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

A hell of a lot of people are showing interest in this. You should see the Facebook side of things.

 

Evotistica -better talk in PM, maybe you can be one of the supplier-testers.

 

I knw we talked of this before but incase you forgot I'm willing to help with that as well complete with paying a "donation" for it too.

 

i can read your and others personal offers in PM.

 

By IDE you mean 40pin (3,5 HDDs) or 44pin (2,5 HDDs)?

 

40 pin. i didnt see sata<>ide adaprtors w/ 44pin sonnector.

 

@cybdyn
@OzOnE
Any progress update?

 

They exist - I have a number of them.

 

Yep, they do all sorts of adapters on eBay now for only a few dollars.

I'm liking the idea of just sticking USB on it.
It would simplify the board design a bit, and would make it smaller.

Then again, IDE is simple enough to implement, and I do like the concept of just sticking a 2.5" laptop HDD inside the DC.

If it had only USB, people would just need to buy the chosen adapter (IDE / SATA HDD, SD, CF, USB stick etc.).

I'm just starting to discover the ARM boards, and they have good support already for USB storage, and for CF / SD cards.

cybdyn and I are wondering if the ARM itself would be fast enough to keep up with the commands directly from the DC (without needing the FPGA at all).

It's possible, but it needs to service the ATA / ATAPI commands as quickly as it can.
DMA isn't so much of a problem, because that is initiated by the "drive" itself anyway. The ARM chips also have a nice DMA block for things like that.

It will probably use a small FPGA / CPLD for now though.

Still working on the NAOMI stuff too.
I've mapped out all of the G1 bus connections now (goes to the FLEX FPGA mainly).
I have my first working NAOMI on the way to do further testing.

OzOnE.

 

Hello every body,
this is a great project that i hope that i see it finished some days.
Also i'm interesting to make another prototype for PS3 since the PS3 uses normal PATA/SATA data bus for its optical drive, and i hope that some one here could guide me from where i must start my project.
I had studded the GC-Emu project since it was an open source project and now i have some info about how i could port this to PS3.

 

IDE is 40 pin ONLY, the 44 pin 2.5" laptop connector is a miniturised version with the power supplied through the connector instead of another connector, you can get converters between the two for $0.99 on ebay.

 

Any News?

 

insufficient funds. so it's not big news for now. i've almost finished new pcb for dcio, 5 x 5mm : fpga + ARM (sd , usb host. no IDE). "male" and "female" pads for gd-rom connectors.
1) gdemu
2) gdrom to usb for fast copying gdi/cdi
3) "spy" , logger

 

So the new board will allow the original drive to be attached to copy games to the storage medium like with a Xbox?

 

That seems quite a lovely setup Мой друг!

 

http://i023.radikal.ru/1311/a8/c1bd42ad7ba6.png

 

Cool.

The USB host does make more sense nowadays.

@sonicdude - it should take a standard USB 2.5" HDD or Flash drive, so I guess any standard drive will work on the DC.

For going the other way around - On most ARM chips, the OTG port can function as both a host and a device, so should show up on something like an Xbox 360.

cybdyn may have more info on this, but it's all feasible.

OzOnE.

 

So much progress on all optical drive based fronts, a good time to have a unit or three with dying lasers or noisy motors about to seize!
Errr Cybdyn, is one of your microchips the wrong way around in that picture on the far right?
As always, keep up the great work!

 

it's 3D model is wrong, other things are Ok.

 

I was talking about how it has connectors on both sides. One to fit the Dreamcast board and the other looks like it fits a GD drive. I was asking if a GD drive can be hooked at the same time to allow for copy a disk over to the USB drive or SD card.