Saturn Optical Drive Emulator

This is some amazing engineering. The modchips out there can be a hit and miss and it's not uncommon for the lasser to go out from being chipped. I'm pretty excited to see this to completion.

 

Legend achievement unlocked!

 

If you implement reset via game controller, then I recommend doing it in hardware (on your side). Software hacks running natively usually affect compatibility in some way, unfortunately that doesn't stop the lazy ones requesting this feature.

 

the is is what makes me happy to collect saturn. That people still care about it.

 

Oh boy, this is exciting news. Is there some mailing list I can subscribe to? Maybe a website that looks like it was built in the 90's that I can check every day?

 

Why does today suddenly feel like Christmas in July?

 

Awesome job jhl, can't wait to pop this into my saturn!

 

A fantastic reverse-engineering and interview video. Thanks for explaining it in great detail and all your [years of] hard work!

 

The Internal operation of the CD-Block was basically unknown, just treated as a black box. The commands on the SH-2 side were reasonably well documented (since the official Sega documentation had leaked), and the protocol on the CD drive interface had been pretty thoroughly documented, but the internals were a mystery. There were almost certainly a whole bunch of edge cases that the emulators handled incorrectly, but nobody was too worried about it, since the emulation was generally good enough. The main reason for this was that the games were being written based on the same docs that the emulator authors were basing their code on, so they tended to handle all the usual use cases.

 

Amazing work. Id be sure to support this effort if a device is released

 

I'm not ashamed to admit I made the same high pitch shrieking noise I made when I unwrapped my Saturn on Christmas morning. If you need any testers I will be there. Amazing work congratulations on your project.

 

I really liked the bit about helping emulator devs with this, too!
There is one other console that was kind of popular, and that has a not that well understood drive block.
The PS2 always had trouble with the CDVD system, even in its heyday.
Nowadays there's several emulation efforts for it (HDLoader, Open PS2 Loader, PCSX2 and Play!) but to my knowledge, no one has really figured the hardware out at a low level.
So if you ever feel like it, the console is getting popular / retro right about this time

 

Well, if it supports USB SD card readers I guess that'd be just as good.

 

OMG, this is amazing work ! A Hero is born !

 

@jhl
To nit pick, people do make the saturn modchip still.

 

I love this

 

this is amazing the advances in technology is wonderful

i have a question though i notice in the video that you could rip a cd and use the player to play game could the player be used to burn game from the player onto a disc and it would play on a saturn is that possible?

 

what?

 

I hope they can get a Kickstarter or other campaign going soon to fund production of these.

Nope, I don't think the Saturn drive can write media as it is.

 

Tommorrow my sat will be able to do me some coffee