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Would love to see how this goes. My Dreamcast GDROM drive finally died a little while ago. I will be getting a new one, but a device like this would make keeping the busted one around for awhile.

You would be surprised how many folks I hear want to use one for the same reason.

I linked this forum before, but the English section of SWAT's site has some great information about what features Dreamshell will have in the future with the SD card adapter, and SWAT told me he is working on a new version of Dreamshell that will have many new and updated features.

http://www.dc-swat.ru/forum/forum-29.html

Amplibax wrote:

pakopako wrote:Hm, a piggybacking BIOS. That's GREAT news. I've gone through four (?) Dreamcasts since 1999 and the problem the majority had were just worn out GDrom units (laser gear broke, laser died, etc.). If I can flash my remaining systems, then it will be a great fall-back feature.

That would be amazing. I have two DCs with faulty lasers that could be used again.

Yup; all you need is one working GDrom unit to "pass around" -- or at least that's the theory.

Anthony817 wrote:Well, I found out this past week they are just now shipping it out... Waiting is the hard part.

Waiting is indeed difficult. Nothing like how its like on TV.

I don't think you can get around not having a working GDROM drive. You still need to still need to boot up DreamShell somehow and that would be from a CDROM. I don't think there's a replacement BIOS that will boot directly from the SD card. Am I mistaken?

Ok, so here's how it goes. You install a working GDRom drive in the defective Dreamcast after you have soldered the bios mod in it, then run the Dreamshell OS and go to the bios program, then you install the OS directly into the bios, and from then on, you can use it without the drive, but keep in mind, not all games work at this stage, but it should have better compatibility when Dreamshell 5.0 comes out.

The bios is piggybacking ontop of the original bios chip, and Dreamshell is written to boot files from the SD card too, but the data must be written to the bios.

Think of this as a custom firmware, and then you will understand how this works.

Anthony817 wrote:Ok, so here's how it goes. You install a working GDRom drive in the defective Dreamcast after you have soldered the bios mod in it, then run the Dreamshell OS and go to the bios program, then you install the OS directly into the bios, and from then on, you can use it without the drive, but keep in mind, not all games work at this stage, but it should have better compatibility when Dreamshell 5.0 comes out.

The bios is piggybacking ontop of the original bios chip, and Dreamshell is written to boot files from the SD card too, but the data must be written to the bios.

Think of this as a custom firmware, and then you will understand how this works.

Very interesting. How are the games that work? Do they have slowdown or do they run as if they were being run straight off the disk?

I'm very tempted to get one for a project this summer.

Anthony817 wrote:You install a working GDRom drive in the defective Dreamcast after you have soldered the bios mod in it, then run the Dreamshell OS and go to the bios program, then you install the OS directly into the bios, and from then on, you can use it without the drive, but keep in mind, not all games work at this stage, but it should have better compatibility when Dreamshell 5.0 comes out.

I haven't been following this development for awhile but that's pretty good news. I have a few BIOS chips but haven't done anything with them yet. It would be good to avoid the awful loading noise of the Dreamcast.

YoshiEgg25 wrote:Very interesting. How are the games that work? Do they have slowdown or do they run as if they were being run straight off the disk?

The main thing here is the transfer rate of the serial port and CDDA, which does prevent the games that use this type of audio heavily from working full speed, becuase Dreamshell doesen't support CDDA as lots of audio streaming from the SD cards takes up lots of bandwidth and the 5mbps maximum transfer speed the serial port can handle seriously impedes the performance of the device.

Games that don't use CDDA at all and that do boot with Dreamshell CAN work full speed however sometimes, but finding these games and creating a compatibility list are all that is really taking time now.

Emulators are the real winners here, as well as are homebrew games which don't really rely on CDDA audio, and these seem to be the best compatible programs to run with the system. Apps and like VMU Tool are also the things that are showing the greatest potential for compatibility, but many many retail games are working with this setup I can asure you.

Some examples of this I will list in videos below, and you can gauge for yourself if one of these things are worth buying for yourself. The only thing about getting them, is they take so damn long to arrive in the mail to be processed after "Buy from Taobao" recieves your orders. I ordered mine in mid january, and it is just now getting processed, if you can look through that right there, then the cheap price for the device and the potential that this thing has shown so far should be enough to get the most hardcore Dreamcast fans to get one of these.

One of my favorite videos is here, he really does a great job of explaining what you can expect with these mods.

Part 1.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gTpylJi9wk

Part 2.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-b1JfRo5Zo

Headhunter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XRp6KR2_cg

Code Veronica
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21l8upQ5CLI

Also just look through this list of videos for a better idea of what you can do with it.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_q ... apter&aq=1

My SD Adapter finaly came in last night! Tested my 32GB SDHC card on it with Gigawing and it is working 100% full speed!

I will have a full review of the product in the next few days when I get some more one on one alone time with it!

So happy now, can't wait till Dreamshell 5.0 beta comes out, THAT will be so worth it!

So can this be used as a VMU replacement?