stargazer
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SLC, UT

I've been in the market for a good Dreamcast SD adapter for a while now, never really liked the idea of buying some hacked cheap plastic chinese dongle. Helder over at the Assembler forums has had some decent internal boards made up.

I just installed one today, and it was a breeze. I was hesitant about taking the DC apart but was pleased to find out it's easier to take apart than an NES. Soldering the adapter board to the serial port was a little tricky, but with the old glob and solder wick technique it was no issue.

Also he shipped it the same day I paid for it, and it came within 3 days.

Overall great piece of hardware!

LINK: http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/sh … nal-SD-Mod

rygD
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I was looking to use either internal or the dongle for a while, but when I was ready to go for it I started looking deeper.  As I understand it there are some things that will run fine, some that run kinda half-assed or slow, and other things that don't work at all.  Can you confirm or deny that?  Shenmue is what I was in the middle of playing when I decided to give my DC a break, so if that works I might consider it an option again.

I read about someone trying to reverse engineer how the optical drive works with everything and make a module called GDEMU.  I think the goal is 100% compatibility when drives die.  When I last checked it was still not completed, but it looks like there may be some boards out there in the world now.  If you find the other options lacking at any point you might want to look into it.  The link is below, and earlier discussions are available on livejournal.  I wish I had kept my eye on this project.

http://gdemu.wordpress.com/

Last edited by rygD (Jun 8, 2014 7:14 pm)

stargazer
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SLC, UT

Yeah, as for now, the SD adapters are what they are which is not perfect. But what do you expect for 20 bucks? Actually a lot, since we've now all been tainted by R4 cards that have 100% compatibility and cost 5 bucks! I'll give shenmue a try later tonight and let you know.

I'm tentatively excited for the GDEMU, however, that may be a little more than I'm willing to spend on a dreamcast!

rygD
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Any info on what you get working and what has problems will help me decide.  As you said, it is 20 bucks and better than the little dongle type adapter imo.  I really don't have the money for a GDEMU at the moment, but maybe I will get lucky.  Also, thanks for sharing and bringing this subject up, which led me back to GDEMU, even if I discovered too late about the preorder.

stargazer
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SLC, UT

Just a heads up, couple things I've learned so far.

If your SD card is class 4 or lower, use DreamShell beta 4. If it's 6 or higher, use RC2.

The cable position in the post is wrong. The contacts should face down, with the blue side facing up.

arfink
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Minneapolis

Sounds pretty interesting to me. I have a pair of Dreamcasts with dead GDROM drives, and this would be nice to have. I mostly play shmups on it, since the DC is pretty much the best shmup machine ever outside of the Neo Geo. wink

rygD
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arfink wrote:

Sounds pretty interesting to me. I have a pair of Dreamcasts with dead GDROM drives, and this would be nice to have. I mostly play shmups on it, since the DC is pretty much the best shmup machine ever outside of the Neo Geo. wink

The dead drives are why I wanted to mention things like GDEMU.  I think there might be other projects out there like it, however I don't know how they compare. 

If I can get something to keep it alive after the GDROM drive dies my Dreamcast will probably be the only Sega console I keep around.  I prefer real hardware to emulators, but I have decided to stick with Nintendo stuff for now.  I won't be getting rid of much of my older gaming stuff, but any new purchases will be well thought out.  Dreamcast was the only Sega console I really wanted, and by the time I got around to buying one half the stuff I wanted to do I couldn't for various reasons.

stargazer
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SLC, UT

Should be noted that at least initially, you need your GDROM to boot dreamshell. After that it can be installed into memory.

I agree with rygD here. The Dreamcast is such an interesting system to me. While it's library was pretty limited, it did indeed have a good one.

What I really wish is that there was some kind of kit you could buy to mod the network card to wireless. You'd need that big connector port, but overall that adapter has quite a bit of room inside it for all sorts of stuff.

arfink
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Minneapolis
stargazer wrote:

Should be noted that at least initially, you need your GDROM to boot dreamshell. After that it can be installed into memory.

I agree with rygD here. The Dreamcast is such an interesting system to me. While it's library was pretty limited, it did indeed have a good one.

What I really wish is that there was some kind of kit you could buy to mod the network card to wireless. You'd need that big connector port, but overall that adapter has quite a bit of room inside it for all sorts of stuff.

OK, that's cool. I've noticed that with my dead GDROMs it's less of them being completely dead and more a case of not wanting to read certain disks and being fine with others. For example, my copy of Ikaruga reads fine on all of them, but SoulCalibur will read some of the time, and PowerStone 2 won't read at all. So I might get lucky.

arfink
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Minneapolis
rygD wrote:
arfink wrote:

Sounds pretty interesting to me. I have a pair of Dreamcasts with dead GDROM drives, and this would be nice to have. I mostly play shmups on it, since the DC is pretty much the best shmup machine ever outside of the Neo Geo. wink

The dead drives are why I wanted to mention things like GDEMU.  I think there might be other projects out there like it, however I don't know how they compare. 

If I can get something to keep it alive after the GDROM drive dies my Dreamcast will probably be the only Sega console I keep around.  I prefer real hardware to emulators, but I have decided to stick with Nintendo stuff for now.  I won't be getting rid of much of my older gaming stuff, but any new purchases will be well thought out.  Dreamcast was the only Sega console I really wanted, and by the time I got around to buying one half the stuff I wanted to do I couldn't for various reasons.

The way the GDEMU project has been going is a little sad, IMO. That guy must have had some horrible experiences with customers, which I can fully relate to.

stargazer
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SLC, UT

Yeah.....it's too bad. I think it's best to only do something like this in an extremely closed beta, almost not even announcement. I guess kind of like the way Kitsch has figured out, don't even really talk about it till it's ready to be sold. And for the love of all that is holy don't take any pre-order money.

arfink
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Minneapolis
stargazer wrote:

Yeah.....it's too bad. I think it's best to only do something like this in an extremely closed beta, almost not even announcement. I guess kind of like the way Kitsch has figured out, don't even really talk about it till it's ready to be sold. And for the love of all that is holy don't take any pre-order money.

Amen to that last bit.

It is my experience that people buying used video game systems can be some of the most difficult, exacting, and unpleasant customers around. Some are awesome, but after a long time in normal retail environments I can honestly say that dealing with some of these forum-buyer types can produce the absolute worst experience possible. tongue

stargazer
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SLC, UT

Yeah I'd have to mostly agree with you there. When I did my batch order of Mother 3 carts, I had 0 issues. Everybody was good, paid on time, and there were no problems. That was a group of maybe 13 people though. And I tried to be as explicit and up front as humanly possible regarding expectations. Actually now that I think about it I've never had an issue with CM.O trading.

Must be a good brew of people.

arfink
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Minneapolis

CM.O has been pretty awesome, yes. smile

rygD
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arfink wrote:

The way the GDEMU project has been going is a little sad, IMO. That guy must have had some horrible experiences with customers, which I can fully relate to.

I agree, but I can't blame him (at least for the things I have read.  I don't think he is really doing this as much for others as he is for himself.  I don't think he really wants to do it to make money as much as he wanted to figure out a way to fix this problem (or just see if he could do what he was thinking of).  Many people seem to think of it as a product for consumers, which I don't see it as.  I have a few things like this, and often there is no support, but this just makes things more fun for me.

stargazer wrote:

And for the love of all that is holy don't take any pre-order money.

This, for sure, especially at this stage, unless he has experience with that sort of thing and keeping things sorted.  Everyone does what they want, though.