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

tnx))

 

Excellent!

 

^ indeed!

 

as donation or for device?

 

THIS THIS THIS!!

 

Donation for a device

 

MK_gold , Phantasy star, and GigaWing works.

 

Is there anything in particular right now you need to further develop this device? I will sure buy this if it works out ok.

 

Excellent work! Interested in this as well.

 

I await a good working prototype for public testing.

 

How are you running the games, through your own code directly, or with Dreamshell?

 

no DS, no PC. just my board and SD card))).

i only plan use DS as menu in future.

 

"Is there anything in particular right now you need to further develop this device? I will sure buy this if it works out ok."

i will let you know , when i need addition stuff for test prototype for ppl.

current device is based on non cheap parts. maybe about 50...70$ only for parts. but if some one dont wanna wait and test it "as is"? we can talk in PM

my plan - make it cheaper, simple... but i dont know when i'll make next version on new parts...

btw - i got new parts (like ARM mcu and it ready to be discovered, but i need time)

 

I remember people discussing here about CDDA games that had some kind of different way of recording the game soundtrack. Maybe I'm confusing it with the GameCube streaming audio issue but are those games supported?

And Cybdyn, any idea if HDD will be supported? Sata? IDE?

I know this has been asked in the past but since the prototype is in the horizon maybe this can get a final answer.

 

im also interested about the HDD aspect of this.
call me nuts, but i just like hdd's more than sd cards, cheaper or not

 

I'm not entirely sure about cybdyn's plans for IDE / SATA, but I think he already has an IDE port on his proto board?

IDE is quite simple to implement. That's what I started with on my N64 cart emu / GD emu project.

I believe he is busy over the weekend, but he said he will try to give me some help with getting my GD emu working.

I want to state now that I do intend to give cybdyn a chance to earn something back for all his efforts.
So, if I do get my board working as well, I won't be selling huge amounts or anything until he has had a fair share.

I like the idea of using an HDD as well. Much nicer having all the games (*cough, I meant "homebrew") on one drive.

Also, it's easier to reach the max transfer rate from a hard drive, since almost all modern drives should support 16.6MB/sec (the normal max transfer rate for the GDD).
I don't think the HOLLY chip can handle rates faster than that anyway. Maybe a BIOS patch could increase that, but it would already be very fast.

Once IDE is supported, a SATA adapter should work fine since the FPGA will only be requesting raw sectors from the drive.
I did try using two SATA / IDE adapters for the original GDD before, but it didn't work at all (they didn't pass the Sega SPI commands).

CDDA streaming is similar to the Gamecube, but should be doable...

AFAIK, most games don't request data sectors from the drive while a CDDA track is playing?
If that's the case, then streaming 44,100Hz audio shouldn't be too tough.

The other part of it is "emulating" the head position (FAD / LBA / MSF etc.) which the DC needs for audio playback.
This should be as simple as having a few counters which are set to the correct starting value by a CD_PLAY command, then increment at the audio rate.

Again, these sorts of things are generally easier to code in C once the low-level stuff is working well.

OzOnE.

 

Ozone do you know any game that uses CDDA so we can ask Cybdyn to test it out?

 

Virtual On, Vanishing Point, Sega Rally 2, super runabout Guilty Gear X and Mr Driller are all CDDA games. I think there has historically been an issue with Windows CE games which have CDDA not being able to be replicated on CD-R for whatever reason. I think this mostly impacts Sega Rally 2, Super Runabout, and one of those Midway or Namco Arcade collection discs?

 

few of tested game was w/ cdda or gdda))) but i will make cdda/gdda support for future... i use ISO image - it's only 2048 (0x800) bytes per frame - so cdda/gdda data damaged or is not full - cause it shouldbe 2352 (0x930) per frame. but in future is not problem.

my board have got IDE (or IDE-like) connrctor, as i tOld BEFORE i wanna try attach t ti my board, through ide->sata bridge and use "2,5 hdd for only 5v as power sourse)) . hdd is better for speed and size. and it can make device qiute simple.