...I wonder what it would take to develop some sort of method of playing the CD-ROMS through the Hu-Card slot? Or perhaps something that would plug into the back of a TG-16 or PCE? I for one would be willing to shell out a few hundred bucks or more for such a system. Any thoughts?
Nobody? I would think Krikzz or another developer would be able to make some money on something like this. I just checked on Ebay and there are a whopping 11 Turbo/PCE CD consoles available, ranging in prices into the thousands. And even those units aren't going to last forever...
KRIKzz has stated he is not interested in optical drive emulation. There are others out there who have done some systems 3DO, PS1, and maybe some others. Its not an easy thing to make from what I hear.
i did read a thread soemtime ago but i'm not very technically minded but the gist of it was the tg16/pce cdrom expansion was designed to communcate with scsi and may be possible with some work to use scsi drives with the consoles. i'm not sure where the idea ended up and was probably not possible due to some technical reasons beyond me but the idea was interesting.
The only problem that I remember, would be /RDY. It's not on the cart port. But that's assuming the CD hardware actually asserts it. I know it doesn't for BRAM (in which you have to manually put the CPU in 1.79mhz mode to access the slower device/memory). If the CD hardware never asserts /RDY, then I don't see why you couldn't do this sort of project. The CD setup uses /IRQ2 which *is* on the cart port. That and the whole upper 1megabyte address is accessible as well. There's audio in as well on the cart port, but it's mono. You'd need a pass through cable coming out of the card for stereo mixing. But yeah, if you used the back of the normal non-CD systems, then it's completely fair game. All once has to do, is look at mednafen's CDROM emulation source code to get an idea of what to do. It's pretty straight forward stuffs.
FWIW, it is painful enough as it is waiting for all 2 megs of Street Fighter II to transfer from the SD card to the Everdrive. I would hate to sit through the loading time of a CD game with red book audio... Wait, what kind of hardware would you need? The CD rom systems has an extra sound chip right? Would you have to do something like: connect expansion port to tiny computer which reads ripped game data from SD slot -> run software on tiny computer to send/receive data via the expansion port (and emulate extra hardware) -> tiny computer outputs video & audio to TV Would this perform well? I'd love to help rig up something... I'm always in search of new weekend projects (and cheap alternatives to PC Duos). I don't have the skills to do this one on my own though.
The "loading time" for SF2 is partially because of how long it takes to program the FlashROM, not just reading from the SD card. If you were talking about a CD game, you wouldn't be "loading" redbook audio. Infact CD games generally only have a tiny amount of RAM to work with, 64K to 256K or so. Then you have the arcade card which is a different beast. I'm sure if someone put the effort into it and had all the needed skills and knowledge you could make a "cd-rom" attachment that read from flash media. The additional sound capabilities could be handled. Maybe some day we will see such a device. I'm sure if we do it will suddenly make regular PC-Engine consoles alot more popular than DUOs.
Yeah, the only two audio stuffs are a simple single mono channel of ADPCM player, and CDDA (red book). Both can be emulated pretty easily, and streamed from an SD card. The bandwidth for both, is extremely low - so no problems there. A cue/bin or cue/iso/wav would be pretty easy to interface with. PCE CD has stuff like subchannel read, but I don't know of any games that use it (just the pack in CD+G). You'd need a cue+bin+sub to fully support it, but games don't ever read the subchannel data. Though support for it would be nice, if only for homebrew reasons. Could probably do something like an ARM mcu and SD card interface. There's nothing fancy at all, unlike the SegaCD.
Would it be easier to just create a USB to PCE adapter instead that just converts PCE commands to regular external USB CD-ROM commands? That way you could plug any USB CD-ROM to your PCE and never have to worry about drive replacement again.
Yeah but it will be much better if there will still be an option to read cue+bin from USB HDDs - modern drives are too noisy, not to mention it's a risk - to use original CDs with 48x-55x drives.
Hard drives are a nice idea, but I think an interface card would be the easiest to implement first. PCE <---> SATA (CD-ROM) or USB (CD-ROM) would be ideal in my humble opinion. I assume IDE <--> SATA adapters probably fall under the same category?
Just chiming in, though I don't know much on the grafx. If the interface is scsi then why not just use a scsi drive instead of usb or sata or ide. They are fairly common these days
I'm sure people are open to using any kind of common CD-ROM drive. It's just we need someone smart and experienced enough in bring these kinds of devices into the market to take up the challenge. I'm sure Krikzz could probably could do it. We just need to demonstrate there are loads of money to be made in this area. Considering so many people spend $80+ just to have a CD-ROM unit recapped/refurbished/lens replaced, this could be the definitive killer-app that ends up taking over the CD-ROM repair market.
