Hey just finished the ide ata mod. I found some pictures and little info about it but did it anyway.... http://www.dreamcast.es/forum/viewthread.php?thread_id=2127&pid=14132#post_14132 But I have a few questions do i need a sd card reader to make it work? Found out somewhere that the bios needed to be on sd card is this true? Here is my connection i broke a trace line at point 37 But i fixed it connected the yellow line together and dreamcast is booting just fine. My Hard Drive is found and file system sometimes will work... Screenshot is from when hdd was formatted in ntsf. When i format Fat or FAT32 It will mount the drive. but it will stop loading after sd card not found. when i leave the Hdd power off it will boot in to bootmenu where i can not boot. Have Ram and Cd but will not boot. seen a youtube video where they booted from sd.. i have tried different dreamshells core; bootloader; cdi. but no go.. Core stops at splash screen when hdd is on. or gives blackscreen Bootloader at picture showing above Cdi stops at splash screen. any thoughts? greets dcnigma
As far as I know it depends by the bios you flashed on your DC. Most of them need the Dreamshell files on CD to boot. Only one version, with less game compatibility, can be booted by an SD card without the need of a GDrom. The last bios I mentioned (ATA working and boot from SD card) can be found here (http://www.dc-swat.ru/page/dreamshell/firmware/) and it's named "sd_loader_with.bios". Take note, on that page, that most of the bioses are marked as not passing the "Holly protection". It means, afaik, no ATA initialization. Good luck. theJKL
Interesting! Anybody can translate from russian? I was able to read few words, if I correctly understood no game booting (at least without resonator), but I'm not sure....
Ah ok! Thanks SWAT! And with the resonator can the DC boot fine? Is it loading Dreamshell? Is it loading games? Sadly I can't understand anything in russian...
Can anyone clear up which resonator is being referred to and how it's being used? I'm starting a project to add HDD port to my console. I was under the assumption that if I had an SD card mod and a bios flashed to boot dreamshell from the SD card, then I wouldn't have a problem. But now it's possible to load dreamshell from the HDD itself? Where does this resonator come into play? I translated the Russian to English, but I'm still kind of lost as to what's being discussed. Thanks for anyone who can help clear it up for me.
There is a 33.8688MHz oscillator on the GD-ROM drive, which in addition to running the logic on the drive board is also fed back to the Dreamcast main board. So if you remove the GD-ROM drive and wire the HDD in place of it you also need to provide this clock, since without it accesses to the SPU hang the system.
I don't intend on removing the GD-Rom drive, but I'm going to flash the bios so it loads dreamshell from SD. Do I still have to worry about this? I'm going to install two new bios chips. One bios will be region free, one will have dreamshell loader on it. When it's switched to the DS bios will it still be able to use the oscillator on the gd-rom?
Then you don't need to worry about it - you only need the oscillator if you are removing the GD-ROM drive.
Yep. Only one difference of BIOS mods: The new BIOS mod, will switch to original BIOS immediately after loading DreamShell core to RAM from custom BIOS, but before execute it. After as BIOS is auto switched, DreamShell will be executed from RAM. So you can get maximum compability as on original BIOS and working HDD/GD without problems. But need updated BIOS firmware with DS core (ds_core_pic12f675.bios), you can get it from GitHub or my forum.
