Connecting IDE disks & ISA (network) card to Dreamcast

[OzOnE]

Excellent, this is great news, SWAT!

You can see the DMA routines are simple enough. If you can get polling to work for end-of-DMA, then it should be straightforward to replace your low-level SD card routines with the IDE ones.

Or, if you can get G1 DMA interrupts working (to show end-of-DMA) without interfering with the stock BIOS stuff, the DMA stuff should work fine.

Oh, btw, I did have it working so I could switch between IDE / ATA (DMA) and back to GDD (PIO), but I don't think it's working in the current code. I'll take a look at it.

Also, it still froze the DC when WRITING back to the CF card. It would be great to fix this because we could do fast GD ripping.

Ideally, we eventually want to use a HDD for storing all the images and this should be a straight swap from CF. Hell, in theory even a Blu-Ray ROM drive or writer could be connected.

The good thing is, the IDE cable can be soldered fairly easily. Just remember to always strip / twist / tin your wires, but then trim the tinned ends down to ~2mm.
Also a good idea is to add very small blobs of new solder to the test pads before soldering the wires.

I'm stuck with the PCB layout for the G1-to-IDE adapter. If anyone can help, I've started on a basic layout here...

http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/sho...post599131

The idea is to make a cheap adapter for everyone so it will be plug-and-play. It should also allow the GDD to be plugged directly into the PC (with a custom driver).
The IDE adapter shouldn't even need a Flash BIOS mod, just a small loader on a CD-R (like DS).

I must admit, @cybdyn was right in suggesting a direct connection. I just thought it would be way too difficult (for me) to set up the DC dev environment and start messing with KOS.

btw, if anyone is thinking about portables - please note that it doesn't look like removing the GDD is possible without a custom BIOS. The stock BIOS still checks for the GDD and freezes if it doesn't find it (even if the CDDA clock is input to the DC).

Thanks again, SWAT. We look forward to any new updates.
Please let me know if you need any help or for me to explain some of my crappy code.

OzOnE.