Dreamcast SD Card/USB Adapter / Booing ISOs

Includes but not limited to: SNES, Genesis, Sega CD, PlayStation 1, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, Game Gear and I guess the Virtual Boy.

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crimsonnight
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Dreamcast SD Card/USB Adapter / Booing ISOs

Post by crimsonnight » Wed Jun 30, 2010 8:56 am

OK I didn't know such devices were in existance until I saw 'z2442/joey's post below where he says 'custom mods black swirl and such with sd card adapter added in just for isos/hb/emulators "mostly for my dev work".'
So I did some research and from what I gathered some sort of adaptor was in development but was never released to my knowledge:
http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/showth ... p?t=192408" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Does anyone know if there has been anymore progress on this bit of kit?

These seem to be a guides on how to make SD Card/USB Readers for the Dreamcast:
http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopi ... 17&t=16827" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://f17.aaa.livedoor.jp/~takotako/g2bus.php#g2usb" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

And here's some info I found on an ISO loader that was/is in development:
http://translate.google.com/translate?j ... l=ru&tl=en" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

So what do you guys think, does anyone have anymore knowledge regarding any of this? Do you think booting dreamcast ISOs of an SD card/memory stick will be a viable alternative?

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z2442/joey
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Re: Dreamcast SD Card/USB Adapter / Booing ISOs

Post by z2442/joey » Wed Jun 30, 2010 9:29 am

hey this is great did not know it would be interesting to any one well a while ago i found a pinout of the adapter on a Russian site a few weeks ago. look into something called "dreamshell" it can load dc iso off of the sd as well as homebrew . it also is a full file manager for the dc pretty much a full os for the dc.

--props to mmonkey for this
-http://www.mmmonkey.co.uk/console/sega/dc-region.htm
use that mod and the region changer to get the sweet black swirl that is how i did it it was very easy and took about 20 minutes.

-=FamilyGuy=-
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Re: Dreamcast SD Card/USB Adapter / Booing ISOs

Post by -=FamilyGuy=- » Wed Jul 07, 2010 7:28 pm

This nice design is a courtesy of JJ1ODM, everybody on the internet seems to forget to say it ...
If you wanna build it yourself:

The beast: http://f17.aaa.livedoor.jp/~takotako/dc ... php#sdcard
Image
Gd-rom ripper: http://f17.aaa.livedoor.jp/~takotako/dc ... hp#dcsdrip
Bin loader: http://f17.aaa.livedoor.jp/~takotako/dc ... p#dcsdload

Iso loader from DC-SWAT: http://www.dc-swat.net.ru/news/16/

Cheers,

FG

crimsonnight
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Re: Dreamcast SD Card/USB Adapter / Booing ISOs

Post by crimsonnight » Fri Jul 09, 2010 11:54 am

Thanks for the replies guys ^^ like I said, my tenchnical knowledge is extremely limited, could someone please just confirm for me: if you build an SD loader (as outlined in the links) can you then run use SD cards to run ISO images on a dreamcast? If so do you need a disc in the drive? Cheers

-=FamilyGuy=-
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Re: Dreamcast SD Card/USB Adapter / Booing ISOs

Post by -=FamilyGuy=- » Fri Jul 09, 2010 12:17 pm

You still need a CD to load the SD software. Not all games works in Sd-iso though, some a slow on the loading sides too.
It's a really cheap way to dump games in bin (2352 bytes/sector) format, way cheaper than the Broadband adapter!

FG

crimsonnight
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Re: Dreamcast SD Card/USB Adapter / Booing ISOs

Post by crimsonnight » Sat Jul 10, 2010 1:04 am

Thanks for the quick reply :) Sorry for the ignorance, but why did you mention the broadband adapter?
Bascially my situation is that I'm having a handheld made for me atm and I'm trying to work out how important it is to include this technology - I mean if it's as simple as it sounds then it would drastically increase portablility as I wouldn't need to carry discs around?
Also, concerning the loading times, surely they must improve with a faster speed class - and can you get it to work with SDHC cards?
Thanks once again!

tom61
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Re: Dreamcast SD Card/USB Adapter / Booing ISOs

Post by tom61 » Sat Jul 10, 2010 12:22 pm

crimsonnight wrote:Thanks for the quick reply :) Sorry for the ignorance, but why did you mention the broadband adapter?
Bascially my situation is that I'm having a handheld made for me atm and I'm trying to work out how important it is to include this technology - I mean if it's as simple as it sounds then it would drastically increase portablility as I wouldn't need to carry discs around?
Also, concerning the loading times, surely they must improve with a faster speed class - and can you get it to work with SDHC cards?
Thanks once again!
The broadband adapter (an ethernet adapter for the Dreamcast that slots into the modem port) can be used to dump Dreamcast games with the right software.

As far as the speed goes, the serial port, which the SD adapter gets plugged into, maxes out at 1.5Mbps, way below the speed of even Class 2 SD. I'm wondering if it can address SDHC as well, purely from the capacity standpoint.

-=FamilyGuy=-
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Re: Dreamcast SD Card/USB Adapter / Booing ISOs

Post by -=FamilyGuy=- » Sat Jul 10, 2010 3:10 pm

JJ1ODM wrote:The speed has about 650KBytes/sec.
Time to ripping GD-ROM is about 35 minutes in total.

SD card to confirm the operation:
HAGIWARA.SYS-COM / SD / 128M
Transcend / SD / 1G
A DATA / microSD / 1G
Kingston / microSD / 2G
A DATA / SDHC / 4G (but slow because of FAT32 Problem of this SD card?)
Transcend / SDHC / 8G
Seems like it works with SDHC, altough I personnally only tested with a 2GB standard SD card.
650kB/s isn't "great" but still it's better than standard coder's cable. And you don't even need a computer!

FG

crimsonnight
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Re: Dreamcast SD Card/USB Adapter / Booing ISOs

Post by crimsonnight » Sun Jul 11, 2010 5:55 am

-=FamilyGuy=- wrote:
JJ1ODM wrote:The speed has about 650KBytes/sec.
Time to ripping GD-ROM is about 35 minutes in total.

SD card to confirm the operation:
HAGIWARA.SYS-COM / SD / 128M
Transcend / SD / 1G
A DATA / microSD / 1G
Kingston / microSD / 2G
A DATA / SDHC / 4G (but slow because of FAT32 Problem of this SD card?)
Transcend / SDHC / 8G
Seems like it works with SDHC, altough I personnally only tested with a 2GB standard SD card.
650kB/s isn't "great" but still it's better than standard coder's cable. And you don't even need a computer!

FG
Cool, awesome it works with SDHC cards, and I don't need to worry about the speed class and long as it's at least a class 2 card?

It's alright, I'm not too interested in ripping games

My main concern is that I'm right when I say:
Basically my situation is that I'm having a handheld made for me atm and I'm trying to work out how important it is to include this technology - I mean if it's as simple as it sounds then it would drastically increase portablility as I wouldn't need to carry discs around?
... As in it's as simple as putting ISO files on an SD/SDHC card and booting them using a disc. Could someone please confirm this is the case for me before I request it's implimentation? Thanks!

*EDIT* Just found this: http://dcforums.co.uk/forum/index.php?showtopic=49199" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I'm very interested by this line: - Now DreamShell can be loaded directly from SD card using the "DreamShell from SD Loader".
Does this mean that you can boot ISOs without he use of a disc...?

Haunted360
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Re: Dreamcast SD Card/USB Adapter / Booing ISOs

Post by Haunted360 » Wed Nov 24, 2010 5:38 am

What about wiring it TO the Modem port, then doing all the hacking and modding...

I know it is a PCI Slot in disguise :wink:

tom61
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Re: Dreamcast SD Card/USB Adapter / Booing ISOs

Post by tom61 » Wed Nov 24, 2010 6:47 pm

Haunted360 wrote:What about wiring it TO the Modem port, then doing all the hacking and modding...

I know it is a PCI Slot in disguise :wink:
It would be very awesome if the modem slot was PCI but, sadly, it isn't. Wiring to the modem is quite involved with all the connections it has, and is apparently difficult to get drivers working at a good speed. Additionally, the speed comes from being a parallel (it is not very similar the old PC printer port, BTW) , and SD cards are interfaced serially(most homebrew stuff reading from SD cards use the SPI interface).

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