Saturn CD Block ROM dumped

+1,I'm watching this with awe and wonder. I have 8 dead Saturn's here in need of replacements for the CD drives. You will be resurrecting a whole generation of videogames. Can't wait to see what comes out of it.
P.S would you consider making this an open source project and posting the details and schematics online?

 

I am so down for one (or Two) of these.. If they ever hit production stage I want one.. Money is ready...

 

Why didn't you use a single CR-RW?

On-topic: This is very cool, it means we have now four ways of playing backups: with a patched Action Replay cartridge, with a hacked MPEG card, with a not-yet-programmed custom BIOS, and with the legacy mod chip. Out of these four I would thing the most elegant solution is the MPEG card, that is until Cyber Warrior X manages to bring back the AR original functions of 1M/4M, cheat and memory backup.

I'm assuming the region-lock bypass is also implemented in both your solutions, but that wasn't explicitely stated I think.

 

any news about the hardware solution?

 

My boards came back from fab a while ago. I've been too busy with work to populate them yet. Hopefully next week.

 

Can you tell us more details about the purpose of your boards ?
Do you plan make related work public ? (I would be happy to reuse it in my projects )

 

This board has the needful for microSD and perhaps host USB. Future plans are up in the air.

 

Wait... will it be something like ODE for Saturn?

 

That's what I'm hoping for myself and I believe that's what was the initial intention which would be an ideal replacement for the dying Lasers of many consoles.

 

OK, good continuation

 

great to hear it must have been costy to get your on demand boads?

remember to keep us updated!

 

Small run boards are much cheaper than they used to be - if you're happy to wait.

It's the time put into the project that's the big cost... if this were commercial I'd be well into five figures by now!

 

+1
Especially PCB design can take very long time to finally get something nice.
(Well, firmware/software development takes time too ^^)

 

Yeah, PCB stuff is disproportionately time consuming - especially when you have to draw & check your own footprints. Simple mistakes can cost you a lot of time later.

In this project, though, it's been dumping & reversing the entire CDB firmware that's taken ages - and tapping it for full-featured ODE in a reliable fashion is going to take just as long again. So, y'know, it's happening, but it'll be a while!

 

i'll be waiting for you and this hoping i can afford it

I support all the efforts of getting rid of old console optical drives... be it psx, saturn, 3do, neogeocd or any other. it's the only way for them to be future proof and have a correct way of retrogaming. After all there's very few accurate emulation out there!

 

Just a question... Would this also reduce loading times? It may sound strange, but I'd really like accurate load times, both for having the closest experience to the original and for Speedrunning. Speedrunning is heavily affected by loading and nobody would accept a run that has smaller load times.

 

it certainnly will in some form. The seek time will be enormously faster just as one thing to mention

 

I intend to match the seek time, actually, for compatibility reasons (don't want to find bugs in released titles...). Presumably with some way to turn it off if you're in a hurry.

The sector data rate will be exactly the same (1x/2x CD rate) as the original.


There will be a few tendrils of my code in the CDB's little brain, though. I'm not sure it'd count as original equipment for speedrunning, given that. I also can't give you submillisecond accuracy or anything. CD seeks also usually depend on disc/drive condition too, so they're probably somewhat variable naturally. *shrug*

 

That is nice to read! Thanks!

It doesn't have to be perfectly accurate though. I was just kinda worried that it would feel and look like an emulator due to ultra short long times. There are usually huge differences on load times on different runs, but it isn't really fair or competitive to other runners if your runs are like 20 minutes faster due to load times. Most people run rereleases of Saturn games anyway, so it is not much of a big deal. I'm more worried about having the closest to legitimate experience in the future when no solution for the poor laser drives will exist.

 

Speedruns aside, that's a good reason to implement loading times. Personally I wouldn't mind an option to, say, halve them, but they should be available to those wanting the original experience.

(Possible bonus feature for overachievers: Also provide drive sound emulation for the *full* experience, like (I believe) WinUAE does for floppies. :b )