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

joined - can't offer squat on the technical end, but down for the cause. also best of luck Mario!

 

Incredible post.

 

Care to elaborate? What post? This thread? My Facebook group? Post above yours? Something else? What?

 

Deunan progress -> http://dknute.livejournal.com/42609.html

 

Just saw that on the FB group.

It's a bit strange tbh - Deunan said on his previous posts that he wasn't going to be releasing anything?
He did say "limited run" I suppose, but still.

Oh well.
Nothing stopping anyone else making a GD Emu I guess, I just wish he hadn't been so silent all this time.

If I have known he might be releasing something, I might not have continued with the original project as long as I did.
So, I suppose we can be thankful that he held out for a while. hehe

OzOnE.

 

even if he hadn't been silent competition only breads innovation... and cheaper prices

 

Honestly I never understood that guy's motivation. He went through all this time, money, and effort, and still won't or barely will sell them? What was the point?

 

I guess he had fun? Don't despise people doing stuff for the sake of it! Meanwhile he wasn't taking heroin of beating puppies (as far as we know)!

But yeah, not too much worries here guys, it doesn't seems like he'll sell much of these. Though you're now pressed to support CDDA!

 

Oh, please don't give up now - - his comment of "...Will I be selling it? Probably not because it's hand made and bloody expensive. Then again, I could use some extra money so a limited run is possible."

- - Gives me zero confidence that any of us in the community will see a chance of owning a device that could do what all of us want so badly!


Glad to see he is making progress, though. If some schematics and "lessons learned" come out of it for you and everyone at large, it's a win no matter what. Sort of like that fellow "Mario" who popped up in the thread a few days ago. "Competition" and collaboration is a good thing, I was excited to see Mario wanting to tackle his own version!

-a2a

 

I'm amazed he showed up with completed boards. I thought nobody would ever see him again.

And thanks, Atari! Even though Deunan finished his, I do still want to make my own. Hopefully he'll release things he's learned and maybe source code - but I highly doubt he'll do either, unfortunately.

Also, I've been unable to find any logic analyzer dumps for the GD-ROM, so I'm doing my own. I don't need it to decode the protocol because that's already laid out in Sega's spec documents, but I want to know the general flow of commands and data and see the timings, how long I really have between writing words to the bus, etc. I'll report back when I find out (even though the other people working on this are far ahead of me already).

 

Duenan is one of those people that like to say "Look what I got, and you can't have it!" Pshhh. Amazing progress from cybdyn/Ozone. I have full confidence in you guys to create a good solution for the Dreamcast and ZERO confidence in Duenan. Duenan also looks to be using SD or CF. We need a HDD for the Dreamcast!

Mario, perhaps you could look into a solution for the Sega Saturn?

 

I don't like Duenan. All this time and effort only to say he has no plans to offer it short of possibly doing a limited run. Then there's the fact I tried to make a comment about it on his page and my comment was marked as spam right away because I linked to this thread.

Dick...

 

Well ikari_01 said the same thing about the SD2SNES, that he didn't have the means to make them. Then he made a limited run of them. Then he turned the keys over to krikzz, who has made tons of them ever since. So I suppose you never know?

 

There's also the possibility that if he DOES do a limited run. Some one could essentially reverse-engineer it.

 

I'm surprised you're all so convinced his prototype actually works - there are no videos of it running, no screenshots even (not that they'd actually prove anything)

He says it all runs with "no problems" - fine, but how about actually proving it?

Also, the comment "I'm not going to sell it" - and then he mentions a "beta tester". Pardon, but why the hell do you need a beta tester for a project you have no intention of releasing? It makes very, very, little sense in the grand scheme of things.

Perhaps it's real, but I'd expect to see a LOT more proof than a photo of a Dreamcast and a PCB stuck on top of it (well, inside it)

Anyone?

 

You can say all you want about the man, but he knows his stuff a lot. I have no issue believing him, especially as he doesn't seem to ask for people's money right here right now.

He basically already wrote a full Dreamcast emulator (makaron), and a good one at it, and he once said his gd-rom emulation board was based on his previous researches.
He's not appearing out of the blue like this. My guess is that there will be more news in the next weeks about this.

I still think cybdyn/ozone/DCIO has more potential to be a real commercial unit someday. Plus, they are nice people!

 

I'd rather go with DCIO myself since they are good poeple that even update those on the Facebook side of things and have proof of it working.

 

Yeah that dude is pretty stuck up. I appreciate what he has done but he is a dick when you mention certain things to him or say something he doesn't like.

Oh well, here is to hoping DCIO can get to a finished retail release before his does and that these guys can make some good money from this project!

 

Thanks for the support again, guys. We really appreciate it.


I don't want to sound too harsh about Deunan.
What he has done with Makaron and other projects is nothing short of amazing.

It's completely up to him if he does a project or not of course, and whether he decides to sell it or not.
It just seemed a tad odd of him to mention a "limited run" after previously saying he'd doesn't really condone this type of device for playing commercial games?

I do believe that he has it working as well, or I doubt he'd have gone to the trouble of getting the new boards made.
I believe his prototype on the DE2 board used a NIOS-II core (which is coded in C) and would have made debugging a lot easier than my original design did.

This is what cybdyn suggested to me a very long time ago, but it was a bit beyond my skill level back then to think about merging an MCU chip with an FPGA (and I'm still learning. lol)

But, it's starting to make more sense now, and I've done a little but of coding with ARM chips now, including some USB interface stuff.

The NIOS-II thing is an Altera CPU core IP, but I've always had trouble getting the damned thing to run for some reason.
I don't think NIOS-II can be used in a "commercial" product without paying tons of licensing fees either, which is likely why Deunan also opted for a proper ARM chip.

Anyway, it's interesting stuff.


@Mario - Sorry I hadn't replied for ages, but I've been so busy doing arcade board repairs and about ten other projects (that's why it took me a week just to send some parts off to cybdyn).

I do wish you the best with your project. Nothing wrong with a bit of healthy "competition" or enthusiasm for the project, as you say.
But, you can understand it would be slightly awkward for me to offer you direct help atm while we're still in the process of getting ours working.

I think cybdyn may be open to the idea of some collaboration effort soon, but I think he'd like to get to the stage of running his previous code on the new boards first.
After that point, we'll have a better idea of where we are and what help others could offer with the coding etc.

So, unfortunately I can't re-upload my previous source code as it would be a bit of a conflict of interest as such.
We are doing this as a community effort of course, but you can see where I'm coming from.

(tbh, there are likely still copies of my old code floating around, but it never did boot properly at all, and is all done in very low-level Verilog code, so no CPU / MCU.)

We did look into using the ARM chip alone to handle everything, and I think in theory it could be done.
But, an FPGA just made it easier and quicker to implement the low-level stuff for the DC side.
The ARM chip can then handle the SD card / USB side of things without worrying too much about exact timings for the G1 port interface etc.

Please keep us updated with your project though.
I think you have some very good ideas, and I hope that we can work more together once we have more news about the DCIO progress.

OzOnE.

 

You probably dont want to badmouth Deunan given that he has a lot of work done on something you would like to have. We just need to look at some of the fiasco's with biohazard 1.5 and iirc a build of sonic xtreme that people being dicks stopped what may have been released in the future.

Frankly if he's invested enough for it to be "bloody expensive", being that he funded it out of his own pocket, the chances are he enjoys challenging himself and learning and I don't think you should fault him for that being that if he was to release what he has done im unsure of the legality of it and that is a risk for him.

FYI he might run that limited run and then release what he has done, schematics etc and then you can build it yourselves, or he might get to the point where he says "cover the expenses I paid and Ill release all the documents for yourselves to build them".

Don't run the guy off just because you're a little annoyed that right now he does not seem interested in sharing.