Saturn CD Block ROM dumped

wonderin what the status is so far

 

The guy posted that he needs to finish his PHD which is about 2 months of his time so give the guy a break as it's only been 4 weeks and last I checked it's 8 weeks for 2 months. I along with many others are eagerly anticipating his release or news of progress but he will post info of the status when he is ready to do so. Let's give the guy a break till he decides to do so.

 

PHD students always seem to be 2 months from finishing! It's a very difficult thing to do, lots of politics involved.

 

i got you im jus now finishing up my associates jus excited is all with his work

 

Is this useful to exploit the SH1? With all the cache, it would be useful for extra ram. Excellent work!

 

No. You can already use that RAM by writing sectors to the CD block and reading them back later (although this is poorly documented, the Put Sector command will do it); there's not really anything more useful to be done.

 

BUMP!!! any updates???

 

any news so far? really excited for this project!

 

Could you please not keep bumping with pointless asking-for-news? It's not gonna make anything happen faster. Thank you.

 

whats the difference in load times with this modboard to the cd drive load times?

 

from gdemu(and Rhea) author:

 

That is true as long as you simulate the drive itself. Higher speeds are possibly achievable if you simulate CD block, like SAROOO does.

 

Are you working to improve SAROO design?Which is its functional status at the moment?

 

Yes. It boots and sucessfully starts a bin files, but some rare CD accesses return wrong values due to the reasons yet unknown. If it's a pure data (which the CD info mostly is), it appears as corrupt images/video/etc, but as long as it's a code, CPU freezes. It takes about a 2-3 minutes for a cpu to freeze while showing game intro screen/video.

 

This project uses accurate timing, so the original 1x/2x speeds apply. It would be possible to drive it faster, but depending on the software's use of the CDB could lead to crashes - I might make it a user configurable overdrive someday, but don't count on it.

 

Hi, can we call you Dr. Engineer finally?

 

Still a couple of weeks' work left. When I'm done, there will be a proper announcement and a full update on status - there has been a lot of progress since I last wrote.
Here's a teaser to keep you all happy:

That video was made in a custom fork of Yabause which emulates my card, but the functionality is now working (and a little more streamlined) on real hardware. Stay tuned for more goodies in a few weeks...

 

Brilliant, my dear engineer.Also Deunan of Rhea has been very interested in your upcoming device.
So, you wrote an emulator of your card and run it into a Saturn emulator, it seems a pun.Again great job, I'm sure your project will be a huge success.Is it FPGA or CPLD based?
Which is more or less the compatilbity with games?

 

Indeed. Writing emulators for various things has actually been a major boost to my development productivity; I have greatly enjoyed this.

There's a CPLD and a microcontroller.
Compatibility will be pretty much 100%; that's the reason for my approach, working with the existing CDB. It is a stupendously complex piece of software and it has many, many quirks. This is in contrast to the complete replacement in SAROO. Of course, software that requires an MPEG card cannot function - there's no way to implement all of the MPEG decoding without a dramatically more complex and expensive plug-in card. So there are a few titles that will not be compatible.

 

A grand total of one, Lunar, which already has a non-mpeg release, so not a great loss.

Stupid idea though, you couldn't possibly daisy chain an MPEG card into your device? And only using the decoding hardware on it? It would be way too complex to do, I guess.