Saturn Optical Drive Emulator

You are defending yourself (and deunan) with a passion when nobody attacks you. All we say is that those current devices aren't cheap, that @jhl specifically stated he wanted his one to be affordable, and that he knows what's he's doing because of previous experience.

I like deunan's devices, gdemu is as good as it gets, but I sure would appreciate competition in the niche and more affordable and obtenable devices.

 

It's such a shame it couldn't load 4mb roms though. The one single Gameboy game I wanted to play, that barely even works on emulators, did not fit on the card.

 

I notice that you seized on the part of my comment that you could possibly counter by arguing I wasn't listening to what you were thinking rather than the much more significant part - which was that your assertion that the complexities and difficulties involved in getting something into production might be an unknown area for him was an invalid one because he had already got something into production.

And this is a discussion board - to a large extent speculation is what we do here, so attempting to characterize it as some sort of vice seems a curious position.

 

If deunan's devices were priced at 80, folks would complain that they should be at 60. Just how this hobby works. Instant gratification prevents saving of funds.

 

To be clear, I'm not even saying that they aren't worth it. The time, parts, and research involved certainly warrant a reasonably high price. Regardless of fairness, it's just that 160+$ is a lot of cash for most people to spend. (Well maybe less so for some people on AG, but still).

Also, I feel like deunan and mnemo could probably professionally manufacture some big batches instead of handling it manually in small quantities. They could lower their own workload while being able to sell more devices for cheaper and still make more money. It would cost them more upfront, but that's the price of an economy of scale.

 

Yeah, I think it had 4MB of flash on it, but for some reason only 3MB was available and 1MB was reserved - doubtless for some nefarious internal purpose!

The other significant restriction was that it basically only supported MBC5 games - it's still a nice product though. I thought the FRAM was an especially nice touch.

 

I wasn’t defending (or attacking) anyone here. I’ve got a full-time job, a family, and a mortgage (like many here), and it’s not my first choice to stay up watching my email notifications for video game stuff at 3am.

The last time I ordered from Deunan, the product arrived in a soggy mess that was wet, dirty, torn AND TOOK NINE WEEKS to arrive (with no tracking). Bubble-pack envelopes are really NOT how things that expensive (and rare) should be shipped.

Yes, he wants to keep shipping costs low. Yes, he wants to keep overhead low with small batch production. However, if he’s already employing people with assembly duties, can’t the current “hop to it, bitch!—then wait” ordering system be improved with additional resources? Sure! All it does is artificially inflate the hype surrounding his products to keep them relevant. I can only hope that this new device will induce Deunan to rethink his distribution strategy. Trust me when I say “his butt is not mine to kiss.”

That said, my argument to Plavix was merely against him putting a device down on availability and pricing—something that can’t argued until BOTH products are in the market.

As would I.

...or perhaps I needed not refute the other part of your comment, because I didn’t disagree with it. However, you stating him not “gouging” anyone indicated that you never really acknowledged the sentiment of my previous comment, in your comment. That wasn’t cool.

I didn’t assume that they were an unknown area for him. Every project is different. Take for example the fact that parts for a product commonly need to be sourced with different suppliers. Last-minute supplier pricing changes, contractual conflicts, snags in manufacturing QC, and/or material(s) constraints... these are just a few of the many variables that can affect final product delivery schedule AND price. Just because someone’s done something before, doesn’t necessarily mean it will all go to plan for the next project.

That said, I—again—never implied that this man would do anything intentionally unscrupulous to the Saturn gaming community. Basically what I’m saying is: “sometimes, shit happens.” I worked in global supply management for two tech companies, so this isn’t uncommon (even for big corporations).

No one is characterizing speculation as a sort of vice, or anything thing else negative. Speculation, in this context, merely has questionable validity...and can therefore be misleading. As I’ve mentioned above: “shit happens.” No one can truly say what the pricing on this thing will finally be until its release.

It’s also a curious position to slam someone with salient points. But this is a discussion board, so I take it for what it is...discussion.

 

The Prof. provided quite a long-winded update the other day, mainly explaining the long delay he's had lately. Apparently he has had 3 major issues to fix, and spent a lot of time on them. However, he realized these were not required simply to get the Beta units out.

1. How to get ABC+Start to reset to the menu? Basically, since doing so in-game will just reset that game, you need to hide the code somewhere in memory. He says it will be fixed, or since the OS code will be open source, someone could do it.

2. There is OS, which is easy to update, and there is MCU (his ARM CPU) firmware, also easy to update. However, he's already running a CPLD (logic chip), and this one can only be updated with a JTAG. However, he feels pretty good that his logic is sound, and probably won't need to be updated. So, he's also putting that on the backburner.

3. He was intending to assemble the beta units (25) at home, but has come to senses and will have the PCB's manufactured professionally.

In any event, I would have to assume he's probably weeks or month or so out from shipping the Betas.

 

I've never seen GDEMU ask anything of anyone, other than to leave him the hell alone. The amount of entitled people that nag the guy just goes to show how toxic some of this community is. The guy has his own thing going, he isn't asking anything of anyone. If you don't like the terms of his sale, don't deal with him.

 

Aside from the price (justified, as explained above many times over) which is still out of my budget - who else keeps checking the site (the wordpress one) periodically over the years and NEVER seen the pre-orders open? I've yet to randomly visit the site and the actual pcb's are available... I mean never.

I do hope someone comes out with an affordable alternative - around 60-80 euros - and whoever does should clean up pretty quick. I'm still surprised the Chinese haven't cloned them yet. Not so much the Saturn - but the Dreamcast was big over there, selling loads of units.

 

I'm curious if they'll try to change over to a different CPLD now that the MAX3000 is an obsolete part. Might be worthwhile to do now rather then having to do a redesign later and needing to support two different boards. They should be able to get the MAX3000 for quite awhile though and could just stock up.

I think some of the MAXVs are 5v tolerant but that might only be for the expensive ones. Xilinx's XC9500XL CPLDs are 5v tolerant though. Of course could just use level shifters with some other CPLD.

 

Ok this is your guys only warning. Please stop the bickering and complaining about entitlement and people. I've removed some post but if some users keep it up I will be handing out temp bans for it.

Lets keep it civil.

 

The developer behind the PSIO has expressed interest in making a ODE for the the dreamcast but I think he wants to fully roll out the PSIO (which should be very soon....), details on the support forum

 

I imagine like many of us someone in China keen on reverse engineering it can't get their hands on one either.

 

A couple questions if anyone is still looking at this topic.

Is the guy in the video's idea for something that lets you make music on the Saturn's FM chip still happening?

If someone were to make a homebrew game that they wanted to sell someday, is this thing the only answer? I assume that thanks to the copy protection you'd either have to resort to telling your customers to use a modded Saturn for their pressed disc they bought that's no better than a CD-R, or you'd tell them to make sure to have the Satiator on hand so they can just DL and play on their console with USB.

It'd be cool to think especially with the active development of Jo Engine that we may see a renaissance akin to how the Genesis dev scene is slowly growing, but having physical media to feel like you made an actual release on the system looks like it's never going to happen unless you want to sell jewel cases with USB sticks in them. Am I wrong?

Sorry if this doesn't exactly fit this topic.

 

Or people can use the swap trick... hardly elegant, but people have used it for a long time.

 

The cheapest option would be bundling a pseudo saturn cart with whatever game you'd want to sell. It would increases costs substantially so you could make it an optional thing to order.

 

Properly manufactured factory pressed CD-ROMs are better than any CD-R. When manufactured and stored correctly their lifespan should far exceed most if not all CD-Rs. So even if your unlicensed game required bypassing security via swap trick or modchip it would still be better than a CD-R.

 

Games behave differently depending when you press ABC+Start. During gameplay it resets to the Title Screen, if you press the combo again on Title Screen the software stops and the CD Player reloads. It happens with most games (if not all of them) I played. Probably only a title's screen ABC+Start should reset to menu.

Also, if you press ABC+Start On cd player screen the current date and time appears briefly on top side of the screen.

 

The ABC+Start soft reset was, I think, a requirement by SEGA, so all commercial games should have them. The only stuff I've seen that doesn't do it are homebrew titles.

There are a few games where the reset is remapped to XYZ+Start, possibly because the game requires you to press a+b+c during gameplay too. Or just because the devs like that better. Treasure games do this, Guardian Heroes even has an option to select either, I think.