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

Little update, it would seem the guy never put my address in correctly & parcel force have it :-/ & it's being held, he's obviously done something wrong, so be carful if & make sure he has your address correct before he sends it.

They have had it for 3 days now, I guess he never used my phone number I supplied, god this is a pain lol

would like to thank Meringues for telling me about parcel force, since I had no clue they were the ones deriving it to me & without that information I would still be in the dark.

 

Sure here you go:

http://i.imgur.com/zjjAWzn.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/rSqlJW1.jpg

All of the little white stuff on the pcb is from me filling the usb hole.

 

I can't find anything on the Toshiba chip. There's a Toshiba chip on the GD-ROM drive (TC9450AF). The one in the picture is a Toshiba TC9466FA. I wonder if that one is found on another region / production run GD-ROM and he reused it from a real GD-ROM drive.

 

Pretty a neat design.Besides ICs, I can see some resistors and by-pass capacitors , a protection diode , a 3.3 voltage regulator, three quartz, one inverter.This Mnemo is a skilled engineer.

 

if only communications were better...

 

Bad communication is tipical in these ingenious guys (as for him there is also the language barrier).Then I think he is very few interested in commercial purpose.IMHO there will not be another production.

 

I doubt that. Why go to all that time and trouble to make a one off run of these if you are not looking to make money from them. Think of all the time ane effort that he put into this, and you can be damn sure he wants to profit off them. If anything it would be smarter for him to partner with Stoneage Gamer and get them to mass market them and reel in the cashthan to abandon it. He already did the hard work, and he has a better chance to get his bought by more people cause you can connect 2tb HDD'S to these. I am curious how well a SSD drive would boot games come to think about it.

 

I think SSD would be a waste as you would be limited to the speed limitations of USB

 

Sometimes wanting SSD isn't as much about speed as it is not having any moving parts to wear out / quieter / less needed power.

 

Thank you very much, interesting that no one can find any information on the TOSHIBA part..

 

After a bit of digging...

https://www.toshiba.co.jp/tech/review/1998/high98/electronic/e2/index.htm

 

Toshiba TC9466FA - wow, it's so geniusly!!))

 

So does it use a modified version of the original drive firmware?

 

@citrus3000psi, would you be so kind to tell us the markings on the chip closest to the USB port ? (the photograph is a bit blurry)

And if you want to take this controller for a real-spin, could you please take the GDI version of Crazy Taxi and leave it in attract mode for a few hours to see if it misses textures ?

 

RTW i been reading your comments on this topic... if you are planning to reverse engineer this thing Im up for beta testing

 

I can assure you that I have no intention of reverse engineering any of the GD-ROM replacements, I am just curious by nature and I find that the use of the PATA LSI in the design is quite brilliant.

 

tc9466 is IDE controller w/ internall buffer. it helps to make gdemu w/o fpga/cpld. it doesnt use original firmware, as it works just as slave part.
as i know, it uses low level interface (serial stream/ pcm-like) to send data from ARM, and it seems is not easy if we jave no info about registers and etc

how tc9466 can be connectet , you can see here
http://www.promelec.ru/UPLOAD/xml/scheme/SCR-3232.pdf

it looks like MNEMO made his gdemu(usb) in original way!!

 

It would be cool to make a comparison between Deunan GDEMU and Mnemo USB controller.I mean not only about performance but also design/egineering.Anyway I'm going to get a Dreamcast after have sold mine some time ago, these two devices (and the upcoming cybdyn one) has woken my hunger again..

 

I hope someone does this for PSX (PSone).

 

Yeah I should be able to do that tonight.