I once stumbled across a dreamcast dev kit infosheet on the WWW and I was wondering -- will it play games as well? I know it's not a practical thing for consoles and that with things like boot discs you can play imports on the DC, but having a dev kit would be cool as a collector's item, wouldn't it?
DC Dev kit
- Thread starter bugbeak
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Actually the DC dev kit is very useful. One of the neat features is that it can use it's host PC's hard drive as a pseudo-drive. So all the data files can stay there and it just gets them from it as if they were on a disc. And yes it will play games as well as let you force a bajillion settings (like vga support) on them.
Yeah, I was lucky (unlucky) enough to come across someone with one of these at a local PC repair place. The guy there that I know pretty well (their only Mac expert) was talking about how one of his co-workers got this thing from a local developer that was getting rid of it. Unfortunately, I never had a chance to see it because the guy that got it quit work there the next day and I didn't have any way of contacting him about it.
My life is such a tragedy.
My life is such a tragedy.
About the blank GD-Rom comment - GD-ROMs are just CD-Roms recorded at a Higher speed and the read at a lower speed, enabling the to store 1 GB of data. The part that is read differently is the inside part, which is all of the actual game data. The outside track is where the developers can put all of the data that they want the end-user to acess, like sega swirl for PC's from the DC web browser, or wallpapers. They are sepateted by a region that says SEGA on it - people are getting closer to being able to read these on a normal PC drive every day.
Some links on the subject of GD-ROM
GD-ROM controller info
GD-ROM discussion on BOOB! forums
Hope this clears some of the info up!
Some links on the subject of GD-ROM
GD-ROM controller info
GD-ROM discussion on BOOB! forums
Hope this clears some of the info up!
It's actually the inner tracks that store the standard CD-ROM compatible data and the outer region that stores the game data. This is the case for 2 reasons. The first is that a normal CD-ROM drive starts reading at the inside and works its way out, so the low-density region wouldn't get recognized if it was on the outside. Secondly, on modern drives, it is much faster to access data on the outside edge of the disc than on the inside edge.
Also the high density portion has a tighter spiral as well as having the pits closer together along the spiral. I've checked the patents myself and they confirm this. There is no way to write the equivalent of a GD-ROM on a normal CD-R; however, with hacked firmware a normal CD-ROM drive could read the high density region of a GD-ROM. Felix (of FreeDO fame) is working on replacement firmware to do this.
Also the high density portion has a tighter spiral as well as having the pits closer together along the spiral. I've checked the patents myself and they confirm this. There is no way to write the equivalent of a GD-ROM on a normal CD-R; however, with hacked firmware a normal CD-ROM drive could read the high density region of a GD-ROM. Felix (of FreeDO fame) is working on replacement firmware to do this.
Possibly not a 100% equivalent (i.e. including low-density and pad/separator regions) on a typical CD-R with a typical burner, but Plextor has a drive with firmware support for burning an "overclocked" channel that can store 1GB on an 80-minute disc, and some vendors sell "90-minute" and "99-minute" discs with tighter track pitches, so I guess it depends on your definition of a "normal" CD-R. Of course, this still does nothing about whatever linking method GD-ROM uses to hide the second session from standard drives, but that's a minor issue in comparison with physically fitting the same amount of data.
Felix is working bigtime on this. I also did get the regions separated wrong. Why couldn't a regular CD- burner burn a GD-ROM? On one of the pages i provided a link to, it says that a GD-ROM is a CD recorded at twice the speed it is read at, "tricking" it into thinking it has more room . . . Couldn't ISO's be burned to a CD? Otherwise, or regular burned Homebrew CD's would not work? I am not sur on this, but thats what I think. THat Plextor drive souds like the best candiate for the job.
I seem to remember a document released early in the US release of the Dreamcast talking about how Yamaha had developed the method to write a gig of information to a regular CD-R and this is, of course, the standard that Sega adopted (this is all from memory btw, not exactly sure of the details or even if the information is valid from a good source), but around that same time another software company had discovered a similar way to store about a gig of data using the yamaha burners. Apparently there were certain models of Yamaha burners that could be used in conjunction with this software to burn GD-ROM compadible discs.
I believe there are several sources that cite that the GD-ROM burners were essientially a somewhat common Yamaha burner used in conjunction with a set of software, one set created by Yamaha, another set created by this other software company. I'll have to see if I can't dig this document up for those who are curious. So if you are able to obtain this software, theoretically (if this document was true), making GD-ROM discs is possible.
I believe there are several sources that cite that the GD-ROM burners were essientially a somewhat common Yamaha burner used in conjunction with a set of software, one set created by Yamaha, another set created by this other software company. I'll have to see if I can't dig this document up for those who are curious. So if you are able to obtain this software, theoretically (if this document was true), making GD-ROM discs is possible.
Considering the DC is the only ahrdware to use such standard, I don't think those Yamaha burners were ever sold with other purpose other than being GD-ROM burners. It's unlikely they were avaliable at retail.
But the Dreamcast can boot CDRs, why would you need to burn GD-ROMs (moreso considering the dev kit allow you to test code without burning discs)? To make a homebrew game with 1GB worth of data?
But the Dreamcast can boot CDRs, why would you need to burn GD-ROMs (moreso considering the dev kit allow you to test code without burning discs)? To make a homebrew game with 1GB worth of data?
Originally posted by M3d10n@Mar 17, 2004 @ 12:29 PM
But the Dreamcast can boot CDRs, why would you need to burn GD-ROMs (moreso considering the dev kit allow you to test code without burning discs)? To make a homebrew game with 1GB worth of data?
As far as being able to write GDs goes, I've heard of late-gen DCs only being able to run GDs, though that might be 1) crap or 2) they may simply be referring to DCs that cannot run MIL-CDs. But I've never seen anything definitive on this one way or another. The second thing they could want this for is pirating large DC games without downgrading video/audio files. There is another possible use I can think of that would be very good for homebrew in general - speed. What is the max speed the DC can read a CDR on the outside? Inside? What about a GD, with a more densely packed CAV setup? I don't know.
Anyway, I think that just being able to READ GD-ROMs would be a great thing, as it would allow people to run actual game discs on an emulator in the future, though there's no rush for this. Yeah, you could use this to pirate DC games more easily, but if you have an emulator/real DC in the first place... you could just download the games. It's too late to do anything about that. I suppose (if the author is concerned about use of pirated games on their emu) you could try and code the emulator to only load from original GD-ROMs, and utterly remove its ability to load images or non-GD discs. But I don't know how successful you would really be. For instance, there are programs that can mask whether a disc is a CDR or not.
And possibly of some interest:
<!--QuoteBegin-Rand Linden
If you have a Non-MIL CD Dreamcast, you can change the ROM to an older version to get MIL CD capability.[/quote]
And then there are programs like Daemon-Tools that can make an image look like a disc in a drive, complete with "weak sectors" and what-have-you. The principle is basically the same - as long as you have a consistent driver model that all programs have to access the hardware through, any piece of the hardware configuration can be faked by a driver.
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