Has someone successfully faked a BBA?

As the topic reads, i'm wondering if anyone has successfully made their own BBA's or somehow tricked the DC into believing a lan adapter is a BBA?
I just had this thought that even a LAN adapter turned into an SD-drive would be so much faster than the current SD solution. And a LAN adapter telling the DC it's a BBA would also be gold..
Is there any knowledge out there on these ideas?

Found this intriguing photo:

over on this site which doesn't explain much..

 

This picture shows only a breakout board for the G2 BUS (modem BUS).

I know of no attemp to turn a hit-300 into a hit-400.

Though:
jj10dm made a clone HIT-300, the lan adapter (not BBA): http://jj1odm.qp.land.to/g2bus.php#hit0300_clone
He also started making a BBA clone, but never got it finished: http://jj1odm.qp.land.to/g2bus.php#bba


Cheers!

 

I did come across some clones that used regular PCI adapters but there wasn't much writeup on it. The site seemed to be in Japanese too and we all know how well google translate works for long text...

 

It was probably the same guy I posted some stuff from, jj1odm: http://jj1odm.qp.land.to/ There's a LOT of stuff on there, but only a few are in english.

 

Ok, so there seems to be some knowledge out there.. yet somehow no one seems interested in using it for an actually usable SD card solution. this is so weird? Why is it, is it because of lack of japanese language knowledge or lack of technical capability of such an approach? And also since BBA's are super overpriced it seems worth doing a cheap clone of them.. so why isn't this happening?

 

There's likely not enough of a market to make such a device economically viable for production

 

I think so. It seems vaguely familiar. Been awhile since I looked there.

 

There is no way to "trick" it into using a LAN adapter as a BBA, that will never happen as it will require either 1) rewriting games that only have BBA/modem support with LAN adapter support, a pretty much impossible massive undertaking even for a team of programmers as these games are not open source 2) creating a piece of hardware/FPGA or something that "translates" communication back and forth between the LAN adapter and system, which would be at least as difficult as building your own BBA clone so there would be no point in building one as the LAN adapter itself is quite rare nowadays it seems.

If you want a BBA, save up the $150-$200 and buy one.





BTW, I own a BBA but honestly, the BBA is kind of pointless nowadays.

1) If you want to use it to play games, the BBA is only compatible with PSOv1, PSOv2, and Quake 3 Arena. You might as well set up a PC-DC server or a Netopia dialin router for half of the cost and it's fully compatible with every commercial online game.
2) If you want to use it for dumping GD-ROMs, you can use an SD card adapter which is almost as fast as the BBA but a very tiny fraction of the cost.
3) If you want to use it for homebrew, well... the better solution is for the homebrew community to build its own open ethernet card and build drivers for it into KallistiOS. Everything homebrew should be able to support such a device by a few code modifications and a recompile. But honestly the SD card adapter is also great for homebrew applications as well.

Personally I would never part with my BBA, but if you can't afford one there are other tools to accomplish the same thing.




EDIT: You keep talking about using the BBA for SD cards... The G2 bus is much faster than the serial bus and it is possible to build an SD card adapter for it. But you don't need the BBA for that.... the G2 bus is just a peripheral bus, an SD card adapter would plug right into the slot where the BBA would go, no BBA needed. But it is harder to create an SD card adapter for the G2 bus compared to the serial bus which is extremely simple, that's why it was done that way.

 

Thanks for all the good and tasty knowledge to all

@darcagn
Okay, in my head I just imagined both LAN adapter and BBA were both basically ethernet cards limited on purpose so people would spend more money.

The main point for why I'm interested in BBA is because I had this thought were you could connect an SD drive throught an ethernet cable, or use the expansion port for SD in some other way that would make SD fast (enough to play FMV without lag).
It's confusing that you say an SD adapter is almost as fast as a BBA yet later add that indeed the G2 bus is much faster than the serial bus..

 

For dumping games or sending/receiving debug infos, the traditional serial coder's cable is terribly slow, I think this limitation is on the serial protocol pc-side.

Dumping a game with no on the fly compression was around 24h. (on the fly gzipping allows for less data transferred and thus reduced time, mainly on games with zero padding).

With a BBA it's lightning fast, maybe 5 to 10 mins, never tried first hand but it should be in the 1-2 MB/s range.

With a sd card, jj1odm reached 650 kB/s in raw speed, which is around 18.5 minutes for a disc, my personal record obtained while beta-testing the sd-card design was 450 kB/s with the serial capacitors removed, which is around 27 minutes for a disc. The theoretical maximum speed of the serial port is around 1.5 MB/s iirc.

So at ~10$ the sd-card is more than fast enough for dumping/homebrew loading/logging while more than tenfold less expensive than BBA. Though it's slower than the gd-rom speed, wich is 12x or 1.75 MB/s; thus the slowdowns using sdiso (that and overhead).

 

the SD card is almost as fast for dumping yes. Bba dumping would bemuch faster, but it is limited by the speed the gdrom drive can read the GD. otherwise iirc (I'm at the beach on a phone so I can't really look it up) the bba is 100mbit.


edit: in what way are the bba and LAN adapters "limited"?

 

I think he meant the lack of games that support them. There's only 3 that support the BBA. Maybe more in the homebrew market but only 3 official games. Not sure on the LAN one though.

 

The LAN adapter only supports the browser it was bundled with. And homebrew.

But it why would these be limitations so someone would spend more money? What else would someone be paying more money for? Seganet dial up access?

 

Wow that is some great details and gives one a good look at the whole thing.
Now I understand, thanks for the explanation FamilyGuy.

I guess I'm missing something.
To me the dreamcast is a computer as any computer.
Therefore it shouldn't need separate LAN/BBA adapters since they are the same thing (lan card here - lan card there). Why whould you make one for gaming (3 games?) and one for whatever else. This doesn't make sense to me.
And so if you have use of their different (?!) functions you have to buy both. Hence paying twice for the same thing.

 

Word.

 

They released the 10mb/s one first with a browser disc, there were no online games at this point.
Then they made the 10/100 mb/s one that worked with the games, but not the disc.

I guess they didn't make the games compatible with both or produce a new browser disc that worked with both was because neither adapter sold in enough numbers for them to care.

A console isn't a computer, generally the drivers for the hardware are built into the software itself. You can't just install a different driver for your hardware and have the game pick it up.

Newer consoles with hard disks can operate a bit more like this though.

 

^ this. They are both Ethernet cards, one was 10mbits max, based on a Fujitsu chipset, and bundled with a browser disc that supported it. It was only sold in Japan in small quantities. Later on they released a different Ethernet card, which was 100mbits max and based on a Broadcom chipset, marketed as the Broadband Adapter. In Japan it was bundled with the Broadband Passport browser, in the US it was alone. It wasn't released in PAL regions. This Ethernet card was supported by some retail games and a few browsers.

KallistiOS, the development library used by most homebrew applications, supports both devices.

 

We need now someone to produce them to we having Ethernet Internet and become common.

 

Better yet, just make a phone line spoofer that plugs into the modem and uses either wifi or ethernet. Has all software built in to run as standalone. Might already exist but I never bothered to look for one. MAybe something like Magic Jack? The new one that can run standalone.

 

You can achieve this by hooking up a phone line simulator (usually run $100+ on eBay, but if you're patient you can find them for around $50. I actually have one of these on sale at eBay right now, but I'm asking $95 shipped for it) to a router that supports dial-in (usually around $30-$50 or so on eBay, but again, you have to be patient and wait for a deal). I have a Skutch AS-66 4-line Telephone Line Simulator hooked up to a Netopia R2020 router, which is connected to my normal home router. here is a tutorial on setting that up.

That setup is compatible with all commercial games. The only thing I can think of that needs the BBA to work is I think the video chat in Visual Park, which is the disc that comes with the Dreameye camera (but really, who is going to use that? ).

The downside is that the modem is not at all compatible with any homebrew at this point in time. Getting the modem to work is currently listed as a "low" priority for the KallistiOS developers, and all of the software would need to be at the very least recompiled and have some code tweaked to support it then. So for anything closed source with the developers long gone... forget about it. So, I have a BBA as well (I'm also interested in getting a LAN adapter, too, just to collect).


Also, it should be possible to use the $35 Ethernet model of Raspberry Pi with a USB modem ($25 or so) to create a dialup server in Linux.