Hello all,

I've been lurking on here for a while and thought I'd finally post since I found something that might be of interest to you all.
it would seem as if someone has figured out how to hook up or modify a (from the looks of it) laptop or maybe just a regular CD-ROM drive to a Dreamcast and has it reading reliably.

Not sure how exactly this was performed as the uploader seems to only speak Spanish. I sent him a message about it so I'll post when I get some more information back from him.

It might just be the innards of a GDROM mounted in a different enclosure, but none the less, inspiring since the almost 12 year old GD-ROM drives certainly have wear on them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yruN_oTKSH0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egv_LBMp ... re=related

This is exciting since I may have a laptop type Dreamcast portable in the works soon.

EDIT: Even more interesting news. Apparently the Dreamcast actually has an IDE controller onboard!

http://jonr.neovanglist.net/?p=20

-Thanks for reading,
Artyom

The physical layer is IDE

The electrical layer is an extended and modified ATA-4 protocol with custom commands by Sega.

Until someone spends quality time with a logic analyzer and finds out the command set and what new instructions there are, this'll never happen.

A little bit more info on the drive hack in the video, auto-translated from Portuguese, is in this post. It's not using a whole IDE drive, just the compatible internals hooked to the Dreamcast's drive controller with a PIC to handle the eject/insert functionality.

Hmm, well thanks for the info. I think that's what I'll end up doing anyways.