Dreamcast Zip Drive Found!

It was going to be used as an extended drive, meaning games like Quake 3 could use it to store additional maps that would be too large to fit on the Dreamcast's only other medium, the VMU.

ZIP media comes in two sizes that I know of: 100MB and 250MB. The former being a tenth the size of a GD-ROM disc. Plus, it's the convenience factor. You wouldn't want to go buy a GD-ROM disc every time new content came out.

Other comparable media out at the time (also produced by Iomega) were the Ditto and Jazz drives, each holding about 2GB of data. Ditto probably wouldn't have worked because it's a tape drive (a higher probability of failure), and between Jazz and ZIP, ZIP was probably the cheapest to mass produce even though Jazz would have been easier to integrate into the dev environment because of its SCSI compatibility.

One thing I would be interested in finding out is if the Quake team had access to ZIP drive documentation. Q3 was released the same year the ZIP drive was supposed to be released. Either they were told ahead of time the project was going to get canned, or the game supported it in the event the attachment was released.

Also, to anyone interested in purchasing this, it's important to note the terminology used. In one of the replies, the seller says the device is functional "electrically" and not "electronically." The seller is probably using the terms interchangably, but "electrically" could mean there's only power fed to the internal ZIP drive to operate it mechanically and the other components are only there to simulate a finished model.

 

I m not a DC expert, but I m pretty sure you can do optical disk emulation and replace the DC's optical drive. Of course, you d either need a computer to do the emulation or some custom hardware that I suppose is also found in the Katana boxes.

Additionally, just like old computers you can use reserved memory parts during boot in order to mount devices. You don't need to go down the driver path at all actually, since you can use some sort of IPL, provided the BIOS reserves some part of memory on boot specifically for the ipl of peripherals.

PS: IPL= initial program loader - All computers use it, even home computers - you just don't hear much about it (unless you love your 64DD dev unit )



It must also be remembered that the Nintendo 64 had 2 Iomega related projects.

First, as seen in my Avatar, the 64Disk Drive, as originally conceived , using Zip disks.

Second, the N64 Hard Drive (loading through the top slot) , shown by Iomega in some expo. Pictures of it have been seen on the Forums before (from the scans of some spanish magazine)

 

4k is still expensive in my opinion I hope it goes down futher since it really doesn't do anything or at least it wont till it falls in to the hands of a pro modder

 

Barcode: You're right. I agree with you about the first point. Theoretically, you can "emulate" any kind of device always that you find an interface between it and the system. But being success, depending on the case, is very complicated.

A similar case which is familiar to me is the fact of using an iPod in an old BMW car which only has a CD loader, without changing the central unit. Some enterprises sell interfaces which allow to emulate the CD loader signals and operate over the iPod like if it were a compilation of CDs (with limitations, obviously).

Unfortunately, I only thought about "touching" the BIOS and didn't think about the possibility which you comment. However, I still think this work is crazy for a home made creation. If not, it had been as much simple as making an interface GD-HDD. I believe that using other buses to load all that amount of data from commercial games would be too much slow.

About the issue of the IPL, I didn't know anything about it (I'm dedicated to pure software really). So thank you for the info . It's very interesting, really. But how would you make the Dreamcast SO to manage these devices? I mean that although the BIOS could knew it's "there", when the SO loads, it still will be an unkown peripheral. Right?

 

devices on old PCs (8088/8086)became "known" on boot when they loaded their own piece in addition to the BIOS, if that's what you're asking. The DC would also see the Zip drive like any other serial device, be it karaoke or BBA

 

Barcode: But once the BIOS recognise it as a device "plugged" to the serial bus, Wouldn't the OS layer need a driver/module to be loaded in order to make it work properly? Just like in any OS I mean.

About the auction: Ok, price dropped down to $500... But keeping a reserve price, which I guess it's $4000 LOL . Anyway, time to "fight" amoung us to get it :dance:.

 

Honestly canning this Zip drive was one of the smartest things SEGA could've done.

I dont know what they were thinking in the first place: Zip drives were already slow at the time, being replaced by CD-R drives everywhere.

Actually I think that a 5GB HDD mounted in a base (using the serial port) could've been sold at the time (2000) for around $100, and if you ask me that sounds much better idea than this Zip drive.

Then a DC with DVD and the MP3 VMU were all great ideas that never saw the light.

Man everytime we talk about this stuff I get depressed...

 

Cheap, portable, relatively spacey rewritable media - nothing to do with a CD-R.

They didn't want to release an HDD for piracy reasons mainly, besides cost.

 

100mb, 250mb and 750mb with reading only being backwards along with writing, but if memory serves the 750mb drives could only read 100mb drives.

Either way 100mb would be a lot of maps.

A late issue of ODCM went into a bit of detail about SEGA making a "dc on a chip" (doubt it feasible even now) and embedding it into set top boxes. The dvd player was probably the beginnings of this.

 

APE: I still doubt that DVD player has any connection with the later plans to embed Dreamcast into a chip. Anyway, the chip which you comment finally was made by Renesas, and it's called SH3707. But I don't know if it was used in real products... Do you know of any? I still remember that a mobile phone was anounced one or two years ago. That had been very cool ^_^ .

 

If they started doing that, people would think of the Sega Genesis days when sega simply screwed it up by announcing add-on after add-on and it threw a lot of potential customers off.

OH, and Zip drives can write up to 750mb, but you need a later model and when that came out, it was too little, too late, as DVDRs started to become cheap.

 

The over-lap of Zip drives and single-writtable media is relatively small.

In mathematical terms, a DVD-R has a cost of X, whereas a Zip disk might cost 10*X. However, this figure is beaten by the thousands of read/write cycles than a Zip drive can offer versus the single , one-off nature of DVD-R media.


Currently, the Zip drive's competitor is none other than the USB flash solutions. Actually, they have trully beaten the Zip drive as far as I m concerned, since they appeal to the same market, offer more portability, do not need a drive (most PCs have USB ports) and offer much higher read and write speeds. I m also under the impression that Flash media are more durable and resistant to Electromagnetic fields than magnetic media.

 

Zip failed because the disks were expensive, they were slow and the drives eventually suffered the "click of death". I used to use them at Uni on a parallel port drive back in the day, but that was before DVD-Rs and Flash drives came to be.

In 1999 we didn't have all these new fangled toys!

 

$500 is freakin cheap. I hope someone here wins it.

 

I remember using 16MB Memory Stick units to transfer data back at 1999. Better choice than have getting a Zip drive Jimbo , at least for documents etc.

 

I think the first flash drive was sold in 2000 and it was pretty expensive at the time, they certainly weren't readily available until the 3rd year, and even then they were small. 100MB Zip disks were the obvious choice back then.

 

I recall that in 1998 (I was living in California back then), SONY offered Desktop VAIO PCs (in a slim-case) with a Memory Stick drive instead of a Floppy drive. Inside it there was a P2 @ 450Mhz or something along those lines.

 

According to Wikipedia the first ever USB flash drive was indeed in 2000 from a company called Trek, then an 8MB one from IBM in late 2000. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive

I guess memory cards like Memory Stick were earlier than that, but it wasn't really a feasible way to transport data at uni. I don't think external drives for that kind of thing existed back then.

 

I think you're confusing Sony's Memory Stick with Sony's Memory Vault. Memory Stick (which are obviously not USB) were around before the USB Flash drives as you said.