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

Someone posted some images of a direct SD card soldered to the dreamcast board.

Does anyone have any more info on this? Compatibility and read speeds?

I'm using a bad cellphone now, sorry for not posting the pictures properly.

http://imgur.com/dbSltho
http://imgur.com/5SGczzi
http://imgur.com/wbw7Ty7
http://imgur.com/KnqvRst

 

Pretty interesting concept, but fairly ghetto. It would be easy to wreck the connections that way >_<;

My GD-EMU arrived, working perfect so far. Gonna run it for a while with the macbook fan and see if it gets hot.

UPDATE! Macbook fan is too fricking loud. It's like the stock fan turned up to 11. Now trying a GPU fan out of a launch Xbox.

 

Hi, I'm going to do the Picopsu mod with a 80w Picopsu. I just want to double check one thing. I've seen a few posts stating you don't have to connect the 12v line to the Dreamcast if you are using GDEmu, but then I see a lot of pictures with the 12v line still attached. I just want to confirm that you are able to run a Dreamcast with GDEmu without the 12v connected safely? Thanks

 

Thank you for the explanation. I think this info will be good enough for me to build one. If I hit a roadblock, I will PM you.

Thanks.

 

its not needed, but there is no harm in connecting it, if your not using the stock PSU.

No problem

 

So here's an update on my research. After tying a 12v fan from a gen 1 Xbox into the 12v rail, the system is reading a stable 12.2v draw, and is running cool as a cucumber with no crashing after 3+ hours of heavy Quake III Arena deathmatch. I was going to add in some plastic airflow guides but considering that the system is barely warm to the touch after that much play, I'm not going to bother now. After I get some batteries in my camera I'll take a pic.

 

Sounds interesting Nukkus. I tore open a few DVR cable boxes and got a 1tb hdd out of a nicer unit for my PC and have some left over fans. I hate trashing working parts so I held on to them. Good to know how well extra fans work in these cases.

Edit: How many mm is that fan?

 

@Fandangos - that SD card mod is being soldered to the same caps that connect to the serial port anyway, so I doubt it would be any better / faster than the usual SD mod.

Actually, it's recommended to remove those caps (C605 to C609), as they will be slowing down the maximum signal frequencies.

Or, there are some test pads you can solder to which bypass the resistors and caps on each signal, so you don't necessarily need to remove the caps.

This is for the standard Dreamshell SD card connection AFAIK.

The DC has a second serial port too, and the signals come directly from the SH4 CPU (like the external port).
I don't know if anyone has tried using the second port for anything useful, but it could possibly be used to speed up SD card access?

The only problem is, the pins for the internal serial signals are used for the boot-up options stuff, so the SD card might need to be powered up shortly after power-on (so it doesn't disturb the boot signals).

The internal serial port is actually "serial port 1", and the usual external port is "serial port 2".

I don't really have time to test this again myself, but hopefully someone else could try?
I did try getting the serial port working a few years ago when looking into the JTAG stuff (couldn't get either working. lol)

Maybe the extra signals could be used to drive the SD card in 4-bit mode from Dreamshell?
That should in theory make it tons faster, but would always need an internally soldered SD mod.

OzOnE

 

It's a 40mm fan.

 

^ 30mm IIRC , definetely not 40mm

 

^ the case fan is 70mm & the GPU fan is 40mm
(Some say the case fan is 72mm)

 

We're not talking about a stock Dreamcast fan here, yo.

Anyway, here's the Xbox GPU fan installed in the Dreamcast.



And here's a view of the full installation, with my Sandisk 64GB Micro SDXC.

 

GPU fan is a good idea, thans for the tip, will try this asap !

EDIT : nice tablecloth.. ;x

 

Looks good, Are you able to secure the top of the dreamcast with a 40mm fan?

I finally received my GDEMU safely from Poland! Once it shipped it only took 18 days to get to me. I was expecting a much longer wait. Now I'm waiting on a spare VA1 Dreamcast and need to decide if I want to add a PicoPSU or just a fan.

Has anyone ever tried to put the heat pipes from a VA0 dreamcast into a VA1? Oddly enough I have a couple VA0 Dreamcasts laying around.

 

Would the fan not be better placed near the front or is that regulator at the back the main heat issue? Or is the fan only really there to sink the 12v?

 

My PSU does not look like that...

Mine is: PC BD KTN PWR UNIT PANA EU V01 (C) SEGA 1999

I will post pictures later.

 

Well I found that with the fan placed towards the back like that, it creates a nice vortex effect with the front right fan. And the top cover fits on perfectly with the top tabs removed from the fan.

 

Sorry for the double post, but I have a crazy idea. What if there was a tool we could run the GDI images through, and cut out the dummy data? Then it would be a heck of a lot more simple to store the files on smaller SD cards. Is this possible? I know you can make an undummied CDI file, but i haven't had much luck so far, most of the tools are meant for 32-bit operating systems.

 

This is entirely possible and I've been thinking about it for a while but found no time to write code for it.

Basically what we could do for people without japanese-cake's bios mod that removes the bootbin after high LBA is:

• For 3-tracks discs (1 single HD track): convert it to 5 tracks, bin2iso, use track03.iso as the TOC, a dummy 3sec silence audio track02.raw (if required at all, I'm not sure it is) and all game data in track05.iso. The idea is to keep track03 as small as possible. The saved space is the non-defined data between track03 and track05, which should not be requested anyways.
• For 5+ tracks games: Shrink track03 so that it doesn't contain the zero-padding. Convert bins to isos.

Converting a bin track to iso saves about 13%, the rest of the saved space should be removing "useles" padding data. It should not even be required to actually extract the data from dump and rebuild the isos for this; simply figureing out where to cut track03.bin and converting to iso should be sufficient.

For people with the custom bios, it could be possible to simply rebuild track03.iso from extracted files, it may not even be required to rebuild a separate data track for 5+ tracks games as the TOC is in track03 anyway and the bootbin doesn't have to be at the outer part of the disc using that bios.

I technically have all that's require to tackle this in my gditools project (see signature) and I might try it soon for fun.

Cheers!

FG

EDIT: BTW in the meantime you could use gditools to extract the data and rebuild it into a .nrg (for conversion to CDI) using my selfboot pack (signature) it should work fairly well for 3tracks katana games with no non-lba or custom copy protections.

PS: Does anyone know how to figure out at which LBA the TOC of a iso9660 filesystem ends? For now I can use the pvd to figure out where's the end of the path table, but that's not the end of the TOC per se. Calculating that value would be much more efficient than figuring out which sector is the last blank one, checking from the end.

 

My main problem is I'm still quite a noob at this. I'm learning though. I'm going to put together a nice P4 system with XP to do my Dreamcast stuff, I'm tired of getting all the warnings that this and that aren't compatible with a 64-bit system.