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Dion

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Hi,

this is actually a fail project of mine. I posted here since it is an idea after all. Many arcade games still uses cdrom/later dvdrom drives. And as arcade tech, i faced with a challenge when the cdroms died and no where cheap to get replacement.

I might get embarrassment from posting this, but i really want to make this one works. Maybe someone with more experience can give some hint.
the idea is just replace the cdrom drive and the disc, with hardware emulator with sdcard as data medium.
i used stmf4 as main microcontroller, which i thought, can accomodate the ide bus communication. later, i found, anything i did with the coding, was very far from accommodating the task file register responses. it's been several months since last i put this thing suspended.

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asking around in electronics forum, suggesting using fpga, which is completely new to me, and might took years to accomplish. ah well, i felt hopeless about this.
 
Why embarrassment- I mean, you're undertaking a task that as many of us have found, there's little to NO interest from people out there to address the core issue of IDE device emulation, because they don't recognize it's a thing that's even needed- at least you had some skills and picked up some hardware and code and gave it a shot.

I do agree, from everything I've heard, FPGA is the way to go, but I can't give you many tips other than keep at it- there's definitely a market and interest, although less so than the SCSI market (but they've already got a few good devices that work and have tons of support)

I'm simply SICK of hearing the canned response when i ask around "Oh just replace the cd drive with a compact flash card reader, they work better" with NO concept that there's tons of hardware out there that expects a TRUE ATAPI drive on the other end, not just a block storage device that may respond to a small subset of the IDE HDD capabilities.

Keep at it, wish I had the skills to help!
 
Hi, thanks for reply.
i was considering using other chips.
one was FC1306T, which is already used in many ide to sdcard converters. unfortunately, it seems the host can only recognize it as ide, not atapi.
second was, using panasonic AM3 mcu that used in LG's dvdrom drive. From what i read, they're actually usual mcu, not like specialized odd chip. unfortunately, datasheet is hard to find, even at panasonic website.
guess i will keep looking for alternatives.
 
In general a proper ide emulator with all the atapi commands needed to emulate a CD-ROM as per namco's requirements should be able to do a DVD as well. Am I missing something or has someone started working on this?

I'm definitely willing to contribute towards a bounty on a solution.
 
How the data is stored on the non-ide side is almost inconsequential- the real issue here is the lack of any non-industrial ide/atapi emulators.
 
The USB drives I mentioned are supposed to emulate ATAPI commands (including ATAPI CD's)
 
or that.. I was more biased to the usbcdrom hacked USB because it's more "comercialy" available than the hagiwara stuff...
 
I found many different IDE/CF adapters, all claim to be bootable etc. But only the hagiware mentions ATAPI in their documentation.

An IDE to USB adapter would be fine for me as well, but can you find IDE to USB adapters?
In my search I only found USB to IDE/SATA adapters somehow.
 
in my experience, cf is not an option. they tend to die quickly. not usb because apparently, what i want is a hardware ide cdrom, not usb. some namco games using parallel ide interface, which could benefit from this emulator.

unfortunately, i am not currently work on this. still need to learn using fpga. even if i did, like twistedsymphony said, the cost is high, which i am aware of. kind of hard looking for high speed mcu capable doing that. the main problem with ide is the slave device must able to respon within 100ns (iirc, it's been too long) for register task. you can imagine this register as a memory with 3 address pin. i once have an idea to use dual port high speed ram. but somehow later i drop that idea, i forgot maybe because it's expensive.

i also aware about scsi cd project. i even consult the author when i was starting develop my first fail pcb.
 
Yes, SATA to IDE will work for hard drives, but that's not the point of this proposed project- what's being looked for is a way to no longer need optical discs.
SATA to IDE still requires an optical drive on the SATA side. The only reason CF to IDE functions is because many CF cards speak IDE directly, and present themselves as a Mass storage/Hard drive type device.

There is no *affordable* device on the market that i'm aware of that can present a mass storage device, SATA, CF, SD, or otherwise as an optical device with compatible ATAPI OPTICAL DRIVE commands, as, in part, this employs a measure of device EMULATION or IMPERSONATION.
 
Posting from phone but read the product specs, mentions atapi and optical multiple times. It's step 1.

Do some basic research and you discover people chaining them with sata to sd adapters for ps2/xbox1. Can you use this to emulate optical drives? Some investigation to do there, but at worst there's a way to use commonly available sata drives.
 
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