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

Does this mean the hardware side of things is practically done now?

 

So beta testing is a go now?

 

Even if it is, the software will not be a piece of cake. Unless Dreamshell actually runs without crashing on this device (unlike others), they have work to do.

 

I don't like the Dreamshell idea behind it.
I hope we don't have to do this whole boot-into-dreamshell-desktop thingy in order to play games.
Dreamshell has way too much "features" that no one actually ever uses, which makes it slow imo.

Something like a default iso/gdi/homebrew that gets launched on every startup would be enough .... I'm thinking of something like the Dreamshell boot loader or the ISO Loader (within Dreamshell) itself.

 

I agree with you, as I've said before, my experience with Dreamshell has been nothing but miserable. However, I don't think they want to reinvent the wheel. I think you're still forced to use a disc of some sort that launches an OS on the DC. Otherwise you have to hard-load the OS into the DC bios, which is not something everybody can or will want to do. I think it's fine if they use Dreamshell as an "OS" but I would hope they dump ISO Loader, or at least vastly improve it.

 

I hate Dreamshell myself. got the serial SD reader some time back with Dreamshell CD and while the disk loads up I couldn't do shit once in Dreamshell. Couldn't load games or even use the VMU explorer system for loading game saves. I was trying to use it for loading Sonic Adventure as a test since that one works and it wouldn't do it. Couldn't even load the special holiday event game saves for Sonic Adventure 2 to the memory cards either.

Dreamshell sucks major ass...

 

Would be nice if Dreamshell could be optional / replaced with other homebrew software, like with the Cobra ODE for PS3, where you can choose the backup manager you want.

 

As far as I understood, cybdyn wasted to use dreamshell as the base, not use a full-feature one...

 

DreamShell looks good, i wanna use it just like GUI , or menu to show/choose game image from storage device (sd, hdd, pc). then gd-emu resets DC and it works like gd-drive w/ exact disc inside.

to choose another GUI we can make way like : first boot image from storage-device can be like "boot.gdi" or "boot.img" , or use boot.ini file to store params , so you can create this file from PC and then gd-emu use it for boot-up process.

 

actually i,m still waiting pcbs of new dcio. but i've got new psio's pcbs yet)))

 

I didn't understand your second line, but I agree on the first one. I think Dreamshell is fine as a GUI, not much more though.

The Serial SD concept simply doesn't work because the serial port is too slow. DCIO should solve that. I'd still scrap ISO Loader because I think it's far too buggy.

 

after power-on GD-emu boots/loads from image on SD card (or HDD )- we can call it like "boot.img". under this image you can use image w/ DreamShell or w/ any other GUI you want, it can be just a game.

another way , gd-emu can use "boot.ini" file to get info what image use to load as menu end for other params, like region or whatever...

anyway, we will see it on practice, OzOnE will explain it better)))

 

as for SD-serial-mod, it's still simply mod))) theoretically it can be updated if we use mcu to move data faster, and for handling w/ FS.
but for support such idea i need support from SWAT.

 

I agree with Greg - Dreamshell is a nice GUI, and it's the serial port that causes a lot of the problems with DS.

The serial port was never intended for SPI, let alone high speeds for talking to an SD card.

I wouldn't be too harsh on Dreamshell. It's still a great achievement by SWAT.
I know first hand how hard it is to get GD syscall redirection working.

A lot of SD-ISO games do work well under Dreamshell, and it's great for emulators too.
Compatibility was always going to be tricky with it, but the SD adapters can be made super-cheap, so I can't really complain tbh.

Personally, I found it perfect for doing development on, as it runs on KOS and is easy to run binaries on.

Although, that is the whole point of the hardware GD emu - the idea is to be 100% compatible, so the DC won't know any difference from a real GD-Rom.
After cybdyn got the booting process working, it's actually CDDA track playback which may take the longest time to code for.

It will obviously need some sort of simple loader menu though. Dreamshell just happens to fit the bill, and should load a lot faster from the DCIO.

As cybdyn said - the menu can be loaded from SD at power-up (a bit like the Everdrive / 64drive, but as a MIL-CD / GD image on the SD card), then all it has to do is parse the files on the card to list all the game GDIs.

Once the game is selected, the menu essentially just writes the start address of the GDI to the DCIO (via the G1 port), and maybe writes some TOC stuff too.
The menu will then reset the DC, and it will load the chosen game / app GDI from the DCIO as if it were the real disk.

The menu isn't really of direct importance to the compatibility of the DCIO, it's literally just a way of listing and choosing a GDI file.
It will be nice to make it look pretty etc., but that can be worked on later.

OzOnE.

 

Oh, also, SWAT said he's done some testing with the IDE adapters remember.

So, for people who just want to try out a few games under Dreamshell, it should in theory load a LOT faster than the serial SD adapter.
This is another option for people with very little money, or who want to run a few emulators etc.

Again, this isn't without it's issues...
To load Dreamshell itself with the IDE adapter in place, you either have to stack the GD drive on top of it (about an inch higher), or do the Flash BIOS mod so it runs the Dreamshell bootloader right away.

Standard disclaimer - the IDE adapter has very little to do with the DCIO!
It's just another cheap alternative to the serial SD adapters.
Compatibility will only be as good as the new version of Dreamshell (which SWAT and others are currently working on right now).

SWAT shared a Dropbox folder with me and others for the new Dreamshell development.
I'm not too good with C / C++, but I have seen quite a lot of activity happening with the new version (files being updated every night).

I can't wait to see the IDE adapter running under Dreamshell. I think it will improve things dramatically.

Anyway, back to the DCIO.
It's even more exciting.

I still haven't ordered the parts for the DCIO yet, but I'll try to get it sorted tonight.

cybdyn - just a quick question - is the DCIO board capable of powering a small USB device like a 2.5" HDD?
ie. does it have the +5V power routed to the USB port when acting as a USB host?

OzOnE.

 

OzOnE, did you really see SCM of DCIO?))) of course it has power from usb port. i.m not sure it's enough for powering of HDD.

anyway, current version of DCIO is not last (i hope), i tried to use parts with wide and different capabilities. it can help us to get more info how to make it better.

 

OzOnE, now that you mentioned SD-ISO's, would you/cybdyn expect that standard ISO images of DC discs will work on DCIO? i.e. no need to build them in the same way as for Dreamshell? Here again, a point of DS frustration is that most of the SD-ISO's that were made work on DS version 4.0, which has many bugs and compatibility issues. The RC1 release for some reason used a slightly different SD-ISO format, making those files incompatible. I tried building my own, but again, the documentation from SWAT was nonexistent or just plain bad. So my annoyance with DreamShell is actually more to do with the poor, poor documentation. Granted SWAT is a Russian site, which doesn't help the rest of us...

 

to inform you RAW images will be supported also you can see some videos of the DCIO working
http://www.youtube.com/user/9madsheep/videos

 

I assumed so much, which is of course a great relief!

 

actually 1st dcio used ISO from GDI. with new HW we can use more formats.

using DS as menu has no common w/ ISO-SD loader , formats, revisions of DS.
actually we need make some sort of mod inthe code of DS to get it work w/ dcio. as i know, DS can perform/launch apps or code modules from sd or gd-drive (i hope), so maybe we can use core w/o changes and just make little app/module to support addiditional functions - like add new device to list of devices and show what files it got.