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

sure the device behaves fine , just a couple of bugs left but IMHO in order to sell hundreds of devices you need to have great features... it's been 3-4 months that MNEMO is working on devices for SaG (IIRC) but there is no more info whatsoever, everything is so secret... the device doesn't even have a product page ffs LOL

 

Well I'm glad to hear that MNEMO is hard at work for Stone Age, means those units will become readily available to many of us.

 

I hit up Mnemo. It sounds like Stone Age Gamer is in possession of their boards, or will be soon.

Can't wait to get one.

 

Any idea of the price they will be asking for them? If it is a crazy high price I will just stick with my IDE mod. haha I am on the waiting list for a GDEMU as well. Hopefully soon and not a crazy premium.

 

I paid $218 USD for mine, which included shipping from Kazakhstan (There was also a $10 Western Union fee that I am not including in that total).


Either the price was high in order to pay for the development costs - - in which case you can expect lower prices from Stone Age Gamer...

...or, more likely, it was a bargain price that reflected taking a risk on beta hardware - - in which case the actual retail cost will be higher.


I'm going to bet that the final price will be somewhere near $300 + shipping from Stone Age Gamer?

Anyone else want to make some wild guesses?

 

I believe they will try to make it as cheap as possible OR add extra features. Otherwise they won't be able to compete sufficiently against gdemu. That's what I'd do anyway.

 

They don't have to compete with GDEMU, as Deunan can only make so many, and last I read he was coming to an end producing them, anyway.

Oddly, someone JUST responded to me on the Stone Age Facebook ad for the MNEMO GD-USB with the following, after I asked whether MNEMO's device would make the system "heat up" like GDEMU. I was under the impression that the overheating was an airflow issue which the GD-USB largely solved due to its footprint being the same as the GD-ROM.

 

that was me greg and yes it still suffers from heat issues at least talking to MNEMO it still does and he agrees that utilizing the 12v rail on the PSU solved the issues but he wont be adding anything to GD-USB due to the heat isnt causing any damage and as long as proper airflow is in the case will be fine. But again he did agree using a 12v fan would decreased the build up and also improve airflow.. Plus a newer 12v Fan could run allot more silent vs the stock fan.

 

^ good luck finding a 12v fan to replace that stock one... I failed miserably at the task (either the fan had not enough rpm, would not fit or was noisy as hell) so I just ended up doing that behemoth of a mod with the picopsu and the x360 heatsink...

 

It's been a long time, but I am still working on this project (little by little). So far all I've managed to finish the core functionality of a deep sample memory logic analyzer. It's pretty rough but I've managed to capture the entire initialization procedure of a GD-ROM drive, from power up to about 3-4 seconds into a game load (some MB transferred). There is some data on the trace which I can't account for, but I can get waveform data on a wide variety of ATA and SPI commands with very high timing res (50MHz sample freq), including a command 0x71 (undocumented?).

Right now I am working on an ATA shim which will latch data written into the ATA registers, respond to ATA register reads, set status bits, and trigger a CPU interrupt for a microcontroller. The broad architecture is the ATA shim, a processor, and some FIFOs. The microcontroller will wait for a interrupt, fill the FIFOs at it's own pace, and then trigger INTRQ or DMARQ.

I noticed that SPI command 0x40 (subcode data request) is rather frequent. Can I just spoof this data by replaying a captured packet? I would assume that other devices spoof these requests because most GDI rips have no subchannel data.

 

I would love to get a GD-ROM Emulator, but I don't know which one to choose: GDEmu or USB-GDROM Controller. The advantage of the first one is I don't need to make holes in the Dreamcast's shell, but I will be limited with the size of a SD Card. With the USB-GDROM Controller, I can use a portable HDD (enough space to store everything I need...), but I must make a hole in the shell for the USB port. Could be interesting if the next revision of the GDEmu could have a USB port (together with the SD Card port) to pass the HDD's USB cable through of the GD-ROM's hole...

By the way, I found the image bellow HERE. It's a hoax pic, but would be super nice to have a "DreamFlow" to be used in these GD-ROM Emulators like in this picture...

​

 

thepingas: i can help you, but maybe in PM or Skype?

 

Personally if I were in your position - I would wait.
When Mnemo gets time to work on firmware and if he manages to add CDI support the only downside would be no disk swap. (Which to be honest not many people would either want or need) You could always desolder his USB connector and have a fully internal solution too. As soon as CDI support is ready however - I will be buying one of these for my son. (As he loves gunlord and also the translations too)
As far as GDEMU is concerned - SD cards are up to 512GB now - though ludicrously priced, in time as we all know the price of cards will drop as capacity increases. So once size limitation is not an issue then the only downside will be the fact the menu needs to be updated oh and possibly availability too. I use a GDEMU - but the fact I played most of the games around release means that I fit all the games I will ever want to play on 2 SD cards (1 if the menu gets an update)

All in all - it looks like the quickest 'full solution' will be Mnemo's board if he gets CDI support working, but worth waiting for before commiting to a purchase

 

Thanx for the tip, NightbreedUK. I was not interested to get a GD-ROM emulator for now, but for the furute. But I was in doubt between these two to choose.

A 512GB card? WOW!! I refuse to think the price of this thing... I got the lasted Trurip pack with the Dreamcast games recently. Compacted, they are around 600GB... I think an 1TB HDD is enough to hold all those games decompacted... With a 32Gb card, it's better to put games to play "by seasons".

 

Anyone tried to put a 1M or 100k ohm resistor between the 12v and ground to stop it from floating? I'm not an engineer, but I think it'd be a simpler solution than using a fan...

As for mnemo vs gdemu, I think they should compete with gdemu if they don't want issues. Imagine if Deunan realizes they are selling tons of USB devices at 300$ each and decides to invest in mass production and sell gdemu for 100$. USB over SD isn't worth 200$ in my opinion.

 

Well said. In this case, would be perfect a SD-to-USB adapter... If something like this could existe...

 

Sorry to drag this conversation back to GDEMU, but does anyone else have issues with Shenmue? I've been playing fine for hours, pressed the button to swap to disc 2, played some more just fine. But then, after sneaking into Warehouse 8 and talking with Master Chen, it starts loading back to your house and is just sitting there playing the music for as long as I leave it on.

Any ideas?

FWIW, I'm using the latest GDEMU FW and GDMenu 0.3

 

Never mind! I tried for the third time and it didn't freeze this time. Strange though.....

 

that is very odd xombiexplox... oh and Keropi I was thinking a 120mm or maybe a little smaller placed in that NICE BIG GAP that is where the GDrom would live... still working on a vac shell to help direct airflow and would be used to hold the fan. i know others tried replacing the stock fan and yea will always be loud.

 

There's a comparison chart on the Facebook page. It's still a work in progress but might be helpful.

"GDEMU, USB-GDROM, G1-ATA Comparison Chart"
https://www.facebook.com/groups/LSDGDRDEH/