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GDEMU + Naomi drive -- Does it work?

streetfighterken

streetfighterken

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I operate multiple GD-ROM cabs. Netboot/CF setups is cost prohibitive. But GD-ROM failure is a regular thing that is becoming tiresome. Anyone tried GDEMU or similar with the Naomi drive?
 
I've been curious of this as well, and have been meaning to pick up a broken GDROM drive to see if I can poke at it.
 
rewrite said:
Someone on one of the Naomi Facebook groups has been working on this. I haven't been keeping up on it though.
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im in the group also. yeah mikes been solo dolo at the moment. but it should be just like the dreamcast, same as the v0 ,v1 consoles on dreamcast. but writing to the dimms and stuff is whats the hard part. i gotta collect more info from the posts but he is hard at work .
 
Seems like a waste of time to me, as it will still require you to have the GD-DIMM, SCSI cable, GD-ROM drive and GDEmu (original statement mentions cost prohibitive).
Just go NetDIMM+Pi Force like everyone else, and prey someday DS makes a true multi cart.
 
net-dimm's are getting rare and well overpriced though.
partly because assholes with too much money just keep buying more up as they fail instead of fixing them.

i asked here once if anybody had a faulty network board to sell so i could try to reverse it, but nobody answered.
 
stj said:
i asked here once if anybody had a faulty network board to sell so i could try to reverse it, but nobody answered.
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Because I don't think they fail very often at all... I've certainly never heard of it.
Naomi2's pretty regularly yes, that damn supercap, but the NetDIMM itself is rock solid.

IDK who these a fore mentioned assholes are, but I really don't think this the reality of why you can't find one.
 
I will say for arcade operators that already have GDROM setups for their machines, whom have been running legitimate copies --- a drop-in (clone) GDEMU solution would be much more cost-effective than anything else.
 
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I find it interesting the the GDROM "drive" can be swapped between the DC and NAOMI GD Unit but the GDEMU cannot. what's different about it that prevents that from working, assuming you have a valid GDI image on the GDEMU?
 
twistedsymphony said:
I find it interesting the the GDROM "drive" can be swapped between the DC and NAOMI GD Unit but the GDEMU cannot. what's different about it that prevents that from working, assuming you have a valid GDI image on the GDEMU?
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Taking a wild guess here....

I'd guess it's because the copy protection scheme is different, and thus needs to be handled/bypassed differently in the GDEMU firmware.
 
That makes sense. Deunan is pretty well versed in both DC and NAOMI, I wonder if he'd be interested in releasing a special version of the GDEMU for use with NAOMI, or modifying his existing firmware in a way that works for both (like the original drives do).
 
twistedsymphony said:
That makes sense. Deunan is pretty well versed in both DC and NAOMI, I wonder if he'd be interested in releasing a special version of the GDEMU for use with NAOMI, or modifying his existing firmware in a way that works for both (like the original drives do).
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Hey, only one way to find out. @streetfighterken, try reaching out to Deunan to see what he thinks?
 
jassin000 said:
Seems like a waste of time to me, as it will still require you to have the GD-DIMM, SCSI cable, GD-ROM drive and GDEmu (original statement mentions cost prohibitive).
Just go NetDIMM+Pi Force like everyone else, and prey someday DS makes a true multi cart.
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Like I said, I'm running 3 gd-roms. I already have all that hardware. Netbooting or multi-carting 3 of them (btw they are dedicated to one game and don't need multi-anything) isn't cost effective. I've had dimms and net-dimms both fail. Regular dimms are cheaper to replace.

That aside, I thought the dimm+gdrom solution was specifically so the drive would last longer. In theory it should only run one time every day (or even less than that if the battery is working). But it seems Naomi drives fail more often than Dreamcasts -- my original DC still works after god only knows how many operating hours.
 
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I always like solutions that are able to run original code/encryption.

would be cool if GDEMU works as you could run original Disc Images and key chips... would be even cooler if there was some way to adjust the keychip on the fly too, but even disc images simply adjusted for zero key would be closer to original the then net-boot solutions we have now.
 
twistedsymphony said:
what's different about it that prevents that from working, assuming you have a valid GDI image on the GDEMU?
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I'd bet on imperfect GD-drive security emulation.
read comments / cool story there - https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blo...f253b0d7e54824/src/mame/machine/gdrom.cpp#L25

especially this line
Code: 
u8 check_result;       // 0x1f - valid GD-ROM, 0x10 - valid Mil-CD

historically, Dreamcast emulators use hardcoded "check security" command reply dumped from real GD drive, while it had Mil-CD disc inserted, so they always return this value 0x10, but Dreamcast BIOS fine with this and will boot any of GD or CD type medias.

on the other hand, DIMM firmware require this value to be exact 0x1f, and will not load anything from GD-drive or GD-emulator with different value.
 
I've had a netdimm fail too years ago. Tried to give it away for free but noone wanted it so was binned. Sold the naomi a few months later. ODE isn't much use for naomi imho.
 
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