Saturn CD Block ROM dumped

No worries, I'm happy to do whatever's involved to dump the ROM. Since this is an "official" protection-free bios, it might be of some interest.

 

Congrats! on your PHD and looking forward to this project too!

 

So can anyone tell me if the results of this (i.e. the actual ROM inside the Saturn CD controller) are available publicly? It seems like people on this thread who have dumped the ROM want to keep it to themselves so they can profit off things made that use stuff obtained as a result of dumping the ROM.

Its a pitty that it seems to be being kept a secret, it would allow emulator developers to make Saturn emulation more accurate...

 

I'm probably biting on trollbait that I shouldn't, but I don't get the point of this post. Short of posting the ROM itself (which is illegal, mind), jhl has been perfectly helpful and transparent to Cyber Warrior X (Yabause and Pseudo-Saturn) and others in the thread with regard to his methods and reverse-engineering efforts. He already answered a previous question of yours regarding improving emulation, and his answer was that there's a shortage of time and the fact that it's a huge effort. As far as I can tell, this is time and effort you have yet to volunteer, while others have stepped up to the plate and have already achieved great results.

Please take your armchair engineering and nagging elsewhere. Same with everyone asking for updates. It's rude and childish, and I'd rather not see that this thread has new posts, only to discover this garbage. I'm going to go back to lurking now.

Great work, everyone else!

 

x

 

They're working on sh1 cd stuff for yabause. I dunno if it's functional yet, but you can select an sh1 rom for it so I imagine they have a way to dump it themselves. I couldn't imagine them not releasing it once the branch is ready for merging

 

x

 

It will amuse some to note that I am, in fact, involved in the Yabause LLE effort - although I want to make it very clear that d356 and Cyber Warrior X are the devs doing the heavy lifting on this implementation, and it is very heavy lifting indeed.

The CDB is a fiendishly complicated piece of gear, with tight timing and behavioural interdependencies with the rest of the system, and with highly complex internal state. This is what makes projects like emulator HLE and SAROO into games of guessing in the dark.

I'm not sure that CDB emulation will be fast enough to be playable - at least in the near term - but in some sense that's not the point. If the LLE method is completely accurate, then however slow it is, it provides a golden reference for improving the HLE, which is what most everyone will use anyway.

The integration effort with Yabause is challenging. I wrote a CDB emulator for my personal use in my reverse engineering efforts, but that's slicing off a small part of the console and running it in isolation. The SH-2 and SCU implementations were never designed for handling cycle-timing on the A-bus and so the core architecture needs to change; this is the kind of thing that can have subtle ramifications and is difficult to get right.

I think CWX and d356 are doing a fine job, with a sound approach - and in their spare time too.

 

True that, I also didn't care enough to check to see if the select box was hooked up at all. I was also just throwing my post out there for people complaining about the rom not being released. It'd be useless anyway to anyone else like you already said

 

Trollbait or not, the guy does have a point...

Capability is one thing, motivation and time are something else entirely. When I was 15 and living with my parents, there was plenty of time to work on projects like this, but now I'm 30 and married with three kids and a full time job, and I have to be quite selective about what I spend my precious couple of hours a week (if I'm lucky!) sitting in front of the real hardware. The technical bar of working on a system like the Saturn is already quite high, because it's a crazy complex system to start with, so most people with the capability to improve Saturn emulation, like me, are likely to be older and have limited time to work on it, and probably like me, have 100 more projects planned or in progress than they can possibly finish. With this being the case, it's really important to be able to incrementally build on what other people have learned or done, rather than everyone trying to always start from the ground up and learn everything by themselves from scratch, and solve every problem for themselves along the way. If this ROM doesn't get released, it really doesn't help move things forward. Ultimately someone else is going to have to re-invent the wheel and repeat this process.

In terms of motivation, it's important to note that dumping this ROM, publicly announcing that fact, and then not releasing the ROM, actually hurts things in the long run if the ROM isn't released in a reasonable time. Before the SH1 ROM had been dumped, despite a lack of time, I might have had a crack at dumping the ROM myself between other projects, because it's a challenge. It's something new and interesting. Now that it's been dumped already though, I'm much less likely to do it myself. At the same time, I also wouldn't bother doing any research in this area of the system until I can study the ROM. Research isn't as interesting if you know you're re-treading ground someone has already covered, and if you're expecting game-changing new info to come out in the imminent future, you don't dive right into a new project based on the old info, you wait for a little while to get the best information.

I've been patiently waiting for this ROM to be released, and I'll continue to do so. So will most other people who could genuinely make use of it, and jhl in his original post did state some kind of intent to release it. It'd be good to clarify if that's still the case, and if so, if there's any estimate on when that might happen, so people who are waiting can gauge if they want to wait that long.

 

x

 

It wasn't my intention to offend anyone, so if I've upset you by my comments I do apologize. I will respond to your points though. First I should state that I didn't actually see any posts after zumza's one, including your reply to him or the post from jhl. I started writing my reply one day and finished off and posted it the next, and I must have forgotten to check for new posts.

I think you may have missed my point. What I was saying is, given that it's simply a reality that probably nobody is both technically capable and has the time available and motivation, to fully reverse engineer and emulate the Saturn accurately and in its entirety by themselves, it's in the best interest of everyone interested in that goal to collaborate and share information, so that with everyone doing a bit at a time collectively some kind of progress can be made. Unfinished work and untested theories are one thing, but a successful ROM dump is something that can be shared.

That's a fair call, and I don't disagree. I've handled this project badly. While there have been very difficult personal circumstances for me over the last two years, the details of which I'll keep to myself, I should have done a much better job communicating to other people. All my donations have come from one source, and I'm very, very aware that I've had that gear for about a hundred times longer than was expected. I've had some communication with this donor in that time, but I haven't kept him updated nearly enough, let alone everyone else. When I do have any time to do work on any of this stuff right now, it's all being directed towards that effort, and will be until it's complete. This last month, for the first time in a year, I've finally been able to invest some real time and move the project forward, and things are very close now. When I have complete, good dumps, they'll be released. I'm not sitting on anything.


Bringing things back to the SH1 bios, and to cut right to the point here, it'd just be good to get an ETA on when a release might happen. While I don't share the sentiment of how jonwill expressed what he was saying, I thought that asking for an update was reasonable. Any idea on that one jhl? Is there anything in particular you're waiting for before releasing it publicly?

 

Sorry to ask and i know this sounds rhetorical but does the cd block rom you've mentioned disables anti protection via CD-R on a normal saturn console without the need for a pseudo saturn and/or any of the Saturn first/third party System Discs? just curious

Also, do you think it is possible to install the bios to the hardware via Homebrew type Installer program?

 

x

 

Hey jhl, good to see you chime in. I don't suppose I could trouble you for an update on your project?

 

Edit: Retracted, mod can remove the post if they like

 

Yeah, I'm sorry I haven't been consistent with this over the years; my enthusiasm gets the better of me sometimes.

I, myself, am not going to release these ROMs. This isn't the first project where I've dumped a commercial object for some other purpose and been asked to share (see: shairport, for one), and after much thought I conclude - now, as then - that it's not the right thing for me to do in any project. There are legal and professional risks which I'm just not comfortable taking. That's not negotiable.

But that's not to say I won't help you dump it yourself. I'll have a dump feature in the cart, and I'm sure someone will rapidly archive all the available systems.

Finally, I'd like to mention the sometimes rather angry speculation that I've been sitting on these dumps to profit from them. I can understand where that's coming from. It's almost founded in truth: I've put thousands of hours into this project, and it'd make me miserable to be beaten to the punch on releasing an ODE - but those hours live in my ODE codebase and in my IDA database unpicking the functioning of the ROM, not in the ROM itself.

 

So 99.9% compatible, with no MPEG decoder re-implementation.

Too bad you couldn't just include a mpeg decoding cable chip to the board. I suppose it's not worth the effort and expense considering the miniscule amount of uses for VCD/Mpeg playback on the saturn. I wonder if it would be possible to use an rPi connected through the USB port to do it.

 

I for one am thrilled that your project goes much beyond creating and profiting from just making a flashcart in secrecy. I'd like to thank you, as many, for contributing to the console's reverse-engineering efforts, especially with the Saturn that is still a difficult beast to try and tame. In any case, I'll likely get one of your carts to play around with the system eventually.

 

JHL what you have done is amazing, never imagined that somebody can do this.