Dreamcast SD card reader RELEASED

SLASHDOT: http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/10/22/0152218/SD-Adapter-For-Dreamcast-Released?from=rss

http://www.dcemu.co.uk/sd-adapter-for-dreamcast-released-337873.html

Chinese purchase site

http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=7818521031

Google translate version http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http://item.taobao.com/item.htm%3Fid%3D7818521031&ei=0CTBTITnJIWClAentpH-Cw&sa=X&oi=translate&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CB8Q7gEwAA&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dhttp://item.taobao.com/item.htm%253Fid%253D7818521031%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26hs%3DtAB%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-USfficial%26prmd%3Dfd

 

ive done many searches for the SD card readers for the DC
and it always involved having to build it and almost always involving killing a coder cable rare and expensive

or the semi rare DC to neo geo link cable

having a complete and for sale version to me is rather good news not huge new but good news oh and they are 35$ according to the youtube video


if someone was building these and selling them for 10 or 15 then i wouldn't care about this version


besides even if they are 6 bucks and still involve destroying a coder or link cable

then someone just needs to buy one already complete and then ship it to a Chinese company and have them replicate it in mass

thats what ive never understood why cant someone with a coder cable or BBA adapter just send a sample to china and have them replicate the damn things

 

Want one of these! Buying one as we speak..

 

Awesome.

 

oh ok.. then thats a great price and the guy who did the youtube video failed by using the $ sign xD

but ether way someone just needs to copy the cable end and some bits and mass produce this thing

now we just need reversed engineered BBA's


i wonder how they are making the cable end are they actually reversing a part or just killing dc link cables

 

Lol, I failed hard... I translated with bing, and I got the $ sign lol, but yes, it is actualy about $7.20 when converted right. Shipping cost about $22, so the price in my video was kinda close. :dance:

 

Kind of annoying, I'd love to buy one but its just too difficult to do.

The English translated version won't allow you to add an item to your cart.

Oh well.

 

Ok i can get one easy some day i was thinking some should make a bios so we could just load from the sd or gd-rom drive saves useing lasers?

 

Lets give it a few days and see if any sites can purchase some of these in bulk and resale them to people outside of China. I just hope they have enough materials to make hundreds of these.

 

Saves "using lasers" but mandates soldering a new BIOS chip, and loses the point of this in the first place.

 

You can boot up Dreamshell using the laser (yes yes, not 100% laser free) and then run those games you want. Obviously you need a functioning laser but using the laser for all of 5-6 minutes is far better than needing it for 100% of the minutes to play from optical media.

As for soldering in a chip, how exactly does it negate the benefits of an SD card? I soldered one in purely for the Katana boot up animation, had I wished I could have flashed Dreamshell onto it and still can.

FYI people building one of these from scratch takes about $6 in parts+shipping from Digi-Key and you can solder the wires directly to the DC's serial port solder pads inside mounting the SD card slot in the case. I can't seriously imagine this task being that difficult if you can tell which end of the soldering iron gets hot.

 

Can't you just flash Dreamshell into the bios and it skips the Dreamcast dashboard altogether, thus booting into DS everytime? Then you wouldn't need to even use the GDrom am I right?

If I remember correctly, the latest version is able of installing into the internal memory granted you already have your DC chipped.

 

The point of this is that you don't have to open or modify anything.

No, not easily. The BIOS chip on the DC is read-only.

 

Oooo.... Neat. I might want one.

 

Any more news on this?

 

I think this is a major release! I owned a GBA Link Flash card by the same company and it also had the emulation features :clap:

GBA Link cards were widely available in HK and so should be the SD card reader...

 

What about the laser lens on the Dreamcast? What happens to it after playing burned CD-Rs on it for a while?