Chankast to Xbox Port Rumour

[Mental2k]

Ah fair enough, I live in UK :'( still. It's a nice dream eh.

[Cap'n 1time]

ah... i had forgotten about icarus with all the excitement of chankast. For GD support, wouldnt you need some kind of hardware driver?

[quzar]

They had written one.

[Mental2k]

quzar, did it involveman IDE interface and literally plug a GD rom into the PC? Or was it a driver that could make a cd rom worun at the correct play/read speed?

[Kamjin]

It would be a task on it's own to get a CDReader to read
a GDROM.. it's possible, but you'd need to take over
the firmware, and make the necessay changes to handle
the "backwardsness", and head seeking contorls..
So they'd have to be modified on a 1 by 1 basis..
It was more likely that it would only support GDROM
raw dumps. unless they were addind support for
the Katana/Naomi burners..

[Cap'n 1time]

Is GD rom similar to the Xbox's weird DVD rom? It runs disks backwards? Or is it some kind of encryption/compression that no one has broken into yet? can someone explain in detail what the heck this GD rom actually is?

[Mental2k]

Check out on dcemulation.com, theres a tutorial on there somewhere on how they think it works, If i remember correctly its omethin to do with data tracks being written closer together hence allowing more of them, but dont quote me on that.

[wraggster]

actually check out http://www.boob.co.uk for the information

they have the proper info there.

[Kamjin]

Simmilar in ideology to the xbox..
No one's actually analysed it enough to see what's actually being done. In practical terms, Just like a DVD can hold 4.7G on the same surface, a GD is a sillilar idea.
They can do this by placeing the tracks closer together, or by increasing the density, so you could hold more data for each track. My guess is that it's a little of both.
CD's could have done this also long ago, if we didn't have the 99:99 problem, and backwards compatibility.

To shift the conversation a bit..
I hope that in the future console companies start embracing the idea of homebrew.. Sony has, but not in the right fasion with the Yarozeh, and linux.
If they made a console that can physically alter it's
memory map, features etc.. if a pressed media or CDR was put in, and released a free dev kit. I think that would probably fly..
Imagine if the gamecube had done this in the begining.
on the piracy side.. you can't fit commercial games in 210MB, not to mention they wouldn't play due to the HW changes.. but you'd be able to have a good homebrew selling point as well..

[Mental2k]

But it would dissuade people buyin so many commercial games if free ones are available, remember games companies make their moneys on the games and lose it on consoles!