While developments have been made in dumping 64DD disks with hardware to PCs what about just dumping them with a flash cart? I have a vague idea on how it would work, but have not done any N64 programming or looked into hardware specifics to know of any hardware limitations that may exist.
Maybe you could ask OzOnE? He's done a fair amount of research into interfacing the 64DD with an FPGA. Last I checked, not enough for it to be usefully functional, but I think he'd probably be the person to talk to about it.
Simple data dumps yes (as in what you'd get from DDump). However, what they're trying to get are disk surface dumps, including all the system-use information.
Hi, This has sort of been covered before, but sonicdude asked about emulation before, which is related to ripping disks... http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?43148-Emulating-the-64DD-on-a-flashcart-for-N64 As I don't think I'll get around to playing with this again, I might send all my project files to Marshall and Krikzz to see if they can make use of it. It should be completely possible to rip disks using an FPGA based Flash cart, as long as the FPGA has direct access to the cart slot signals. I managed to read the first sector of every block last time I tried, but I couldn't see how to increment to the next sector in a block. I think this is just interrupt based, and if you don't read the data within a certain time of the interrupt triggering, the drive ASIC times out. The protocol on the cart bus is quite simple, but it needs the 64DD specific commands and register info to initiate a track / block read. To emulate the 64DD would be fairly complex, but not too bad once ripping is working reliably. EDIT: btw, reading the system area blocks is no different to any other area, except I can still only read the first sector atm. AFAIK, it's the "stock" 64DD library DLL which hides the system areas from direct reading, so it's not a limitation of the drive itself. I'll send them the stuff later and see what they make of it. tbh, I should have just released it ages ago, since I never seem to have enough time for all the different projects I take on. (I sent Marshall the HDMI project files for the N64 / GC as well, but he's also very busy atm.) If you want more info on the protocol or commands, there's quite a bit of info in this thread (or just ask)... http://www.assemblergames.com/forum...ation-research&p=624378&viewfull=1#post624378 OzOnE.
I still have my hopes for a setup like the NES/ Famicom flashcarts that emulate the FDS. I still want to mess around with the FX Zero track builder expansion that was 64DD only. I'd spend the money to import a 64DD and the game now but the space it would take up is a problem. I'm very limited on space so if the stuff can be shrunk down to a fraction of original size (as in put into a game cart sized thing like the NES carts that can do FDS games) I'd be willing to pay a bit for that. I'm always looking for ways to shrink the stuff I have so it takes up less space. That's why almost all of my cartridge games are ROMs on flashcart instead of real carts. No got the space for a few thousand carts...
Thanks for all the replies so far! Thanks for all you've done so far! It would be great to see it implemented into the 64drive (I'm willing to do testing), but I imagine there are probably a few things on the to-do list before that.
