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

Looks nice. Just wondering, do any of the screw holes line up so it can be secured? or is just the gdrom and usb connectors holding it in place?

 

Its the latter. No screws line up.

 

That's a shame - I took apart an old GD-ROM assembly and pulled out the main board - and it looked to have all 4 mounting holes in the exact same locations as this new USB device, so was hoping it could be securely mounted inside the assembly and then mount the assembly as normal and secure it to the dreamcast.

 

It would be simple to make a bracket to secure the unit tighter. But if you cut the hole in the back properly its not going anywhere.

I also talked to mnamo today and he is working on disc swap support. Hopefully its a firmware update and not a different piece of hardware. Granted I'd sure i'd have to wire in a door switch with the current piece. The device has no idea if the lid is open at all.

 

Here's a short review of GDmenu made by neuroacid:

[video=youtube_share;GaLsb9fFWHA]http://youtu.be/GaLsb9fFWHA[/video]

 

Army Men Sarge's Heroes?

I don't know whether to laugh or cry!

Just kidding, and thanks for the pics - I'm impressed with the setup, does anyone know if the guy is planning more units? I'm tempted...

 

Ha, I was testing the vga patching with that one. I have entire full gdi sets of ntsc-u, pal, ntsc-j....

 

Hey, thanks for the review.
About the wrong title on your Toy Story, its not directly related to it being a CDI image, but with how the MIL-CD rip was made.
Basically the person that made the rip used the IP.BIN from another game, and as I've said earlier thats where I'm getting the game tittle from.
For most of the MIL-CD rips out there it shouldn't be a problem anyway, and if you want you could even edit or replace the IP.BIN of those images to fix them.

I agree with the usefulness of saving the list, but in some cases like mine, if you have close to 30 folders inside you SD card it can be hard to keep track of your games.
It can be pretty useful when you are using a second switch to go backwards from the start of the list.

Initially I was planing to have a tool to build your list while creating your SD card, where you could just set whatever title you wanted for each game and then it would build the menu image
but I ended up discarding that as it would make things more complicated than they needed to be, and it would mean that you had to rebuild your list/image every time you made changes to the SD card.
So in the end it would be less user friendly and "plug and play". Anyway, hopefully this is just a temporary solution to make our experience with the GDEMU a bit better, while we wait for Deunan to release something more complete.

 

@citrus3000psi

Do you have a 1tb USB external drive to test? I would like to know if they would work with these things or not? I suppose there could be power issues but the latest drives should be much lower consumers of power than a huge mechanical IDE or SATA drive.

 

Wow, this thing looks interesting, but since it's an early version I guess the button in the drive isn't a huge turnoff for me.

 

I have an idea I have been sitting on for a while now. How feasible would it be to mod the Dream On demo disc to be able to communicate with the SD card and read your games list, and let you launch them from it? People could add icons to all games that would make it look more akin to a modded Xbox where you see all icons for games.

 

I'm using an external older western digital my book; Its 1tb and works just fine. The max limit should be 2tb; the drive has to be fat32. Power consumption isn't a problem since the its plugged into wall. I doubt you could totally power the drive off the usb.

 

Ah ok thanks, that is good to know. Looks like a 2tb drive is on my wish list.

 

Oh, Mnemo gives you a guide for filing down the USB hole. Cool. Thanks for the pictures, Citrus.

 

The screw holes are for this, I assume so air flow kind a flows like it would with the GDRom drive attached.


& damn looking at it in those pics, makes me want mine more lol I'm so impatient.

i have a load of Dreamcast games yet no way to dump them :-/

 

Thanks for the pictures. Could you confirm that the USB controller works with disc swapping or codebreaker? Is there any form of swapping method?

Thanks.

 

Something I wanted to post yesterday but forgot - What's it like for heat in there? I remember users commenting that Denuan's board made the DC get very hot - although I'm not sure how this was followed up? Was it okay in the end?

Also, as tempted as I was with these - I still think it's best to wait on Cybdyn's board - that sounds like it's going to get the most support (decent menus for a start!) and none of this push a button on the board to play next game. I can easily see that button breaking very soon with heavy use.

I say hold out - there are two on the market (kind of) so it's been done - now we just wait for the best supported version to get released, decent menus, better options to change games directly from the pad, etc.

 

Can't speak for others experiences - but with the GDEMU the PSU does get hotter (Some of it down to airflow - and some of it probably down to the PSU being less energy efficient) However even though it gets hotter it's not too hot to cause a problem, in fact my unmodified Saturn PSU gets hotter lol. Anyway even after playing for hours there have been no issues
As far as the select button goes - I just wired up a RF remote switch with 2 buttons (previous image / next image) so have no worries about the button on the GDEMU wearing out.

Having said that - this USB device looks awesome - and because you can use your GDROM casing the airflow (apart from no spinning disk) should be pretty much unaffected and I would guess the PSU would not be as hot as with the GDEMU - but only time will tell.

I applaud all the developers though for working on my favourite console - and like many others I am really excited to see Cybdyn's finished device, as to me it looks like the best solution of them all

 

thanks for the pics citrus3000psi , can't wait to order mine

 

Thank you for the pictures, could you please share a higher resolution of the PCB ? I am curious which chips he used in his design.