Dreamcast GDRom Diver emulator!

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

 

Easy man, take it easy, it's just a prototype. Even Deunan said that if you only want a free gd game emulator this will be only keep for his makaron tests.

It's a great thing but is very early.

 

Yeah he just said that now, not when I posted this 2 hours ago. I know I should have never told anybody and let him do what he wanted with it.

I was just posting Dreamcast news like I always do. Even with the SD adapters nobody ever mentioned pirating, we always said you have to rip your own GDR's

I agree though, shouldn't have jumped the gun, but I was only posting this where it was relevant to others.

 

this is interesting news hopefully he will detail how he did it
and maybe it could be ported to an Adriano compatible system

 

very interesting

 

does it plug in to the modem port? or is that just for the development of the thing?

 

From his site he says this.

So for now I think he soldered it to the board but plans on using a connector so it just plugs into the system later on.

 

Its an altera FPGA. I'm not familiar with that specific model myself but that is how he did it. Time, energy, and likely a lot of VHDL.

EDIT: If I'm understanding his wording right (seems a bit odd) its a Cyclone II.

 

http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?No=83

From what I understand he wants to shrink it down when he perfects it and use one of these things.

http://cgi.ebay.com/MCU-BOARD-STM32F103-ARM-Cortex-M3-Development-Board-/120562467483

He just needs something sufficient enough to keep up with the Dreamcast clock speeds.

 

I'm sure there are FPGAs out there fast enough, the problem is that they tend to be a bit expensive.

 

i dont think they are that expensive then tincy and ardrinos tend to be speedy and popular and they dont really break 100 bucks often

 

Are you joking? Arduinos are basically the same as PIC chips, they's slow and have a maximum of 18 pins, how're you going to interface with a propietry CDROM interface and an SD Card and RAM with 18 pins and something that can just about flash a few LEDs on and off.
CDROMs transfer data at ~3MBPS, arduino can just about manage serial at 115Kbps from what I remember.

 

^ this

Arduinos are no where near powerful enough to have any chance of doing this. Ever.

 

:-(

hahaha. Arduino's can not do what an FPGA can do man...

The Arduino, has a very slow microcontroller with a limited amount of digital and analog inputs / outputs.

It is just out of the question to use one for this project.



Above all that, what he has done is excellent. Again, this is what I am now trying to acheive for my PS1 SD Card System.

http://www.haunted360.com/development-alterafpga.html

The board he is using, is an Altera DE1. You can see, he is using an external clock and not one of the 3 on-board oscillators.

Yes. It is a Cyclone II. It is actually a EP2C20F484C7 FBGA with 484 pins. It features,

1.2 volts core voltage,
18752 LE's,
315 I/O,
239616 Memory Bits,
52 Embedded Multipliers,
4 PLL's
and 16 Global Clocks.

 

PM me when its finished and I can order one, then give me directions to the online poll for the Saturn version

 

Strange I was just wondering what happened to the DC IDE project.

There was a complete Modembus-to-ISA-to-IDE adapter built with nothing but common TTL parts and
scavenged connectors.

Using a FPGA is only needed to emulate the GD drive logic/software, correct ?

I think a practical GD-ROM replacement needs to patch the bios / interrupt routines and then have some simple CPLDs as glue logic to a CF-IDE drive. (Or IDE to SATA converter)

A MCU plus some cheap CPLDs and EEPROM with a fancy software can do all that ~
(the software becomes the complex component then... real-time interrupt patching and the horror )

 

Correct, he should be trying to shrink it down in size with a much cheaper board later too, for now this is only a prototype for developing, so still might be some time till it is released, but he said he is interested in selling them for a profit.

 

Anyone have another contact for him other than livejournal?

 

I do. But he is extremely busy.

 

Which just means any e-mail sent will be returned when he is available to write a reply.