"Let's make GD ROM emulation happen" Facebook group.

Very Nice

 

I'm having some frustrations with GDEMU and I'm wondering if anyone has had a similar experience. I'm not sure how to proceed. When I got one, I bought a brand new 32GB SD card. I quick formatted it with SD formatter and put some games on it. (I made all of the dumps with httpd-ack, but this should be irrelevant)

I noticed early on that after about 30 minutes of gameplay, the system would act like the drive door was opened and the yellow light on GDEMU would turn on and it'd no longer be able to read anything until I shut off the system. I backed up the entire card and reformatted it with SD Formatter again, but this time with all of the options (Full format, size fix) turned on. After the 30 minutes or so it took to full format, I copied everything back onto the card. At this point, things worked perfectly and I could play for hours with no issues.

Later I added more discs to the card, and that's when problems started again. I couldn't go more than 5 minutes without the yellow light of death. So I backed up the entire card again, full formatted it again, and restored the backup. It was still happening. I tried turning on the optional high speed flag, but then discs on the card wouldn't boot at all so I turned it back off. Then I happened to notice after doing a dir list via command line that there was a hidden "System Volume Information" folder on the drive, added by windows. I deleted this folder, and suddenly everything worked perfectly again. I played for about 12 hours without any issues. (In chunks of about 4 hours at a time) During this time, the card never left my DC. Then after about 3 hours of playing with no issues today, suddenly it happened again. The yellow light came on and I tried restarting the console over about 6 times and each time I couldn't play for more than 5 minutes before the light would go on and it wouldn't load.

Since nothing changed on the card after it had worked perfectly for hours, do you think it's a problem my GDEMU unit? Should I contact D about it?
It's a bit stange to me that my PC can read the card just fine. Why does GDEMU lock and refuse to read the card anymore even after eject and re-insert after a single problem? Is there really no kind of retry mechanism? Any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?guiformat.htm

maybe try a different SD card? Try GUIformat instead?

 

What is your card brand and exact type ?

 

This is the exact one I purchased. I made sure not to pick the cheapest one, to ensure that quality was a bit more likely.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FB4657C/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
The only recommendations I found at the time were 32GB was max and don't get SDXC. This seemed like a reasonable choice, and my USB card reader doesn't have any problems with it.

 

Thats your issue, that card doesn't work.

https://gdemu.wordpress.com/2014/10/13/road-to-hell/

 

Thank you so much. I wish this information was centralized somewhere instead of a random blog post.

Looking at my other options, which would be a better choice? Sony, or SanDisk Ultra? (Or any other brands for that matter) I'm going to ignore PNY because in past experience their media products are shit.

Edit: Ordered a Samsung. Thanks for the suggestion madsheep!

 

or Samsung i bought a 32gb version Class6 for 12 euros works fine.

 

I use Sandisk Ultra, the program HD Tune (http://www.hdtune.com/) has an option to speed test a card. I did it with Transcend and the speed dropped when accessing certain sectors.

 

I ordered a 32GB Samsung yesterday, and today I discovered that it was probably a good choice. According to this, they're the highest rated cards for random reads which is what the Transcend card has latency problems with.

This is actually the key to a temporary work-around for the Transcend problem. After reading the blog post referenced above, knowing that the Transcend slowness is caused by the card deciding to do random housekeeping after an unknown amount of time, I wanted to see if there was a way to force it to do its thing elsewhere. Running chkdsk on it was no help, and my card got to the point where I couldn't even scroll through discs in GDMENU anymore.

Running a benchmark against the card actually solved the problem. I used CrystalDiskMark (used by the article linked above) to run 5 iterations of 50MB worth of 4k random reads and writes. After doing this and putting the card back into GDEMU, everything seems to be working perfectly again. I played against it for about an hour so far without any problems. I don't know how long it will last, but for now it seems like a good work-around for the problem.

 

would a 500GB card be worth the wait... or should a 250gb card handle it just fine... because im thinking of doing something VERY stupid with my spare dreamcast if i can get a GDEMU and when i do it... ill be sure to share and stuff... but after i do it i dont want to have to access the SD card unless a really big update comes up or something...

 

At the moment no - even though the GDEMU supports many folders now, GDMENU however does not - it only supports 64 and for cards that have more than 64 games on the menu goes out of sync (for game 65 the menu goes back to 1)

I still use the 128GB card - but only keep 64 titles on it for this reason, I'm sure though that after a Menu update then it could be worth waiting for a large capacity card

 

So there is no other menu selection system besides GDMenu when it comes to GDEmu?

Also someone mentioned that the only DC game that swap without save is D2 (or is there more?) For that/those game, is it possible to push the button on GDEmu board to swap disc?

I'm still doing research on GDEmu to see if it is right for me.

 

That is indeed correct.

 

Would be useful if the source for GDMENU was up somewhere like Github - then others could alter it if the original author does not have the time.

 

only neuroacid have the source so... only he can change the menu or make the source public.

 

Does anyone know how to change the Name in CDI (and GDI) images so it appears correctly in gdmenu? I downloaded the Half-life Repack cdi but in gdmenu it appears as "CRAZY TAXI".

 

Option 1) Create the list.ini for the gdmenu (you can do it automatically with GDEMU SD CARD MAKE look in my signature)

Option 2) Hex edit the image

Option 3) Recreate the CDI with your ip.bin

 

Thanks! Hex-editing the CDI and Track01.bin for GDI rips worked perfectly.

 

hi guys, there is any update about 3DO USB Adapter ?? Happy new year all !!