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

Awesome progress, I want one!

The hacked up karaoke unit is what I made! Took quite a bit of modding but looked good when it was finished - if I made another it would be better as I learnt alot making that! Exciting times for the DC ahead

ALSO with how small it looks to be with this I am 100% confident I could hack up an hdmi output adaptor into the original DC caseing (VGA-HDMI adaptor)

so it would be a GD rom emulated DC with HDD/SD and hdmi out, sounds pretty sweet

 

Oh no!
Spinksy - what have you said!

We'll have our work cut out if we try doing native HDMI on the DC as well as the GD emu.
But, as it happens, the DC should in theory be easier to do because it can output in progressive (requires that all the games support VGA mode though).

I did some experiments last year with a direct HDMI connection from the N64 (and the GC, but I didn't upload the vid)...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmNN51xRgg8

Hooking it up to the DC would be a bit of a challenge, as the only obvious way is to solder around 12 wires directly to the input pins on the video DAC.
It's doable though, and yet another thing on my project list for when I ever get chance.

Anyway, I got some more DC IDE adapters soldered today so I can hook up the FPGA board to the DC easier.
They also allow me to separate the GDD board from the DC when doing spying / rips etc.

I've always wondered if a NAOMI GD drive would work exactly the same as an original DC GDD?
It would be quite easy to hook up a NAOMI drive now, but they're still quite expensive to buy.

I think I'm gonna use the Terasic DE1 for the GD Emu work this time.
I already "ported" my old code to the DE1, and it has the required SD slot and SRAM.

It's also relatively easy to connect an IDE HDD or CF to it's GPIO port.

Wish me luck!
OzOnE.

 

if the Naomi ROM bored worked on the dreamcast with just hacking the two bios together yet again like the link bios that would be amazeing
native LAN support with the ROM bored

 

Which way around do you mean? Connecting a NAOMI ROM pack to the DC?

Not gonna happen unfortunately - the DC doesn't have enough RAM to run NAOMI games AFAIK? (along with quite a few other differences).

I was wondering if the NAOMI drive could be connected to the DC and still run DC GD's OK?
I imagine it could, as I've read people saying it's basically the same hardware?
That's assuming the security response mechanism is the same?

 

i meant more for loading dreamcast game onto and running them on the dreamcast
or ive wondered about the reverse running dreamcast games on the naiomi itself

 

Hmmm, that's an interesting thought.

I think it would be a huge effort to modify the DC BIOS to run on the NAOMI, as the NAOMI is configured to load from the ROM packs or via the GD interface board.

I'm not sure about the other exact differences with the hardware?
(this has probably been discussed a few times on here, but my memory span isn't too great.)

I remember the thread about the attempt to modify the DC to add the extra RAM, but it's probably too difficult to reach the extra BGA's on Holly.

On second thoughts (about the NAOMI GD on the DC), we're trying to do away with evil disks, so let's forget about that idea for a while. lol

I guess there will always be people who want to run "real" GD disks though - is the process for ripping NAOMI GD's pretty much the same as for the DC?
I'm assuming disks need to be ripped via a DC to use them on the NAOMI CF adapter?

I did buy a NAOMI many months ago, but it had it's GPU removed by the previous owner.
I shouldn't really have bought it, but I couldn't resist as the price was only £20.
The idea was to "steal" the GPU from a DC, but I never got around to it (would be nasty to try soldering it anyway, and would likely need reballing first).

 

NAOMI and DC are completely incompatible, period. You'd need more RAM and a whole seperate CPU to get full NAOMI support.

 

That's what I thought, but if someone really wanted to do it, it's always possible.

Although it may be fairly pointless, it's still an interesting thing to look into.
The MAME source contains a lot of info on the NAOMI and it's custom chips.

The NAOMI is fairly similar to the DC, but the FPGA obviously does a lot of the heavy lifting, and it has a lot more RAM etc.

The AtomisWave looks closer to a DC though - has anyone tried converting AW ROM images to run on the DC before?

 

only if that person have enough skills, but if you using words like -

you are not such person, and probably dont know that are you talking about.

carts and CD/GD/DVD is very different medias,
GD disks slow, and have very slow seek time, so DC games usually load all necessary level data in RAM/VRAM and works so until next level
Carts instead very fast, and Atomiswave games usually access it and streaming data almost instantly and from random parts of the cart, coz its fast as hell.

and even if someone decrypts AW cart, hack out flash bios and SRAM usage, replace cart-accesses by GD-routines, hooks coin buttons from Modem-area somewhere else - it will be SLOW AS HELL, like slideshow I think, coz of GD speed and especially slowpoke positioning time.

so my opinion - no one from people who have enough knowledge and experience will do that.

 

You'd have to rewrite the whole game to load like a Dreamcast game. It would need to be done so the required files for each level load to the RAM. That could be a problem because there's the off chance the AW level files are too big to be loaded into RAM at which point you'd need some sort of fast access temporary storage. (Like plenty of SRAM or some other fast access memory.) No point in it unless someone wants to dive head first into the coding and spends weeks, months, or even years trying to figure it out to be rewritten for optical protocol.

 

actualy its possible to "port" atomiswave games to another DC-like platform, but only if that platform also have fast gamedata access, and person who did this can gain a bit of money from his work $)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdMgcGfdy0I

 

gd disk is slow - but emu works with flash cards. so speed can be quite fast or same

 

Hmm, that's a bit presumptuous, p1pkin.

I'm not a genius by any means, but I think I have at least some understanding about this stuff, and do know what I'm talking about to a certain extent.
Have you even read any of this thread, or my previous posts?

I was just throwing ideas out there after the subject was brought up.
It may not be quite as silly a question as some people think, but would still require a mammoth amount of effort for something which probably isn't worth the effort.

I've been successfully repairing PC's, laptops, CRT / LCD / Plasma TV's, VCR's, DVD / Blu-ray players, projectors, amps, and consoles for around the past 18 years or so.

I started off my own GD Emu project (see this thread), managed to read the first sector of each block of a 64DD disk using an FPGA, and got basic digital HDMI output working on both the N64 and GC...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmNN51xRgg8

So, I think I have some idea of the possibilities and challenges involved.

OzOnE.

 

WOW, this is just awesome! If the bespoke GD-Rom emulator indeed gives enough speed.... Imagine playing the whole Atomiswave libary on DC (or NAOMI).

 

Do you still need a 4 bit interface for a SD card??

Because I had the same plan 4 years ago; did a lot of research on the Dreamcast and SD etc, but unfortunately I never finished it because of time reasons.

I just sold a Dreamcast (have quite a few of them) and after that I thought hey let’s pick this project up again. But I see that’s no longer needed


But I have a beautiful 4 bit SDhc/SDxc (fat32) interface for an Altera Cyclone (it was quite some hassle because of the lack of information) if you want you can have it or we could even team up to implement it. Back then I used it to log the data of the gdrom, and currently I use it for many other projects

 

yeah, i still want make it. but new ARM's mcus stop me))) most of them has on board high speed sd/mmc controller , so it makes less sense define it in fpga.
but to compare what's the better/best - it's intersting for me to chk it out.

 

hmm didn't know there were ARMs that have on-board 4 bit mode SD support - I thought they had only the spi interface, hence the mmc support.

If they have it, then it doesn't matter; otherwise it does. Mine works with 50 MHz (with a 50MHz clock) (spi can only support up to 25, and is more or less 4 times slower than 4 bit 25MHz - with the 4 bit mode you retrieve way more data so it's a bit less than 4...) but with some minor modifications it can easily go up to 100 or more (only new SD cards may support speeds higher than 50 MHz). I only do all the necessarily checks and nothing more because I wanted to limited the amount of LE's as much as possible and didn't want to waste any clock cycles (the interface saves data on the on-board ram blocks).

Do you plan to make it opensource or do you want to keep the code for yourself, and make money out of it - like Deunan?

 

i know about how SD can be fast.

i,m not rich - so i can't say i dont wanna make money.

about "opensource" - i,m afraid here are not much ppl who knows what to do w/ this "source". so it's enough if we talk/discuss in PM.

 

I and several people I know would be interested in buying one each regardless of whether you opensource it or not. Making some excellent progress with this and PSIO, can't wait to see them finished

 

It would be interesting to see the SD card running at full speed as well as the possibility of Atomiswave and maybe even Naomi games on the Dreamcast.