XCKDIY Dreamcast IDE Board: Inexpensive GD-ROM HDD Replacement

told ya'

The entire problem relies on the fact that when the GDROM board is absent, the system have to work without an actual master device. Even if some another device is set as slave it may not work, specially if that device is an adapter. There are actually some workarounds in order to circumvent this situation but they are not functional for every scenarios.The proper solution will be when Dreamshell bootloader has the ability to boot directly from a slave device, I think @megavolt85 was working on such nice feature.

I also agree that a G1-ATA design based on a QSB for GDROM board would be great.

 

what are the work arounds? ive never seen any info on them.... id be more than willing to test and try for sake of the community as i already have most of the adapters the community would like to see working.

 

@Mobius, nice you got it working man! Damn, so I guess now you have a good ide board you don;t need now? Does it work well now that you tested everything out? Is it something you wanted to hold on to, or would you be interested in possibly selling it since you modded your own ide connection on your system?

I have a dead DC here, with a bad GDRom drive I was wanting to solder a mod chip to and have the IDE mod done to it, but I am still a noob with soldering some 40+ connections I don't feel confident to attempt. So a plug in solution like this I could get where I don't have to order something from a 3rd party Taobao middleman site would be nice.

 

Russian IDE mod

 

thats a neat solution megavolt85, but im trying to find a way to do a no case cut setup that has both the gdrom drive and the ide setup.. this is why i was so dead-set on trying to get an sd card to work, because there is enough room inside the gdrom assembly to hide an sd card push-push, which means you could put in either a disc, or an sd card, in the black plastic area of the gdrom drive without case cutting.... the dreamcast has plenty enough room to hide the hardware inside if i can find hardware that works.

 

if you find the cf to sd adapter that is working, you can try to use a TF micro sd extension adaptor. That way you can route to where you want it without a case cut. But if you do find the cf to sd adapter that works, please link it for us.

 

You could use the Russian adaptor as a base board, cut the IDE connector and rewire it to a CF (IDE) to SD adapter.

 

@Gizmo613 thats what i was going to do, once i got IDE->CF->SD working, i was going to mount an SD extension to a place one could fit alongside the stock GDrom drive, you couldnt have an SD card and a disc in at the same time, but you could do one or the other
@-=FamilyGuy=- too complicated for what im trying to do to use that adapter, considering it attaches to the motherboard locations and would be incredibly difficult to get the wiring to the gdrom drive area when you can just as easily wire to the bottom of the gdrom driver board. if i bought one of those boards, i would just use it with a case cut as intended.

 

Looks awful similar to the https://gametrackssite.wordpress.com/ solution - though I'm not sure which came first, and the boards are slightly different on closer examination...

 

got CF to SD adapter working, it ONLY works with a specific IDE to CF adapter
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Fre...p-HDD-Hard-Drive-IDE-Adapter/32795037760.html
This one works, none others ive tested do, this is also the one shown in the pictures of the xckdiy board on taobao (maybe he/they know something we havent figured out yet?), this one has real power regulation and a capacitor on the board (c2 and v1 on the board) that the others do not, it works with all 3 CF to SD adapters and it works with both my xckdiy board and my handmade gdrom board mod.... if anyone is interested, i could post some speed tests between CF and SD to CF, and i wonder if anyone better at this could track down exactly what makes this one work and the others not, so that maybe a general fix can be applied... i do know that when i first did the speed test once i got it working, the numbers on the SD card looked a little wonky compared to what the CF cards output, but i was using a class 4 4gig, i need to re-run the test using a class 10 u1 or u3, this could cause a problem as i know there are some games that are picky enough in dreamshell to react badly even if your CF card needs to be defragmented, but if we can reach/beat CF speeds, i cant imagine the compatibility being any worse.

 

Damn ni release by bad_add yet lol awe-well I'll just solder the ide ribbon and desolder all plugs from an ide to sata adapter, I'm going to do 1 case cut for the sata plugs to stick out and use a 3.5 hdd powered from the dreamcast pico psu.....I need 2 more bits of information tho, to keep the gdrom functional does it matter if I follow the gdrom controller pinout or the motherboard pinout? I'm just curious as I have a spare gdrom controller and if I screw up no loss. I also need to figure out how to set up the hdd to run from gdrom (file layout and apparently optimize the GDI files?)

 

if anybody's interested in such a thing I'm trying out something similar to the russian IDE mod pcb, though mine is using flex cable so I don't need to cut a hole, I'll probably create a seperate post about it when I've gotten some prototypes and tried installing it and etc, take pictures of it installed afterward and the hdd being held internally within the dreamcast (I really really didn't want to cut any holes in my case). Though it's likely to be dwarfed by anything bad_ad makes

 

Semi-necro bump, but I was just wondering if people had got these boards running on VA0 consoles? I've installed the boot_loader_devkit_nogdrom bios, but it doesn't seem to detect my IDE 2.5" drive at all.

 

I can confirm my VA0 NTSC-U console picks up my IDE CF-Card reader (in slave mode) just fine in DreamShell.
I've soldered the IDE cable to the bottom of the mainboard so my GD drive continues to work.

 

So does anybody know where any more of the original ones can be found at? I found the IDE CF adapters but I kind of want the HDD ones that sit in the area of the GD drive units.

 

But the IDE to CF adapters will fit your dreamcast if you sacrifice the original power brick for a Pico-PSU.

Especially if you get the PATA ones (powered) as they get their 5V from pin 41 and 42.
See this one for example: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/cf-...ct-Flash-for-notebook-computer/246329059.html

And there are two 5V spots near the IDE test points on the bottom of the mainboard.
So it's very easy to install, just get yourself a 20cm 44-pin IDE cable, split up the wires and route them through the small holes of the bottom plate.

I've tested up to 256GB CF (just look for used ones on eBay).
Good thing is that you can also keep your gdrom drive for original games.

Here's a pic of my old VA0 setup.


I'm now migrating over to my VA1 mainboard, so I'll post some more pictures when I'm done.

 

Damn, I think that looks great. Why wouldn't it fit or will with the regular PSU and then remove the GDRom? I thought that CF cards of that size were pretty expensive. Also do CF to SD adapters also work with these well? I already have a 32gb SD card but would try to get something larger if I could find something more reasonable.

I wanted to do the HDD mod just because I had a lot of old 2.5" PS3 and Xbox 360 and laptop sata drives laying around I would use with an adapter.

But yeah my plan would be to fully replace disc drive on a broken console to revive it. I got 2 completely kaput consoles here with broken drives. 1 of the systems had both drive motor and bad laser that a pot tune wouldn't even fix, and the other I bought from eBay and arrived DOA so tried to tune it and still doesn't read.

 

not all adapters work

this adapter work

 

This is all I manage to get when trying to boot with a flashed bios and IDE hard drive connected. I flashed my bios with boot_loader_devkit_nogdrom.bios and placed the contents of the DS folder in the root of the hard drive, which I've formatted to FAT32. Any ideas?

 

your HDD don't have pull up resistors and can't work without GDROM board