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

I'm going to pass on deunans and wait for cybdyn/ozone's project.

 

Deunan's closed orders as of this morning, anyways. Says his list is full, but did tantalizingly say "If you’re still interested in getting GDEMU do not despair just yet, I’m evaluating some options. Watch this space, but be patient, these things take time."

Once his v5 board is out and in the hands of those of us who can review and evaluate it, everyone else can read those reports and make the call on what device suits their needs or price point.

Who knows, maybe there will be a head-to-head review of three devices! That would be great! Gooooo Cybdyn/Ozone/Mario !

 

I've made it this long without one I'm sure I can wait another year and compare them all. Just like psio I'll be waiting for cdda support and usb/hdd before I purchase.

 

A solution where Dreamshell is integrated with Cybdyn/Ozone's board (or the other way around actually) would be perfect. Just turn on the DC, and it goes straight to Dreamshell. A complete replacement OS. Game-selection, homebrew, file manager, apps etc. The only thing missing would be a FTP server so we could transfer stuff over to the DC rather than unplugging the storage and transferring manually.

 

IIRC there's a FTP server being worked on for DS... Maybe in RC2? You'd still need a BBA for it to be of any use though.

 

I'm way too excited about all of this!! I've been following the development

OzOne / cybyn, if you need help with the UI, I'm a graphic designer and I'd love to work on such a thing.
It would be really nice for the UI to reflect and keep the whole Dreamcast imagery/branding, like the boot menu.
or maybe it will be directly Dreamshell?

Anyway, let me know

 

Maybe he's going to accept the offer to have someone else produce them in mass?

 

Kinda what I was thinking, too - - the fellow from Stone Age Gamer approached him and was apparently initially rebuffed, I read somewhere? Maybe he has rethought it and wants to partner up now.

 

Perhaps have a V0 compatible model or have v5 or v6 have a toggle switch where the one for V0 compatibility would have a resistor in it to bring the voltage down. Or maybe figure some sort of adapter or alternate power source option that connects to the PSU. There's several ways to go about it.

 

He may have been reluctant until the final version was close at hand. I guess we shall see. Does GDEMU play every retail title? I realize it seems to want to use the full GD Images unzipped in folders. Similar to how to install full images on a modded Xbox.

 

His site says:

 

I do wonder if .CDI images have any speed limitations (since they are being recognized as mil-cd's) compared to GDI dumps.

 

Why would the image type make any difference?

 

Erm, I'm gonna be honest, guys...

cybdyn and I are really wondering now about where to go with the DCIO.

I'm still waiting for an oscillator so I can do some testing, but we're worried about the final price of the boards.

We are looking into using a small CPLD instead of the FPGA, and using a slightly smaller ARM chip too.

I know the DCIO has been a long time in the making, but Deunan's announcement changes the motivation slightly.

How much would people be willing to pay for such a device that has full GDI / CDI support, and is controlled from a menu when you power up the DC?
$150? $100 or less?

We just need a rough idea to know where to go from here, or even if it's worth us finishing the project.

Technically it is working OK with many games already, but we need to work on CDDA support and make it practical for the average user.
(ie. turn it into a "consumer ready" product, so it's easy to use and is proven reliable)

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it might take us even longer than expected to get a finished product made.

Lots of success with Dreamshell as well though recently, and BlueCrab messaged me earlier to say that he now has DMA support working under KOS.
This means super-fast support for IDE devices directly on the DC with a simple adapter. He said he's getting a read speed of around 15 MBytes/s already.

Dreamshell isn't quite the same as a hardware GD Emu of course, but it's excellent progress and means that many games should work at full speed now...

(may need to use translate or Chrome for the Russian parts, or just watch the vids. )
http://www.dc-swat.ru/forum/thread-2111-post-26737.html#pid26737


As a side note - I personally don't see the point of using CDI images for game rips (unless it's for homebrew of course).
If you can use GDI rips, then you're getting an exact copy of the game with all the vids and stuff intact.

Apparently, the new ISOLoader in Dreamshell has much better support now too, so I believe it's working with both CDI and GDI images.

OzOnE.

 

Thanks for the check-in, Ozone.

To answer the question, as I am sure many others will - -


I would pay $150-$200 for a device, depending on the features and options it supported.


I'd assume later runs would get less expensive, but I'd be in on the first round.


Get some air-time on KOTAKU, Joystiq, or another gaming news site, and you'll be flooded with orders. Easy enough for several of us to submit a "hot tip" to their editors and get some Internet buzz.

Sorry to hear CDDA is still being tricky, and that piecing it together is not as smooth as you'd want - - but in every project there are slow spots! I know you guys will win through.

Maybe knowing we are here to pay for it in the end will help . . . ?

 

Thanks, atari2atari,

I think we can meet a target of $150 or less, and hopefully reduce the price slightly with "smaller" chips / different design on later runs.

Actually, it's not so much that CDDA is being tricky, it's just that cybdyn has been busy testing different game images, so he's just looking into the CDDA thing now.
It shouldn't be too bad to support it now that the SD card and USB interfaces have decent speed. Just takes a while to code and debug.

Yep, if we can get an idea of what people are willing to pay then it makes it easier.
We're not in it to make tons of profit by any means, just enough to pay for the parts and a bit for our time.

We also need to look into getting the components soldered in bulk as well as getting the PCBs made.
To solder a big batch manually will take ages. lol

Ironically, soldering the big chips manually wasn't too bad, it's all the passive components that takes a while to do with hand soldering.

So, just wanted to put some feelers out there again, and do a bit of an update.
I am still waiting for parts though, and working things out with cybdyn about which direction we need to take next.

Once many games have been tested and working fine, we will be working with SWAT on others to integrate DCIO control into the new Dreamshell.

All the DCIO really needs to do is to allow direct access of the full SD / USB storage to Dreamshell via ATA commands (like a hard drive).
Then Dreamshell can send a command to tell the DCIO which game image to cue-up, DC will reset itself, then the game will run.

That's the plan anyway.


Regards,
OzOnE.

 

Solder the SMD, and go for a kit option aswell
I don,t mind soldering the rest if they're through-holes.



Stoked on this

 

I would bet lots of money that if you made DCIO that many people would still buy. As deunan stated before, his project is supposed to be a limited run. (That could change). His also only supports 40 images on an sd card. If DCIO had hdd/usb support, I feel many people, including myself, would buy it for that alone. (I want ALL my games on ONE device, not several sd cards.) I hope you all do not abandon this. I still think you would sell tons of them.

 

If people pay $189++ for sd2snes, I can't see why DCIO at 150$ wouldn't sell. I'd buy it!

Don't get unmotivated! People are excited about your device!

Cheers!

@Wombat, afaik the limiting factor in transferring data from mil-cd is because of the firmware of the gd-rom (it just reads CDs in like 4x afair and GDs in 12x), it should be no problem boosting this to 12x and maybe more on DCIO/GDEMU.

 

I would hope a final product would be closer to $100, as I spoke to a few of my friends and they said they would definitely not pay more than $100 for it. I can understand the research and materials making the price a little higher, but I would hope that after enough of them were made and you guys recouped the cost of materials and made yourself a nice profit then it would later come down in price.

I still want one no matter what, so maybe when I am making good money at a good job then it would make sense for me to get one but if it costs more than the price of a new powerful graphics card then I couldn't justify it.

That is just me though, and I am sure it will sell for whatever price you feel is appropriate. Our currency is just not as strong as the GPB or Euro here in the US so $150 is a lot of money for most of us.

The X360 key cost no more than $110 with shipping included, so that is another similar item I would think you would use to price competitively.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/X360-Key-Su...=US_CD_DVD_Blu_Ray_Drives&hash=item5afe11c56f


I hope that you guys stay motivated too to see this thing through til the end. It would be a shame to give up now after all the hard work you both put into this to accept defeat from Deunan.