Dreamcast SD slot Mod help

[geezuzkhrist119]

Does anyone got any how to guides on how to do this?
I know it can be done and I seen videos on YouTube.

[APE992]

Everything you need is right there. Occasionally you do have to remove a few capacitors from the underside of the Dreamcast for it to work, but by doing so you negate the ability to use anything but 3.3v devices IIRC.

[Pr3tty F1y]

I bought myself one from a site that sells them out of China. It works fantastically well.

I'm looking forward to being able to create a backup of my DC collection.

[BlastProcessing402]

I bought myself one from a site that sells them out of China. It works fantastically well.

I'm looking forward to being able to create a backup of my DC collection.

How much (roughly) did it cost?

[geezuzkhrist119]

Man that seems difficult and since I have barely any knowledge of soldering I don't want to attempt that and ruin a perfectly good DC.
But if someone got a modded one for sale, holler at me.

[APE992]

The electronics are the easy part. Already did it a few times but I wouldn't want to do it again unless the pay was really good.

[Pr3tty F1y]

How much (roughly) did it cost?

It was $21.99 with shipping included.

From the contstruction, it was a usb SD adapter that had the DC serial interface soldered on along with a 1/3 cm bit of plastic glued onto the serial plug end to ensure it fits snuggly in the DC serial port.

I only had a 1GB SD card handy, but I burned a DreamShell bootable CD-R and loaded the DreamShell utilities onto the card and was able to see that ripping worked. However, my US Jet Grind Radio Disc was listed as 1080mb so I didn't stick around to see it tell me that I was out of disk space on my puny SD Card.

Ripping was fairly slow, but what I expected from a serial device. Although you can load ISOs from the SD Card, I wouldn't expect it to be that great. Anything that streams music/video would likely have issues due to the limited bandwidth of the serial bus.

[geezuzkhrist119]

what about those SD adapters? i just saw one on youtube. can those use higher than 2 gb crads?

[APE992]

what about those SD adapters? i just saw one on youtube. can those use higher than 2 gb crads?

No idea, I'd say no because the spec for SD cards changed between 2gb and 4gb for the most part.

They will work, but their build quality is garbage.

[atreyu187]

The external cards as well as internal work with up to 32gb SDCH cards I had the external till APE did the internal mod for me. I used the 32gb card for both. I paid $21 shipped for the external adapter.

http://dc-sd.com/

[Pr3tty F1y]

How much (roughly) did it cost?

I bought my card reader on dc-sd.com (but I think the mod queue ate my reply, being that I'm a newb). Initially, I didn't want to post the site selling the card because I didn't know what Digital Press' rules on advertising were, but it seems that it's ok.

DreamShell takes several hours to dump a disc but DC SD Rip takes may 45 minutes at best. However, it seems that Redump.org uses a Broadband Adapter dump as their gold standard. The SD Rip program rips the audio tracks as a raw files with a 2352 bye sector (e.g., track02 on most DC titles and any additional CDDA audio tracks), compared to the Redump.org bin format using a bin file that includes the 150 sector pregap as part of the audio file (I only verified this with my JGR original GD-ROM, but my track 2 data was 352,800 bytes shy of the redump listing and my CRC32/SHA1/MD5 did not match). Being that this data is relatively useless, it will most likely make no difference in your backups, but if your as OCD as me, it may slightly bother you

I will say that the adapter from dc-sd.com can utilize an SDHC card (I'm using an 8gb Dane-Elec model). I hate Dane-Elec as they are largely slow and crap, but at least they work and conform to the SDHC standard

However, just as a reminder, the read bandwidth through the serial port is quite low, so any game depending on streaming audio/video may have issues. But if you are looking for a backup solution, it works quite well.