analog output. Afterwards, you can just use an external (or even internal if you want to replace the DC's analog output circuit) HDMI to VGA adapter if you really need analog RGBHV. Benefit to this is that you can use analog with the corrected aspect ratio.

Also screw fake scanlines. I've always seen them just black out parts of the image instead of actually generating black lines in between the image's lines. Why hasn't anyone made a linedoubler with an option like that? You could linedouble 240p to 480p by drawing black lines in between for a close-to-the-real-deal scanline effect instead of just drawing the line twice right? Is it difficult or something?

 

Damn you had me scared that he was canceling production of future batches. I checked the site and thankfully this is not the case.

My friend Ziming has a modded DC with a GDEmu, but he said the past 2 times he booted it up he had to physically remove it and put back in and power it up to even get it working. Not sure of the problem there. I thought maybe was seated wrong or a bad firmware but he said it has the latest installed. He was going to sell me the DC which has dual bios, is overclocked to 240mhz and had GDEmu, but he was going to sell it sans the emu because I guess he didn't want to sell me something not fully working. So if he ends up selling it to me without the GDEmu I might just buy and build one of these from Dragoncity. They look simple enough and I like the G1-ATA that plugs directly into it.