GDEmu News - Marooned

I was postponing this entry in hope the situation will resolve itself but alas… Long story short, you’re looking at another delay. I’m just about to run out of SD card sockets, obviously I’ve ordered more weeks ago but it seems like the distributor messed up somewhere – so my supplier has moved the delivery date to first week of April and frankly I don’t feel confident it’ll be kept.
This is actually a pretty strategic part and I usually keep an ample stock but there are limits – I’m not a warehouse and these are not dirt cheap either, so by the time I decided to purchase more it was already gone from the inventory and put on order. This is worse than usual because it will affect both GDEMU and Rhea.
Now, if the early April delivery date is not pushed back further it’ll only be a week or so before I can resume work, but if not you’ll just have to wait some more.
In other bad news, some time ago I created this:
https://gdemu.files.wordpress.com/20...pg?w=300&h=225
It’s a 20 to 21-pin cable, made to test a theory. It did it’s job and by that I mean it verified that you can’t just put a 20-pin Rhea into 21-pin Saturn. Won’t work, unless all you’re interested in is CD audio playback. The 21-pin models have a sligthly different protocol and need a few more signals to work properly – so basically at this point a universal ODE for Saturn is rather unlikely. Too many things would have to be put on the PCB, thus raising the cost and complexity. Plus I would not be able to create one without making some changes to the existing 20-pin model, and that would mean two separate FW files anyway. And if I have to do separate FW then I might as well just do a separate PCB just for the 21-pin Saturns and leave existing (and proven) design as-is.
In fact I might even pick a different name for new ODE as people are already confused by the whole 20/21 pin issue, plus VA designations. But that is something still TBD I guess.
On the bright side, I did promise you this:
https://gdemu.files.wordpress.com/20...pg?w=300&h=225
Gold-plated PCBs for GDEMUs are exactly the same version as the latest HAL ones, except more expensive to me. But somewhat easier to solder so I’ll be sticking with those from now on.
Plus I hope the break, if there is any, will finally give me some time to do serious PCE work. I need to get that prototype running because Saturn was supposed to be a quick side project but between GDEMU delays and very, very busy work schedule I have now it basically took over everything else. It’s not a time wasted though, Saturn gave some serious problems at first and I learned a lot from that.
One last thing, quite important one: PayPal has changed it’s UI and while it seems to work faster, I consider it less useful. I can no longer issue group payment requests and have to do each one separately. I also don’t see transaction status in the browsing list so I can’t easily tell which ones I’ve updated with tracking number and which ones are fresh and not processed yet. So I use email notifications but those sometimes don’t come. So, if you pay and then nothing happens for more than 3 days, mail me. But not sooner please, I don’t need even more junk mail in my inbox.
Also, pretty please, DO NOT give me your full shipping address when ordering, unless that address is different from your PayPal address – this only makes me check everything twice for nothing. All I need is your country/region to make sure I can ship there. On the other hand if you wish to provide a different shipping address make sure you point that out clearly, and that you give it to me before you pay. Otherwise I might see the PayPal email first and ship to the wrong address.


https://gdemu.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/marooned/