I'm so happy! After some initial communication grief and a bit of butterflies in stomach once I've sent the money, I finally got my Dreamcast Katana 5.24 station. It's a beauty! Brand new, no usage marks whatsoever. Works great. Came with the latest (I think) stable SDK 10.1. Thank you, dear seller! You know who you are
Ok, I spent most of the day learning how to use Katana. I can run debug ELFs, but I can't compile BIN files. I always get the error message about mission external reference ".debug_start" (something like this). I also tried to follow the whole GDWorkshop tutorial by the letter to create a virtual GD image from one of the provided examples, that had a precompiled 1st_boot.bin file. No luck either. GDWorkshop refuses to close the door of the virtual GD-ROM. Can anyone with experience kindly help me out? I'd love to have a session via MSN or NetMeeting or something like this... So far I decided to try Katana SDK and Adaptec 2940U SCSI card on a simplier PC. Right now I'm running it on a dual-core Athlon X2 4400 system with ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard under Windows XP SP2. Mothergboard already have some devices that Windows sees as SCSI. Also I have built-in flashcard reader, and it confuses GDWorkshop, since it adds two removable drives to the system. I'll try a simple Windows 2000 SP4 (if no luck, I'll even try Windows NT 4.0 SP5) on a simple classic system with ASUS P3B-F motherboard and Intel Celeron Tualatin 1.1GHz CPU with 256 MB of PC133 SDRAM memory... Again, it's a very simple system, so hopefully Katana utilities won't get confused... It's all very exciting! It was lots of fun to see some freshly compiled code run on actual hardware, even if code isn't mine and there is no way yet for me to create virtual GD-ROM images...
you should be careful when operating the system...avoid disconnecting cables while it is working because you may blow up something... If you need any programming advice specific to dreamcast/graphics pipelines you can always send me a pm...but only as long as it is a programming question...my system works ok and i do not remember how i sholved the various problems i had+i am really bored with these things.... cheers
Thank you very much for offering your help! I'll need it for sure. Right now I took a break from Katana, because I had too much of it yesterday Here is the screencap of flash upgrade program. It did update the system successfuly. I still can't build an image, that would allow me to close virtual GD-ROM. More then that, I can't even reformat the SCSI HDD in Katana. Do you use your Katana with Adaptec 2940U PCI card? I do, my 2940U has BIOS version 1.16. I can use EPROM burner to update it to 1.21, which is the last one, but I don't think it will solve my problems with repartitioning. Do you have option to map HDD space over 1GB in BIOS turned "ON"? Or should it be off? If any of my questions don't make sence, please let me know, so I'll elaborate with photos and/or screencaps to explain what I'm trying to talk about. Thank you very much! PS: I found my way around the error in compilation for BIN target. Basically I compile for ELF target, and then use ELF2BIN.exe utility to strip debig info and conver.
... I am using windows xp and a 2930CU scsi card...the emulation drive is formatted in NTFS as a big 4gb partition.What would be interesting is to check out the speed of the katana setup when you transfer files to its HDD using a program called hdtach (http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach).My setup does not go above 3 mb/s when it was supposed to function at 20 mb/s ...I guess the katana scsi interface is slow as hell... Also if you want to build bin files you can use the makefiles suggested by Sega and just define the appropriate flags.Check the various samples' makefiles...they feature flags both for bin/elf output and debug info....
Just a question, is it possible to reflash from an SDK r10.1 to a 9.0, sort of like downgrading the system?
i think it is possible on a Set5.24 unit...if i remmeber right earlier units have problems with certain firmware revisions...
Oh yes, dear gog be careful with the power on/off procedure!! Follow to the letter, and make sure pc and katana are both on a UPC backup. And make sure the slider on the front that protects the firmware is on at all times.
So, did anyone tried to downgrade DA and GD firmware to levels of Katana SDK R9? It may or may not resolve the issues I'm experiencing with virtual GD-ROM closing on R10.1...
I'm assuming my DC Loop Checker "might" be able to simply reflash the Dreamcast Dev unit. I may be wrong, and it could just reflash the retail unit. In it, there are some programs that should be run specifically on a Set 5, and another file which I believe is a file for the Set 4 Katana's. I can't view the other files in the high density layer of the disc though.
