Saturn Optical Drive Emulator

Genuinely excited to see these go into production. I'll grab one right away!

 

Same.

 

My Saturn drive was busted long ago and the open/close switch was also butchered in the past by some douche to swap discs...

I never bought another one, never bought a replacement lens either... I had tons of stuff to play anyway, I can wait for this to get back to Saturn.

I could easily replace the lens, I do repair consoles at work but since the switch was killed I would need to redo that, now that I don't need to use the drive at all, this is the best option for me.

 

I am glad to see progress on this, Will be a great day when you can just launch games without having to grab the discs off the shelves.

 

Glad to see progress as well! I have been waiting for this and was afraid when Assembler went down that we wouldn't see any progress.

 

This is an exciting project. He's been busy, lately, and put it on hold for the last month. I'm a backer of his.

 

Kool lookin forward to updates!

 

Also looking forward to this. I love the idea of leaving the CD drive in place.

 

I'm extremely excited about this.....finally something to rival rhea/phobe. The more devices like this that are available to saturn users the longer the system will live on. Keep up the great work can't wait for the release of this product.

One thing out of curiosity.....I'm a lunar fan and there is a lunar variant that uses the MPEG card....will games that use th MPEG card simply not be playable or will this device emulate the MPEG card as well?

 

This was covered in the the very first post....

 

Don't get me wrong, this project is awesome, but doesn't the fact that the rhea exists and can be used with the mpeg card kinda make this... redundant? Except for the fact no one can get rheas that is.

 

Not at all. Some people welcome the option to leave the CD-Rom drive in the console if it still works.

 

Yea but leaving the cd drive in the console is actually a hindrance because now you have a part that could fail and cause issues for the console meanwhile the ode is a solid state device so it is much longer lasting and as a result you don't lose the ability to play any of the enhanced games.

I'm just not seeing any upside here except for nostalgia.

 

Nostalgia perhaps....
I can also see times I might like to play a CD game that's not loaded on the USB/SD/HDD. I might not have time to load it into a PC and copy it over. Or I might have just bought the game and want to test it out. I have plenty of Sega Saturn's, but generally only one setup to play.
I'm also all for more devices/solutions in the small market of Saturn game loaders. Whether they replace the drive or just add more features and possibilities to the console.

 

Nostalgia would be to the bottom of the list here. Phoebe/Rhea obviously require different consoles, so if yours craps out, you're forced to perhaps go find one with a different MB. Isn't compatibility still an issue with it? SD card limitation? The fact it's impossible to buy also. The Prof Abrasive project is SORELY needed.

 

It's never a bad thing to have more choice.

Ford invented the modern car, but nobody is saying that Toyota is redundant.

 

If all goes well, this should be able to save data from Saturn to PC (backing up saves), and load binaries without needing to convert them to iso first. The best thing would be if you could hook it up to a PC and change binaries while the thing is turned on, it would make development faster, and the whole idea for this card was to make homebrew easily possible.

 

How about the fact that rhea/phobe/gdemu are so scarcely available scalped and price gouged that I'd gladly rather buy an alternative option the very second one is avaliable

 

Exactly. I wanted a gdemu for my Dreamcast too, but it was way to expensive. So I did an IDE drive install and i'm happy with that.
We need options. I've got no idea what Prof Abrasive Saturn board will cost, but hopefully it can be made at a resalable price.

 

BTW, any news on the development of the commercial device? Where can we follow it to know when it's ready?