Is anyone working on a Saturn hardware CD-ROM emulator?

[dhau]

Wishful thinking on my side, but still...

I'm curious if anyone is working on some sort of hardware emulator of Saturn's CD-ROM unit, using a fast PIC and/or FPGA or something.

The way I see it, it would connect to main PCB through the flat cable, and serve BIN/CUE image from SD card. May be have a simple alpha-numeric LCD screen and five buttons for control (Left/Right/Up/Down/Ok/Cancel).

It would be fantastic.

 

[gameofyou1]

I would love to see this also. If I had time, I might attempt this. I have a large stockpile of non-working Saturns, and 9 times out of 10 the problem is with the CD drive (motor or laser). So, I would love to retrofit all those units with a SD card reader.

 

[ExCyber]

pinchy was working on it, but I don't know how complete the emulation functionality is. Info, schematics, and VHDL are on this page.

 

[dhau]

Amazing. That's exactly what I was hoping for. I wish I wasn't so lazy and lame and put my Altera DE1 board to some good use... I may try to use Pinchy's info to make DE1 work as a modchip as an exercise... Even if I can just read the data that goes between main pcb and cd-rom, it'd be very nice.

 

[Taffer]

I agree, this would be a fantastic mod. Loading from SD or other storage medium, preferably with a switch of some sort to select the media source. Is anything like this being worked on at the moment? Although I have a technical background, I've not had the opportunity to study the Saturn hardware in any detail although I imagine trying to reverse engineer any part of this system would be a struggle. That said, I'd be very interested in working on something like this. One thing I was pondering was how accurately and at what level is the Saturn's CD interface currently emulated in software? I would assume there are various real-world timing issues that could be circumvented in software, so perhaps this is completely irrelevant. Anyway, just a thought.