Dreamcast Reading An IDE Hard Drive

evilpaul13 writes: "Somebody got an IDE Harddrive hooked up to his Dreamcast! He plans to build a new case for it as a later project. Maybe this will encourage new Linux for Dreamcast work with the greater possibilities it presents for a small SH6 based web server?" This is still a work in progress -- but it's encouraging, especially given the current price of Dreamcast consoles.

btw...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the text of the website, since it may get Slashdotted pretty soon:

Some new hardware pics

Posted by Dan on 2002-04-27 01:33:41

I haven't quite finished my new ISA/IDE interface for the DC, but I have verified rudimentary communications between the DC and an IDE hard disk today, so I figured I'd post some pics. =D Sorry for the crappy webcam pic quality.

#1 #2 #3

(note stylish blue LED ;-)

I call this a "bridge" rather than a "bus" because that seems a bit more accurate to me -- it just hooks two existing buses (ISA and DC EXT) together.

This is actually built up from the diagram of Kiyoshi IKEHARA, with some modifications of my own. Specifically I had to resolve the 6-way NAND gate, and I got sick of looking for an ISA IDE controller, so I wired up my own directly into the board. This isn't as bad as it sounds because IDE is basically designed to plug directly into ISA anyway.

This is the beginning of my "DC Navi" project, which I'll keep people posted on, in case anyone is interested. I'm eventually planning to outfit a Dreamcast motherboard with a flash BIOS, reset switch, and IDE/ISA interface, and put it into a new case. This will also involve writing a new BIOS for it, which will be based mostly on KOS.

Yeah, I know, I'm crazy, but it's fun ^_-

Small update: I've confirmed it 100% now. I've got a small KOS program that reads this data from the HD info block (IDE cmd 0xec):

Drive is a 'WDC AB1210F', C/H/S=988/12/34 (196MB), buffer size 0MB

Matches the disk exactly. Whoo hoo! On to driver and file system goodness =)

Good ol fashioned hardware hacking

Posted by Dan on 2002-04-21 20:52:17

Just got my first real DC hardware hack installed on my "sacrificial lamb" DC. }-D This one is pretty simple though, just mainly warming up. I installed a reset switch in the side of the case. Very handy if you do any amount of DC dev and have to reset your DC once in a while. Thanks to Bitmaster for the diagram on where to solder things! It's a little ghetto looking right now but I'm not really planning to keep that case forever.

Now I just have to get ahold of some flash memory and a few other odds and ends and I'll start on my more ambitious project of replacing the BIOS with a flash chip.

KOS 1.1.7 posted

Posted by Dan on 2002-04-20 16:27:51

Well, after ~3 long months of development time, KOS 1.1.7 is posted on the SourceForge download page:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?gro up _id=23791

You can find the release notes and changelog here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?rel ea se_id=85710

If you've worked with KOS in the past (and haven't been following CVS) then please look through the release notes. Quite a bit has changed since 1.1.6.

Some of the highlights of this release:

Rewritten 3D API ("ta" has been replaced by "pvr") which allows one to use some or all of the lists in various configurations, fog, paletted textures, etc; also includes "direct render" macros which allow you to inline your 3D pritimive creation and TA submission for super speed (I've seen up to 2.4M triangles/sec with this method)
Rewritten maple system, with interrupt driven I/O and hotswap
Unified network API for both types of ethernet, and working lwIP port
Much more GL compliant KGL library, and a KGL manual
Lots of updates in various 'addon' libs, and a ton of new ones
A lot more examples
And of course, most importantly, includes a port of Hunt the Wumpus and Adventure from the BSD games tree.

E3 Tickets?

Posted by Dan on 2002-04-10 17:45:30

This is pretty unorthodox and I'll probably get in trouble for it, but what the heck. =)

Seems that our supplier for E3 tickets can't get any extras this year. I figured I'd post here and see if anyone had some extras they'd be willing to donate. I'm looking for the "retailer" type like you get for owning a game store (read: requires no admission fee, for the main show only, get to stand in line for 2 hours upon arrival -- that type). I'm looking for 8, but beggars can't be choosers, so if someone has some they'd like to donate, please let me know!

Technically CA could probably get official for-pay tickets at this point, but we can't afford those right now, so it's free ones or bust =)

Updated FoF shots, KOS status

Posted by Dan on 2002-03-30 22:51:35

First off, I have an updated screen shot for in-game play of FoF, just so you all know I'm not sitting back livin' it up instead of working on the game ;-). All the graphics you see there are pretty much finalized graphics that will go into the game itself. This also shows off the new scoring system, with step ratings and health/combo meters. Finally, you actually see two player mode there, each player with a different difficulty of Rhythm and Police from DDR. Unfortunately I'm playing by myself here, and the controller input goes to both, so I'm not doing so well on Maniac mode! =D

On the KOS front, things are slowly moving along towards a 1.1.7 release. It's taking a lot longer than I originally expected, because I want to make sure that it's good and solid after so many core systems being replaced and tweaked. It's looking REALLY nice though. I think everyone will agree it's worth the wait and the small amount of porting that will be required to take advantage of the new features, including a fully async, interrupt driven maple system with enumeration capabilities, nice PVR API to replace TA, newly ported lwIP with support for both BBA and Lan Adapter, etc.

Some FoF screenshots

Posted by Dan on 2002-03-18 21:38:36

Still working on getting all the art and such together, but here are some "in progress" screen shots showing the main menu and in-game play. The steps you see on the second screen shot are for Lupin '78 from DDR 4thMix Plus. Of course this song will not be in the final game, just using it to test out the sync'ing of the arrows =)

Update Mar 19: Sorry, my bad for misunderstanding the intentions of the article there on Boob (update last night). =) Late -> Brain Tired -> You Know. ^_^

Feet of Fury

Posted by Dan on 2002-03-14 23:20:00

On behalf of the other members of Cryptic Allusion, I'd like to announce our current game project! The game we're working on is called Feet of Fury, and will be somewhat DDR-like, with more of an emphasis on player-vs-player interaction like the current puzzle fighting games. We are currently on track to have a decent pre-release ready for E3 this year, which will most likely include the development tools and source code once again. Over the next few weeks, we'll be getting a web site ready for the game and dribbling out some screen shots and other fun "multimedia" pieces. =) Stay tuned!

Site Redesign

Posted by Dan on 2002-02-25 23:12:40

Finally got around to giving the main page a makeover. The front page isn't actually using PHPSlash anymore, I'm just using it to handle the back-end story creation. Eventually I'll also replace this part since there's a lot more (and a lot nastier) there than I really need for this site. Feedback welcome!

Also if you haven't been following, we've got the new maple system in place in KOS, along with some KGL upgrades.

Big KOS changes last night

Posted by Dan on 2002-02-09 11:12:04

Last night I made some fairly substantial changes to the KOS tree, so if you are following CVS, please do an update to your whole tree and a make clean / make from the root of the tree. This will make sure everything gets rebuilt appropriately.

Libc has been split out into its own library now, so if you have "-lkallisti -lgcc" at the end of your link line, it needs to have a "-lc" added before "-lgcc". Or you can replace all three with $(KOS_LIBS) if you use the Makefile.rules from KOS.

I also have switched KOS' default 3D API to the PVR API. If you were loose in your usage of the old TA API (manually allocating textures, etc) then you'll have to correct these problems before your program will work with the emulated API, but almost all of the examples are working now, as is KGL.

I again urge anyone who's following KOS CVS (or using the release versions, even) to join the mailing list so you know when big changes are coming up.

Come Join the Fun

Posted by Dan on 2002-02-07 22:58:57

Not a whole lot has been posted to here lately... because all the fun is happening over on the SF KOS list! If you are at all interested in up-to-the-minute updates on what's going on, then hit the SourceForge link in the top navbar and join the cadcdev-kallistios list. There's also a CVS commit list showing what got committed when.

_
WINDOWS USERS CLICK HERE! [paware.com]

Not SH6

[ldspartan]

It uses a Hitachi SH4, not SH6, iirc. Just splitting hairs :).

--
Phil

Dreamcast videosystem is designed by PowerVR

[Anonymous Coward]

If I remember correctly, the Dreamcast sports a first gen Kyro graphics chipset. Also noteworthy, PowerVR has just released its 2nd wave of BETA X11 XServer, GLX, and DRI drivers for their Kyro and Kyro II graphics chipsets. I submitted this as news, but apparently Slashdot doesn't think it's noteworthy. What realy is noteworthy is POWERVR has NOW opensourced their DRIVERS! Check it out on their download page...

SuSE 7 [powervr.com]
RedHat 7
Mandrake 8
SOURCE RPM
and SOURCE TARBALL ;)

PowerVR has just made the Dreamcast into an aspiring platform for Linux gaming! Good graphics, 128 bit SuperH CPU, good BUS, affordable(less than $100 at retail, cheaper used), and now a harddrive... shame on them ;)

This was posted bout a year ago on /.

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone else made it, a team of college students I believe. They made an interface 4 it. now that the dc is rather dead and its cpu dated it doesnt much matter. Well it might to those linux nuts that want to run linux on everything from a wrist watch to a cash register

Old news...

[Daniel Wood]

bITmASTER32 [compuserve.de] made an IDE interface and Kiyoshi Ikehara [nma.ne.jp] built released a driver for NetBSD a long time ago. What this guy did was nothing special. They have been Lan booting NetBSD on a dreamcast and using the HDD (albeit slow, 800k/sec) for a while now.

Re:Dreamcast is Cheap, but not easy to find anymor

[sparcv9]

Hit up a Babbage's or FunCoLand (same parent company). Babbage's sells mostly new stuff, but has some used/refurbed DC stuff, and FunCoLand is primarily a used game/console store. The one near me has about a half-dozen used DCs for sale. I even got a DC keyboard at FunCoLand for $10, new in the box. The Electronics Boutiques around here seem to be dropping the DC merchandise and just selling off the remainder, though, and the local Wal*Marts have stopped carrying it completely.

Re:Summary of Sega consoles/CPU's

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who has written a Genesis emulator, I can assure you that the Z80 is indeed the sound CPU. There was only 1 game which used the SMS compatibility mode that I'm aware of (Phantasy Star -- exact same game as the SMS counterpart, in a Genesis cartridge.)

Try firing up some games in your favorite Genesis emulator and then disabling the Z80. What's that? Sound stops? Oh! :) Some games did PSG sound through the 68K but the bulk of sound output was done through the YM2612 FM (and its DAC) using the Z80.

The SMS compatibility mode was activated via a cart pin. It disabled the 68K, put the VDP in SMS compatibility mode, and the made the Z80 think it was an SMS Z80.

The Game Gear is basically just an SMS (the only real difference is that its palette can define more colors.)

The 32X used twin SH-2s in a set up that was somewhat similar to the Saturn. The Saturn used 2 SH-2s, NOT SH-3s. There was an SH-1 in the CD-ROM drive, but you couldn't load code on it, so it basically worked like a black box.

AFAIK the Dreamcast uses an ARM CPU for sound.

If you can't already tell, programming old Sega consoles for fun is something I've dabbled in :)

DC Has lots of great stuff already.

[NiGHTSFTP]

I've been following the scene for quite awhile. Was hop in #dcemu 6 months or so, when it wasnt busy. Went through the big John Henderson fiasco.

There is alot the DC offers, that nobody realizes. Do you know its the only cheap $50 console, that has accelerated 3d rendering? in free, open source libraries (KOS 1.1.7).

Rocket Racer beta2 is a wipeout-style game, no AI or Multiplayer till beta 3, but the techdemo of it kicks ass (4 cars, 2 tracks, time trials only).

DCShooter (beta that is out is old, wait for next release).. loads Q2 levels. Its a homebrew multiplayer (1-4) shooting game. Will soon be goldeneye-style.

DCAsteroids and DCFighting are both 3d, but are on backburner for the shooting game at the moment.

Look at fucking DcDivx!! Made by team Project Mayo themselves! (Divx 3,4,5 support, AVI, MP3 - Disc Swap Support) Its only beta 3, and is an -excellent- movie player.

There are outstanding emulators too.

NES : NesterDC 6.0
SNES: DreamSNES 0.9.7
GB : DCGNUboy 1.0.3-0.4
Genesis : DCGen 0.34b
Sega Master System/ Game Gear : Smeg 0.84

Just to name a few.

The harddrive is only a smaller mod that makes up the DC as a whole. Look at everything, and it kicks the crap out of any PS2 or Xbox...

Go ahead, play a super nintendo game on the Xbox.
Play a DivX movie on your PS2.

http://www.dcemulation.com/
http://www.dcvison. com/
http://www.boob.co.uk