Hi, I'm completely new to Gamecube dev'ing, and have only become interested as I've recently acquired what I think to be two DDH-GDEV's. So let me start with questions. Firstly, the boxes have labels on top which read as follows: DDH - HW2 SYSTEM - D5 S/N________ CPU CLOCK 486 MHz GRAPHICS 162 MHz MEMORY 48 MB CONTROLLER Full Speed ORCA Rev. 2.0A (J) S/N________ IP ADDRESS_________ Both the serial numbers and IP address are blank on both labels. The front of the unit has a 2 bay unit with Nintendo GameCube Development System written on it with 4 joypad ports. It also has a 7 segment led display. The rear of the machine has various ports. Namely, 10BASE-T network, RS-232, Digital Video, Analog Video, Console Reset switch, PC Host (with a big warning sticker underneath it saying it should be plugged into a DDH card and not a NPDP-GDEV), SLOT A and SLOT B (look like mem card slots), and another RS232 looking port. There is also what looks to be a standard 3 pin PC power input into the power supply. There's another sticker on the rear which reads as follows: Applied Microsystems Corporation DOLPHIN DEVELOPMENT SYSTEM P/N: 900-75011 01 S/N: NDS10xxx (blanked out intentionally) Then it has the ethernet mac address and an electrostatic device warning. So am I right in saying I have two DDH-GDEV's? All stickers/ports, etc are exactly the same on both apart from S/N's being different. Now onto the more interesting stuff. When I power up Box A, it powers up and you can hear a hard drive spin up and init itself. Shortly after this the 7 seg LED display changes it's value from 1 to sometimes 2, then quickly onto 8 with a flashing decimal point. When plugged into a TV the screen stays blank. When I power up Box B, it does pretty much the same, but the LED display shows a flashing E. I assume the flashing E means error. Also when plugged into a TV the screen stays blank. I've opened up both boxes as there where no guarentee stickers or anything. They both have what look to be identical innards. Now as I had one box that appears to work and one which doesn't (flashing E), I decided to investigate. So Box B didn't appear to do as much as Box A so that was the first to be taken apart. I took the hard drive out of Box B and to see what I could see. I plugged it into an external USB 2 to IDE interface I had lying about and then plugged that into my PC. It appeared as a drive! FAT32 formatted 10GB drive with some files on it. The drive was labelled 'DVD'. So with this in mind I did the same thing with the drive from the Box A. Again, FAT32, DVD. So I copied all the files to a temp directory on my PC. I had a spare Seagate 40GB drive that I then formatted to FAT32, labelled as DVD and then copied the files onto that which had come from Box A's hard drive. I then put the 40GB drive into Box B. Now Box B gave exactly the same results as Box A! But still no picture on the TV. Now as far as accessories go, I have the Analog video cables, the huge PC host cables and one digital video cable. I do NOT have the pci PC host cards. So I need to know if it's possible to run code on these machines without the PC host. Or does the PC host start everything, so until the DDH is connected to a PC it just sits waiting for commands from a PC host? If this is the case, then I have two pretty useless boxes. But, if I can run code on it, that say maybe someone else has made to test on GDEV's, it'd be very interesting to copy onto the drive and try and get it working. Any suggestions or help on this would be VERY useful. Cheers, LaesQ
What you have is two DDH development systems. Do not mistake them for NPDP GDEVs. GDEVs are blue in front , and dark grey. The RS ports in the back are for a debug channel to the PC, hyper-terminal shows the stuff. The hard drive internally is labelled DVD because it handles DVD emulation (the gdev uses the host PC's hard drive to do this) The PCI card that the DDH connects is different from the one GDEV connects. The GDEV's is called ODEM (Optical Disk EMulation), and the DDH's... ask Oldengineer Furthermore, the GDEV/GBOX are related to Hudson-soft and not Applied Microsystems. By the way, how on earth did you get your hands on two of those? check your PMs
As previously confirmed you have a couple of DDH's, but what you need is a couple of matching Marlin PCI interface cards! No Marlins = You can't use the the DDH! ...'E' error message usually means missing/corrupt system files, which is a 2 second job to correct.
oldengineer, which one is preferable to your personal taste for GC development? GDEV or DDH? If i remember correctly from the newsletters, the DDH is more expensive as well, no? Is the .gcm transfered from the PC? and if so, do files travel via the Rj45 or the custom SCSI Marlin interface? (if the ODEM has about the same speed as the internal GC's transfer rate, is the Marlin faster?how is it different?)
Both have their merits. GDEV having the ability to run NPDP stuff and is simple to setup and use. DDH because it's fun and exclusive. ...DDH was viewed 'expensive' mainly because it was the first GC H/W Dev Kit available, although GDEV was equally as pricey, pro-rata. The .gcm goes via the Marlin, the RJ45 is used just to issue the commands. ...The DDH is no faster than the GDEV. ...They both look and feel exactly the same in practice. The main difference is that the DDH is a pain to setup compared to a GDEV, i.e... DDH requires: A P.C with spare dedicated non-conflicting IDE port, spare power socket, PCI slot and a network card!!! ...It's even wise to hook up a null modem cable to check stuff as well!!! Where as the... GDEV requires just a P.C with a PCI slot for the ODEM.
Just incase anyone wants to see em, I uploaded some pics to flickr. Go see em here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/25899356@N00/sets/72057594117785251/ Thanks for all your replies so far. It all seems a bit of a shame not to have the PCI card. Anyone got any ideas where I might get one from? Cheers, LaesQ
Thanks for the clarification oldengineer. clever boys those hudson folks, I trust they ll do an identical setup for the revolution final devkits to the GDEV - black or red and grey would be nice this time around for the coloring
thanks for the pictures. this is still the most beautiful dev hardware to own <3 i'm in love with a DDH, so if anyone got one for sale, msg me
personally I think this one got to be the sexiest dev hardware http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8703
