Saturn HDLoader

Well it's being made in China, so perhaps that will make it cheaper? There's also a bit of an arms race on Saturn, all with different interfaces on three different projects. Whoever gets there first could reap the most success.

 

Maybe soldering/assembling costs will be cheaper in China, and if hdloader author produces this cartridge in large quantities, parts cost may be reduced a little, but it will probably be more expensive than other solutions anyway.

And yes, it is good to see a lot of ARM-based homebrew stuff for our Saturns

 

Getting their product out first probably won't make them the most successful. There might be some people that jump on the first thing available and settle for it. But many others may wait for the product they think is best. And even if you're first, if your product is greatly inferior to what comes later then you're in trouble.

I'm interested in the Saturn project that uses the MPEG card slot. I'd rather not have something that goes into the Cartridge slot. That's where the 4MB RAM cart belongs.

 

Now that Rhea is finished. Has anyone purchase one and can tell us how well it performs?

https://gdemu.wordpress.com

 

In short, incredibly well. Compatibility is damn near perfect, and it actually makes some games load faster due to the lack of drive seeking. You know how some games don't progress until the drive laser moves on to another point of the disc, so it can start a music track or so (like when you do a continue in Virtua Fighter 2)? That's a small half-second lag on a real unit, but it is instantaneous with Rhea. There is also a downside though, a lot of games do not inform you whenever they are loading something, and you can only tell that they do from the drive motor noise - with Rhea there is no noise whatsoever, so you can't tell that some games froze the screen because they are loading (like Dodonpachi when it transitions to the next level).

And you can tell how well it works by this being the only problem with the unit!

It can use some improvements - there is no game selector and only one button to skip folders, which can get confusing a bit, fortunately you can recognize most games from the CD Audio tracks. But an extra button and a game selector both can be added once the firmware will support them.

One other downside is that you have to name everything as "disc.cdi", or with clonecd, "disc.ccd + disc.img + disc.sub". Which takes some time to set up. What I do is copy over all games, create a blank text file with the filename being the games name in every folder, and then use Total Commander to search for every non-txt file on the disc and mass rename everything to disc.(extension). This may also get changed in firmware though, since it should be technically possible for Rhea to only check the extensions in each folder and not specifically looking for the "disc" in the filename.

 

How did you get one? Which I could have picked one up.

 

He offered up the 1st batch (20 pin only) on 11-20. I doubt hes still taking orders for it. I think hes still working on the 20/21 pin version. Just keep an eye on his blog:
https://gdemu.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/cold-is-here/

no, it just emulates the cd rom drive, like how his GDEMU works.


Mine should be here in a couple days. Its currently at the mail hub in Dallas.

 

how much was it? 130eur?

 

Yeah, 130 euro. A bit pricey but it included shipping.

 

looking forwards too seeing how it does.

 

It's not though, it's right in line with what other creators of these products charge.

 

It might go down a tad now that mass production is possible, but I wouldn't expect to pay much below 100 for it any time soon. Still not sure if I want to bite that bullet myself...

 

Agreed. It's totally inline with something like a mega everdrive. The second the dreamcast and saturn versions become easily available I will grab them!

 

The crazy thing is - you could buy a retail saturn and (probably) all the games you really like for less than 100 euros... I'd buy this and GD-Emu eventually, but when you weigh it all up, these things probably aren't the best saving in the world.

I'm curious, though. Looking at both Rhea and GDEmu - how much do the parts cost to make these devices (just the parts, not the labour) - Does anyone have a vague idea?

 

Maybe you bought all of your games in the 90s? Saturn games are extremely expensive. One of my favorite games for the saturn, hyper duel is almost $400 USD.

 

Saturn games are quite expensive.

As for price, PCB alone probably cost quite a bit already (since it is still a low production run). Price on these ODE is really what you expect, not shocking really.

 

I have a Rhea and am very impressed by how perfect it works.

Games definitely seem to load faster (although not as quick as my dreamcast with the GDemu).

As for price it's certainly not overpriced! If you think so you need to research how much certain Saturn games go for and consider all the time and effort that's gone into making this.