Hard-Drives on Dreamcast?

[Unidentified Assilant]

Is it possible to use a PC Hard Drive on a Dreamcast? I want to know, please tell me how if possible.

[scherzo]

If you search the dcemulation.com forums, you'll find lots of discussion about this. It appears that it is indeed possible but a very difficult project. Also, there's no software that supports it. So you would have to learn how to code for the Dreamcast as well.

It seems like the general reaction in that forum towards this idea is, what's the point?

Nevertheless, here's a link I found that has a circuit diagram for the interface.

http://www.fuzzymuzzle.com/Bitmaster/DC ... erface.htm

It doesn't look that bad at all, actually. I already program for the dreamcast. So this is a project I might want to try myself. Good luck if you decide to do it.

[JackFrost22]

I want to do that same thing started it but then it got hard i should finish it someday...

[Unidentified Assilant]

I want to because the nexus memory card I was going to get is too small to play games on if connected where the GD Drive should be.

[MM007]

According to that link, there is a NetBSD driver....

[Thornwillow]

Im going to make a portable DC, i was wondering if i could put a hard-drive in a DCp, because i wont to make DCp's and sell them with 5GB hard-drives, instead of useing a VMU, is it possible?

[Unidentified Assilant]

If you connect it to the VMU part on a controller and get the Dreamcast to think it is a VMU, then probably yes.

[Niku-Sama]

you know it might be possible to write data to a hard drive in a similar manner of a GD-Rom (or god d*mn romis what i call it) and then create a menu to select what ever games ypu put on the drive....but with all this said....

do you even have a dreamcast?
i thought i read you got rid of it

[Unidentified Assilant]

I did, but I still lurk around this forum

[Alchemist]

If you connect it to the VMU part on a controller and get the Dreamcast to think it is a VMU, then probably yes.

And how exactly do you propose to do that? It's not just a case of wiring it up and hoping for the best, you'd need to make your own circuit to interpret VMU reads and writes and save them on HDD. It'd be difficult even if you had something like a computer science/electrical engineering degree and the necessary relevant experience.

Writing software for the DC that made use of some external hardware like a HDD, as Scherzo suggested, would be easier (but of little use to you).

[Sparkfist]

Alchemist is right. Though there is a 3rd party VMU that can be conncted to a computer there is really no way to wire a hard drive directly to the Maple Bus. If you want try something that wont require like 5 years of programming experiance, the serial port in the back is believed to be a usb. You could write a drive to save your file to a thumb drive and with those you dont have any issue of damage from shacking or weight.

[tom61]

Alchemist is right. Though there is a 3rd party VMU that can be conncted to a computer there is really no way to wire a hard drive directly to the Maple Bus. If you want try something that wont require like 5 years of programming experiance, the serial port in the back is believed to be a usb. You could write a drive to save your file to a thumb drive and with those you dont have any issue of damage from shacking or weight.

The serial port on the back is not USB, however, it does have a nice high transfer rate of 1.5Mbps. Only the PS2 and XBox consoles have USB.

[Sparkfist]

Well even if it is not USB, 1.5mb/s is a far faster then the maple bus on the controller ports that limits transfers to 500kb/s or less. Its a damn shame the Dreamcast Zip Drive attachment never made it.