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

Wise words my friend!

 

Awesome - thanks for this useful program madsheep, just used the vga patching on a Japanese gdi image and it works perfectly

 

If I wanted to cut the end of an IDE cable off and solder each wire to the Dreamcast individually... would the wires be in order 1-40 starting with the red wire? Can all the ground wires be connected to a single point?

 

I second the above post: does ide actually work with dreamshell?

You need the pinout and solder 40 pins + dreamshell ready bios... is that it?

How is the compatibility list compared to the external sd games?
Which formats work? Iso, gdi?

 

You don't need Dreamshell bios AFAIK - you still can run Dreamshell from CD.

Just compare cable with DC-Swat schematic - Red/Blue wire is 1st pin, last wire is 40th pin.






And cable...



But I have another question for one who already did this: Is DC PSU capable to power 3,5" HDD? According to pinouts we have +5V and +12V but won't it burn PSU/Mobo?

 

So you have both gd drive and ide connected at the same time?

You can only power the HDD after dreamshell boots up, correct?

 

Yes, GD and HDD are connected at the same time. About powering hdd - Hdd must be powered before DS is booted (in other case DS/IsoLoader won't detect hdd - or I'm doing something wrong ). Hdd must be set to SLAVE.

 

How is this different then what cybdyn is developing? Is it just CDDA audio?

 

Swat's made hdd support from DreamShell. it's software based emulation of gd-drive. you need run DS from somewhere first. gd-drive/bios-mod.

my device is gd-drive emulator w/ IDE support. it replaces gd-drive. cdda support is on hw level too.

 

Hello. I am really looking forward to your version of DCIO.

I have a question, could your device be place in dreamcast together with the optical drive? Or do we need to remove the optical drive completely in order for your device to work?

I would also like to ask, do I need to mod my dreamcast's bios to region free in order for your device to work or does it becomes irrelevant? What I mean is, regardless of PAL or NTSC, your device will load the ISO image successfully and play the game without the region-free bios mod?

Thank you.

 

(Tried my GDemu board on my overclocked 240Mhz Dreamcast and it runs like a Dream.......)

 

i think multi "region" is possible.

about original gd-drive at same time w/ gdemu: theoretically it's possible, but hard imagine from practical side.

 

Once you got a working prototype that boots games, it'd be trivial to add region-free and VGA-enabling fixes. A matter of dynamically patching a few bytes in the first 16 sectors of track03 at boot.

 

Yes but not all games work only with this... same games have more checks

 

Some games have copy protections aimed at make it more difficult to make mil-cd backups of them but that isn't an issue with a gd-rom emulator (and can always be patched for mil-cd anyways). I've yet to find a game that does custom region checks... maybe you know some?

I'm not saying it's impossible, but it seems kinda weird to spend development time on that instead of on a good copy-protection. Of course some games just aren't designed to display 480p, so patching the VGA flag in the bootsector can't make those work over VGA.

 

San
Francisco RUSH 2049, US version
Is one of them.

 

I know Shenmue has a region check, but I think it's only used for language selection, not to lock you out from playing the game. It's why Shenmue doesn't work properly on Katana devboxes, since the devbox doesn't have the region set in the flash.

 

El Dorado Gates series don't work when patched outside of their region. Echelon tried and failed and Hykan had some luck but one must use a PC EMU to get past a certain point.

 

Thanks for your reply.

I am not sure how the design of your device looks like. But it will be really great and a cool option to have the original gd-drive at same time with your device. So that user don't have to swap in and out if they want to use the original drive.



The prototype G1-ATA adapter allows you to have the IDE cable extend out.

Instead of having a single part to your device, you have 2 major part to your device. The first device (1) acts like G1-ATA adapter where users connect a short ribbon cable/IDE cable to device (1) to extend out. The second device which is your main gd-emu connects to the ribbon cable/IDE cable. With this approach, users can have have best of both world.

Hope you will take my idea into consideration.

 

ElDorado Gates vol 1-3 tested and work with the original GDI+Region patching (Boots normally didn't play the game)