Dreamcast Hard drive Interface

dragonhead · Post by **dragonhead** » Fri Sep 12, 2008 11:19 am

Well since the Gamecube is getting one of these, why not the same for the dreamcast?

i feel that the dreamcast doesnt get enough hype around here. now that we know the PicoPSU will power a dreamcast quite well, we should be seeing a flood of dreamcast portables!

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Fri Sep 12, 2008 2:49 pm

If you're wanting to have it replace the GD-ROM drive, I wish you luck in designing and coding it. Considering no one has successfully reproduced the work of destop for a GC HD interface last I checked, I doubt anyone on these forums will design and build one from scratch to support the DC.

There exists plans to make an ISA and IDE interface, but it is slow and complicated. It also requires using a loader disc to use it. I think there is one loader program and NetBSD that can use it. See the DC IDE-HD interface on Archive.org. Of course, for portabilizing, there isn't much use for this, as you have to keep the GDROM drive anyway.

dragonhead · Post by **dragonhead** » Fri Sep 12, 2008 3:25 pm

yeah im just being hopeful. it most likely wont happen. and there has been news on the GC interface, have you seen the thread?

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Fri Sep 12, 2008 9:43 pm

The news on the GC thread is that one person is going to attempt to make it... Not that ground breaking. Designing an interface from scratch would be a lot harder, and it's taken this long to hopefully see the work destop has done rendered into an actual PCB.

dragonhead · Post by **dragonhead** » Fri Sep 12, 2008 9:55 pm

yeah this thread wasnt really 100% serious. wishful thinking.

Post by **Sparkfist** » Sun Sep 14, 2008 8:46 am

There was a web page I found years ago where a kid homebrew a HDD interface for the Dreamcast through the serial port (modem). I don't know much about it, and I'm not sure he got far with it, but it's worth noting here. If you want to try and find the site, I should have posted it somewhere in the dreamcast forums.

palmertech · Post by **palmertech** » Sun Sep 14, 2008 10:46 am

I remember that as well. Unfortunately, a LOT of the old dreamcast homebrew site have been sold to the "What you want, when you need it!" people.

It was not useful for a portable, though, it was only accesible by DcLinux. I believe there was an effort to boot the game from linux, but the serial port was simply too slow to stream the games. It was a cool proof of concept, not much more.

dragonhead · Post by **dragonhead** » Sun Sep 14, 2008 11:05 am

its funny tho because the GDROM interface is actualy IDE with a specialized sega ide protocol. figure out the protocol and it may be possible to emulate it with an fpga or some such. i really dont know... thats not my domain

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Sun Sep 14, 2008 2:52 pm

Sparkfist wrote:There was a web page I found years ago where a kid homebrew a HDD interface for the Dreamcast through the serial port (modem). I don't know much about it, and I'm not sure he got far with it, but it's worth noting here. If you want to try and find the site, I should have posted it somewhere in the dreamcast forums.

Just a quick note, the expansion port is parallel, not serial. At least two people had made the IDE/ISA interface, at least when I was still paying attention to the scene.

palmertech wrote:I remember that as well. Unfortunately, a LOT of the old dreamcast homebrew site have been sold to the "What you want, when you need it!" people. It was not useful for a portable, though, it was only accesible by DcLinux. I believe there was an effort to boot the game from linux, but the serial port was simply too slow to stream the games. It was a cool proof of concept, not much more.

Most of those sites are still on archive.org at least. I keep hearing about Linux, but the only OS shown to use it is the NetBSD port. The parallel port (modem expansion) didn't have enough pins to directly address all the IDE pins, so latches were used to buffer the data in a sense, and it now takes more than one cycle to read and write data.

dragonhead wrote:its funny tho because the GDROM interface is actualy IDE with a specialized sega ide protocol. figure out the protocol and it may be possible to emulate it with an fpga or some such. i really dont know... thats not my domain

I have never heard this before. Where did you get this information? The X-Box was the first console I've heard of using IDE, perhaps you're thinking of that?

palmertech · Post by **palmertech** » Sun Sep 14, 2008 4:57 pm

I can confirm it is not IDE. It is based on a common standard, though, it is a modified SCSI protocol.

dragonhead · Post by **dragonhead** » Sun Sep 14, 2008 6:26 pm

palmertech wrote:I can confirm it is not IDE. It is based on a common standard, though, it is a modified SCSI protocol.

D'OH! thats what i meant.

grossaffe · Post by **grossaffe** » Sun Sep 14, 2008 6:51 pm

palmertech wrote:I can confirm it is not IDE. It is based on a common standard, though, it is a modified SCSI protocol.

well that works too...

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Sun Sep 14, 2008 9:05 pm

Opps, wrong button.

stuntpenguin007 · Post by **stuntpenguin007** » Sun Dec 28, 2008 6:54 pm

I have an old gd-rom drive from a broken dreamcast I would be willing to sacrafice to this project if anyone wants me to try anything. it's one of the old kind that uses wires instead of a ribbon cable.

Kyo · Post by **Kyo** » Mon Dec 29, 2008 12:56 am

are there laptop SCSI drives? They wouldn't be very big (storage), would they?