[WWW.DC-SD.COM] Do you know anything about it?

Just found this cool site that sells SD readers and Dreamcasts with them built in.
Now i don't know anything about this site, so it might as well be some scammer.
Does anyone here know anything about this page? Like is it real?


http://dc-sd.com/

 

Hard to say. That price for modded Dreamcast? Not sure on it. From what I can tell they have done these mods on the console: internal SD reader, flashable BIOS chip piggybacked to original chip, (I think the switch on the side is for swapping between them) and Dream Shell burned to BIOS chip.

$40 for a console plus all that sounds a bit suspicious to me...

I will buy from them next month just to see if it's legit or scammer. I can afford to waste nearly $60 to see...

 

Exactly, I expected they would at least ask $80 for it but then I was like whoa only forty bucks for all that?!
So that does seem suspiciously cheap.
The other thing is, I don't think there's a big market for this kind of stuff so it seems kind of pointless to waste time & effort on a small-time scam like this..
I'm happy you're willing to do that because i don't have $60 to burn

 

It's been years but I'm pretty sure I've bought an SD card reader from them. I've heard them recommended before for SD card readers. But I never knew they offered mods. Interesting.

 

Rather low price, more power to em.

 

Cool, so they're legit?

 

That is a low price. I would be tempted to buy one of their DCs if they are real.

 

Only if SD loading worked as it should =/

Maybe in a few years.. I mean if there wasn't 3 people working out a GD-Rom emulation this would come as a good solution but.. meh..

 

So it still isn't working?
I know the serial adapter sd reader is slow and some games lag when loaded from sd, but isn't the internal sd faster?
Or is there some other issues?

 

I think it's the same thing.
The SD adapter is hard wired and the slot is cutted on the shell. So no difference at all.

The alternative Bios doesn't improve either the game playback. Only a small portion of the games work and none with audio streaming work or whatever that audio format the Dreamcast had.

(and yes.. I know audio streaming is the way some game cube games passes the audio)

 

i think it's still SD mod from SWAT from DC-SWAT site. maybe better hold money for useful things , $60 is good support)))

 

The prices for the VGA and S-Video cables are VERY reasonable, if the site is trustworthy. The SD-card install looks very natural. However, while SD through Serial is slow, the biggest problem is the OS, Dreamshell. It's simply not good enough, and converting ISO's for it is an aggravating, fruitless process.

 

I have a SD reader for my Dreamcast. Have yet to get a single game to boot through Dreamshell. Even the ones confirmed to be playable from SD like Sonic Adventure 1.

Hence my reason for pushing GD-ROM emulation so much.

 

My fear is that some of the folks working on emulation seem to be testing/developing with Dreamshell in mind. I think that's a huge mistake.

 

I do like Dreamshell, but I'd prefer to get a "true" GD emulator working one day.

It just so happens that Dreamshell is one of the few realistic options that we have for getting games to run from the IDE adapter atm.
(realistic meaning not having to code a whole IDE loader / file system / menu system from scratch)

I have sent out IDE adapters to two people already, and I'm awaiting a few more parts to send out to the third.

I've also ported my GD Emu code to the new DE1 board, and I've trying hard to get a NIOS II core running in the FPGA.
This would mean that I could get all sorts of debug info, and code everything in C.

If anyone has any experience with NIOS II stuff, please let me know. I've yet to get anything to work.

EDIT: btw, I know I've said this before, but if any of you have C programming experience (or know anyone) and REALLY want to help get this working,
please don't think that you wouldn't be much help if you're more used to Linux / Windoze stuff...
The DC wouldn't be much of a stretch for a seasoned coder, I just don't have enough hands-on knowledge of this type of stuff.

I'm starting to think the main issue with the IDE adapter code is down to interrupts and the way KOS works.
It would take me far too long to learn all the ins and outs of KOS to understand why it's not loading, so might be better to create a simpler standalone "bootloader"?

I support true GD rips in as much as I'd rather skip support for CD rips altogether on the real emulator and just concentrate on GDI's.
I'm sure most people would prefer the full rips - even if a lot of games have a huge amount of empty space, a ZIP download will still compress that into a much smaller file.

What do people think though? Do most of you prefer the idea of 1-1 GDI support?

That's assuming that all the games can still be downloaded as GDI's, but we can always start another GD ripping marathon when the time comes.

OzOnE.

 

Can you be a little more more specific? I haven't done anything serious with NIOS-II, but getting it to the point where it would at least flash LEDs under program control was pretty easy.

There were three things that caused me problems:

1) Unless you have a very large FPGA, you can't instantiate enough internal RAM for the BSP and HAL
2) If you try and get around 1 by using SDRAM then you need to phase shift the SDRAM clock or you will never hit the setup time requirements
3) (Cyclone-III only) - the "EPCS ROM" component won't use the dedicated config pins and you have to create external ports for them and wire them to the same pins that are being used for the config device. You also need to set up the pins in the device options to "normal IO" - the bug was that even after doing this the fitter still complained about multiple signals on a single pin and in order to fix it I had to edit the project file manually.

But apart from that, it worked - I had it set up so that the code in the EPCS ROM just loaded a blob from the SD-Card and jumped to it so that I didn't have to keep on using the NIOS flash programmer (which seemed a bit flaky) - for debugging, you could just download the code directly to the RAM from Eclipse.

It worked pretty well for me - the biggest problems were no CD-audio and bad video (stuttering, out of sync, etc..) - but I didn't have a problem getting things to boot. I have to admit that the original jj1odm tools are a bit fussy, though.

Edit: I just noticed that the DC-SD guy is showing off - if you look at the photos for the VGA cable, there is a Divers 2000 on the left behind the monitor, and the DC controller sitting on the stand is the Divers one, too.

 

I Can use it on a crappy country in Europe where the voltage is 230 V?

 

Line voltage doesn't matter. It gets converted down to 12 volt and lower. All Dreamcasts use the same voltages inside after the power supply steps it down to usable voltages and converts it from AC to DC.

All consoles, computers, phones, and whatnot do this. Some just have the power adapter outside on a big wall wart plug.

 

You will need to use a stepdown transformer or swap out the PSU for a European one. Judging from the square end on the power socket in the photo, they are using US units, so you will also need to make sure that your TV can support 60Hz (which it probably can, unless it's very old...).

 

Actually I have TV-Monitor on my room, I also play all games if available on 60Hz mode. About the DC unit I want to be an Japanese because I love them very much.
Also it need to move to Dreamcast Topic, this is for Master System and Megadrive.