Dreamcast Broadband Adapter Scan

Is anybody willing to take their Broad Band Adapter apart and take a picture of the topside PCB and bottom side PCB please? Thanks

 

Is this any use to you?

http://users.skynet.be/t_chan/dc/dc_modems.xhtml#modems_bba

 

Bam! Thank you for the link. I guess my search words didn't hit it. Now if I get this straight from all my reading, it's just a software side why we cannot reproduce these with ease correct??

 

The primary problem is that it uses a custom chip that bridges the G2 bus to PCI (it's that 100 pin TQFP on the back of the board next to the connector that plugs into the DC) - everything else on the board is off the shelf. There have been a few attempts to reverse engineer that chip, and they all seem to have got stuck at the point where the console can identify the BBA device, but can't actually use it.

 

So reverse engineering to make a clone doesn't work? Is the connector well documented? Why not cook up a FPGA or other programmable chip and have it interface an existing ethernet hardware like USB to ethernet and make it work with BBA software?

 

Im very new at DC stuff, is that debug having a beeper for raw output of the sound to check its workings, can we add it to normal retails aswell?

 

The connector pinout is in the schematics, and hence we know at least what all the signals are called. The basic problem is that the G2 bus has two operating modes - one is a low speed mode that's used by the modem and is fairly self-explanatory and the other is a fast mode that's quite a bit more complicated and requires the addressed device to deal with the bus timing.

Using a PCI network card and a FPGA Is exactly what jj1odm did - but I understand that his implementation (like mine) locked up when you actually tried to transfer data.

http://jj1odm.sizious.com/g2bus.html#bba

There is a lot of good information on that site, although obviously a certain amount of Japanese language ability helps.

Yeah, it's just an amplifier and a little speaker connected to the SPK pin on the Conexant chip and an LED that's hooked across the opto that loops the line (so the LED lights up when the modem is off hook). The actual modem PCB is identical to the ones found in a USA retail unit.