Is it possible to build your own Broadband Adapter?

BBA and LAN adapter best used for game ripping. But that will no longer be needed if the one GD-ROM emulator I'm tracking gets finished. It will hook to the G2 bus and allow for the modem/ BBA/ LAN and other whatnot to be hooked in as well. This way the G1 bus has the drive still hooked. A bit of software and a disk can be ripped straight to the storage medium on G2.

 

I use my LAN for sending code and stuff to my work horse system and the BBA stays on my dumping system. But I would happily sacrifice the port for gd-rom emulation. But that would mean no online play for any systems with the optical drive emulator attached then it seems. small price to pay since a spare system can be had for that at a cheap price.

 

As I said above, one model has a pass through to allow for the network adapters to be hooked in as well. That or else they have something built in. Not quite sure...
Not sure where this thing is now since the site got moved or something stupid...

 

It is remarkable how well it works as the read speed is higher then a normal drive so it allows me to dump disc faster over a LAN using httpd-ack. I get 2mbps where as a stock drive the most I can get out of the 12x laser is 1.3mbps
as the system was Japanese while the GD-ROM was NTSC-U so it was only to boot the import. It was done by a guy named CoCo some in the DC scene might recall, kinda a pr*ck mod at SOR when it was around with a huge ego problem but hopefully he cares enough about the DC scene to share this info again.

 

few month ago i recieved on my work this "thing" - http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/altera/kit-cyclone-iv-starter.html , the main aim is discover how ethernet stuff works and development to get board with Ethernet interface.

i'm wondering is anybody knows where we can get G2 port connector? or maybe easyest way is just desolder it from unuseful Modem and use plastic package too.

 

The G2 port connector appears to be a custom part - the only was I managed to get one was by removing it from the modem. You will need to apply quite a bit of force to do it, since it's bonded to the PCB at both ends - on mine the glue was in the same area of the connector as the locating pins. Incidentally, I've had a play with one of those boards, and it seems to have been intentionally crippled, presumably to avoid damaging the market for the higher end (and MUCH more expensive) Cyclone IV GX boards - the most annoying characteristic is that it doesn't have any GPIO lines (even the switches and the LEDs are routed via the CPLD rather than directly to the FPGA). The DE2 board seems a better bet for something you intend to interface with the outside world - it's also got a much bigger FPGA (115k LE rather than about 15k) and headers for external connections (both a pin header and HSMC) - the biggest drawback is that it's using an E series chip rather than the GX, so if you want to implement ethernet you need to use and external PHY (although there are two of them on the DE2-115 board).

Edit: It is a custom part - I just got an answer back from the Tyco (who bought out AMP) rep:

"212-5708 and 212-5709 are valid AMP part numbers - but they are for custom parts that were manufactured for Sega to their specifications and appear to have no counterpart in any standard connector series".

 

Cyclone IV GX boards is only for discover more how use FPGA for Ethernet. if i understand i make my own pcb with same size as BBA or modem board.
also i see modern ARM microcontrollers have Eth feature. but fpga is useful for capture G2 intarfce.

 

From my quick look at it, it's not really that useful for learning how it works - the PHY is a hardware megacell in the FPGA and the wizard you use to generate the MAC just gives you a blackbox file that defines the interfaces but doesn't let you look at the actual implementation. Basically, it's only useful for generating code that runs on a Cyclone IV GX and has no wider application.

Some of the ARM chips are nice - I've used the ST STM32 devices and the Luminary Micro (now TI) ones - my personal bias is towards the latter, since they have the PHY on chip and all you need are some resistors and a magjack - but I think you're right and you would need to use some sort of hardware (be it FPGA or CPLD) to interface to the G2 bus because although it's not really that fast it's still too much for programmed IO on a microcontroller to handle.

Right now, I'm in information gathering mode - I built a breakout connector that goes between the expansion port on the DC and the BBA and hooked all the data lines up to a logic analyser while connecting using the broadband passport disk. I have lots of logic analyser logs, but no real conclusions yet...