Hello, I'm pleased to present my functional GameCube DDH DEV setup , completed year after year.... I will update some parts later, especially the hardware config inside the PC, and the exact software part. 1) The hardware - One PC from the 2000 era, SGI Visual Workstation 230 (I'm a huge SGI fan), PIII 800Mhz, 256Mb RAM, 64Mb Quadro1 (SGI VR3), 18Gb SCSI HDD connected to an Adaptec SCSI PCI card. - The Marlin PCI Card FW 3.07 from 2001, connected to a PCI Slot inside the PC. The IDE cable is connected to a free IDE channel without any slave device. That's why the OS is on a SCSI disk, so I was able to have a CD drive, The Marlin IDE emulator card, and the system disk without any problem. - The AMC DDH, final spec, HW2 D5 . An internal Seagate 6.4gb IDE hard drive with necessary boot files. The SDK can automatically create a good HDD config on the DDH. - A 17" CRT TV connected to the video output of the DDH for testing demo - A GameCube controller (I need to try the DS5 converter to try my beta controller!) 2) Software - PC OS : Windows 2000 SP4 - All the Dolphin SDK stuff (drivers, Cygwin, DDH stuff and console, Demos, documentation etc...) 3) Connection - PC PCI Marlin card connected to the DDH by a SCSI like cable provided with the KIT. It will emulate an internal IDE drive on the Windows PC with the internal drive of the DDH. The DDH drive will appeared on Windows, useful to copy demo files, etc... - RS232 input of the PC connected to the main RS232 port of the DDH for console stuff -Ethernet connector of the PC and DDH connected to a switch to make a small network (PC on 192.168.1.1 and DDH with 192.168.1.2), for sending command from Cygwin to the DDH -Analog video output of the DDH connected to the CRT TV 4) Operation On these photo you will see to Cygwin console controlling the DDH. I have browsed the console to the folder of the DolphinSDK on C:. On the gxdemo folder you have all graphics demo from the SDk, on elf format. With the commandline "loadrun xxxxx.elf", you will order to the DDH to load the demo. After some seconds the demo is loaded, as you can see on the CRT TV. The SDk is full of demo stuff, like this pretty good real time shadow test (much better in real, than this aliased photography..). It's also possible to copy files into the DDH drive to install more complex demo, like the Peach Castle. It's very easy, you just need to change the root file folder of the DDH. More to come... Time for pictures : EDIT FROM 01/05/2015
Very cool. Never seen a complete, running setup before. Do you code, or just play with the included utils?
Hello, Thanks I don't any competence to code for it, unfortunately.... I'm trying as much as possible to try all the built in demo, trying to understand the configuration documentation, the possibility. I really love the gamecube dev hardware environnement, with DDH, GDEV etc... My dream is to have a no final setup, with a beta DDH with non D5 HW2 Orca Board, beta controller etc.. But It will be really difficult to realize My goal is to have a "complete package" in is original juice. I have the same type of setup for the Nintendo64 (an ultra64 setup with an indy but it's not complete for the moment) and Gameboyadvance (pc laptop based with SCSi Card and AGB emulator). I will make a topic for each of them later this month.
There's quite a few retail games that dump a load of debugging output to the console window when played on the DDH. I seem to remember that Lego Star Wars dumped a ton of debugging info to the console, although it's a few years since I played it so I may be wrong. You can get the same info by playing the game in the Dolphin emu and enabling console output by the way. You should try a few retail games on the DDH. Nice setup by the way, I have a similar fully working DDH setup. Is yours PAL enabled? Mine isn't unfortunately.
Hello, Yeah, I will try some debugging stuff these days . I just need to switch the DDH to dev mode. It's not PAL enabled. My two DDH are D5 HW2, but with low serial number (dolphin logo, but classic controller) I think they were upgraded later in 2001 to final spec. The overall cost is approximatively 500€, including the PC, DDH, Marlin, cable etc.... I'm just missing the original disk bundlze with the DDH....
PAL enabled? AFAIK they're all PAL enabled, you use a program in the DDH software to change from NTSC mode to PAL mode or vice versa. The only issue is if you have a specific firmware which mine has (Think it's 0.93 or 0.97 from the top of my head) and switching to PAL mode bricks the whole unit and 'needs sending back to nintendo for recovery' (as noted in the SDK release notes). Also you don't need a switch for the network, you can just use a crossover cable which is what I did. Also there's 2 COM ports, one is for controlling the DDH and the other is where all the debugging information would come out from if you were to want debug messages, I invested in a USB-RS232 converter off ebay for the second port.
Hello, I can't emember these PAL configuration in the SDK documentation (SDK 1 from late 2001), but I need to check exactly if it's due to a NTSC ROM (0.93A) or something else. Later DDH have directly the pal enabled sticker on top, but I really don't know if they have a different ROM number. Yes, One com port is to configure the DDH via hyperterminal, ip configuration etc. Load Command are send via ethernet The second is for the real time debugging. I try it yesterday, and it's working great with built in SDK demo. Thank's for the information about the crossover cable. I don't have one, so that's why I use the DDH in a basic lan config with the host PC. I have updated the first post with the inside of the host PC
