Dreamcast Hard Drive

[Cast128dreams]

So do we have any news from that?

[semicolo]

well the oti chip used in some gdroms have an ide interface, the chips used in my gdrom is a toshiba without it. So I can't follow the lines to see if the ide bus is connected to the dreamcast or to a sega interface chip.

If someone's go a logic analyzer and is willing to reverse engineer the interface protocol, it could lead to homebrewn cdrom interfaces.
We're stuck there for now.

[Cast128dreams]

ok but please if you have any news post without second thinking....
Its burning thread

[Elven6]

Has their been any progress?

[ßüboni¢ $oñic]

i think ir would be best if we organized this line between financial providers, technical providers, and hardware donators. I would be a part of the former. I wondered if a super VMU would be possible to give an added boost of memory.

[quzar]

not gonna happen.

[kohan69]

And I was just thinking. The maple bus, is it 2mb/s per PORT? or 2mb/s TOTAL over the whole port system? If its over the whole port system, then any kind of bandwidth hungry device would render then entire controller/keyboard/vmu/mouse system immaculate, since you would have no bandwidth left for standard Dreamcast periphrials.

Exactly my concern.

Also, doesn't the bios have a direct i/o with the maple bus (game ports) ?

If a commercial game is ran, it would try to scan the peripherals connected and get confused when it stumbles on a maple-to-usb thumbdrive.
Definitely a boot-program would be needed.

A more realistic though is to program homebrew to utilize a blank memory card in an unused controller as extra ram, sort of like paging.
(ie, you're playin a 2 player game, but ports 2 and 3 have controllers with empty memory cards, and the homebrew uses the memory cards to buffer whatevers)

[BrooksyX]

I don't really know anything about hardware but here is my Idea. Would it be possible to mod a VMU to attach to a hard drive, then have a boot disc that tells the Dreamcast to read the hard drive, allowing you to be able to load homebrew and backups. Just my idea, doubt its any good though.

[kohan69]

BigMace- That's exactly what the last posts were about using the maple bus (controller port) for the hard drive.

You can boot homebrew from the VMU, but you are limited to 128kb.

Theoretically one could replace the vmu memory with a 1gb flashram, and boot games off there, but it's too much of a computability issue, not to mention bus limit (amount of information you can send at a single time).

Good thinking though

[BrooksyX]

lol, as I said I dont know much about DC hardware. I just wish there was someway for a dc to be able to use a harddrive. If it could I would play it alot more because I always have trouble with burnt discs, mostly because I only have the cheap kind where I live though.