Saturn Optical Drive Emulator

None! I just think it'd be neat if it could be done, but it has no advantage.

 

Can't wait for this if there is a preorder let us know? Lost any hope of getting a rhea so this would be great.

 

I will like to pre-order when available.

 

Ah rats I was monitoring the other thread; I'll watch this one now too

 

jhl mentioned that a finished version might be at some point in 2017, so I wouldn't worry about preorders any time soon.

 

That soon would be amazing. Considering how long the wait has been already, 2017's a piece of cake
Very glad for this, all the way around.

 

None of this makes any sense. Between memory, ram, rom, cheat carts, netlink etc... there's absolutely no reason to tie up the cart slot with some sort of redundant piece of hardware. This upcoming ODE is supposed to have game save access already, why would it need to communicate with another storage card at a different location on the console for the exact same function it can already do?

You might as well ask for a satellite uplink dongle for the serial port so the ODE can send game saves into orbit and back to the Netlink. That would be cool.

 

This should totally be a thing.

 

If I understand disc rot correctly, it's when the reflective metal layer inside the disc are being exposed to air, and begins to oxidise and partially disappear, thus nothing will be able to reflect the laser, and the data can no longer be read.
My point is that this is very unlikely to happen if the discs are kept in mint condition, because the protective lacquer-layer of a disc should by factory be an air-tight seal.

Of the over 240 games I have for the Saturn, I have yet to experience a single game that has stopped working. I have a few games that has deep scratches, and where disc rot has formed, and my copy of Donpachi has a strange "bubble" in the lacquer-layer (manufacturing error), which has caused a lot of disc rot, but luckily these have formed outside the data-area of the disc. So they still work, although I expect that these games will cease to function someday as the disc rot increases. This is inevitable. But the point is that this is caused by mistreating the games (not by me), and a manufacturing error.

Also, you should not cry wolf the instant you see a slight spot on the disc. I have several absolutely mint games that has a tiny, tiny spot in the metal layer, and when I compared the checksum of a few of them against rips found online, they still checked out just fine. I have even experienced this on a brand new factory sealed Saturn-game I opened.
I therefore expect these very, very tiny spots to have been there every since manufacturing, as the games, have zero scratches, and the seal should therefore still be airtight. They obviously still work just fine.

At the very least, this is what seems logical to me. As I've said I have not experienced a game that has stopped working personally.

If you (people in general, I'm not accusing you, Druid II) cannot handle your discs without scratching them, then you are a retard. It's not that hard.
It's my experience that people in the US generally treat their games like shit, with people in Europe coming in as a very close second. This is based on my eBay (and equivalent) purchases throughout the years. On the other hand, when buying from Japan, it's very rare to find even the slightest scratches on the games. Must be a culture thing I guess

Anyway, back on topic. This looks rad. Hope this will eventually lead to more fan translations of games

 

You gotta consider CD-ROM error correction. Your small bit rot dot might be small enough that the errors it generates are corrected by the cd reader, but once it'll be big enough, it will be unrecoverable. CD can correct burst errors of ~2.4mm thanks to the CIRC error correction implementation.

 

That's true. But as I said, I'm fairly sure that these small spots have been there since the discs were produced

 

Possibly - but the real issue is that the presence of the error correction on the disc makes it hard to know if they are deteriorating unless they hit the point where the number of C1 errors becomes too high for C2 to compensate. The relation between BLER and C2 error rate has a very distinct knee in it, and unless you have a suitably instrumented CD reader you can have no idea where you are on the flat portion before the knee.

 

You honestly don't know how great this is! So happy about someone actually making the effort to crack to Sega Saturn! So many good things can come out of this...especially for emulations. However one thing still bugs me about this, as what the title has stated "...CD Crack"...throughout the video learn the focus has shifted somewhat and sure yeah I know the disc drive is a slow death mechanism, even my Sega Saturn after 18 years it's still going well, and it's probably not hard to repair, but does this mean he has abandoned the whole CD thing???

I really hope that he would've finish cracking that bad boy!!

 

Afaiu, the protection is completely reverse engineered and, unless someone finds a non-obvious backdoor, it will never be possible to burn selfboots like on Dreamcast.

You can consider pseudo Saturn (custom code in the AR cart, written by jhl and CyberWarriorX) as the crack, because it circumvents the protection by executing custom code rather than simulating a genuine disc in a brute force, man-in-the-middle, kind of way, like a modchip does.

 

I'm so excited for this that I had a hard time sleeping the night I watched the video.
I really hope this releases for public to buy and enjoy. My Saturn lens died LONG ago and I'm not really tempted to replace it.

You sir are a genius!

As for disc rot, it mostly happen to cheaply manufactured games when exposed to humidity. The most rot I've seen was on Xbox 360, discs delaminate easily and humidity slips inbetween layers.

 

I take it no-one is with me on this thing???

 

FamilyGuy answered you. From the examination of the CD Block ROM there is no way you're going to boot a CD-R on the Saturn by any special burning technique. Sega did as Sony did and made sure their copy protection mechanism was not something easily reproduced. Or more precisely they made sure to do something you couldn't do with a standard CD-R.

Again as FamilyGuy said there are ways around this such as Pseudo Saturn on a Cartridge. Then the classic methods of a modchip or swap trick. Or if you are really lucky, an official System Disc. I think the DreamCast's unique case somehow made people have unrealistic expectations of being able to burn discs that would work without any system modification or trickery.

 

It's funny that SEGA went from no protection at all on Sega CD to insane security on Saturn and then back to ridiculous security on Dreamcast.

 

^I think you mean "Dreamcast"...

Honestly though, the Dreamcast would've had solid protection (custom format even) if it weren't for the V-CD engineering blunder and its subsequent use as a trojan horse for piracy.

 

Yeah well, it wasn't really tight.