Sega Dreamcast USB-GDROM

[Master Phruby]

Have you guys ever heard of a USB-GDROM card for the Dreamcast? Stoneage Gamer one on their site. It's sold out though. The board replaces your Dreamcast's CDROM and allows USB flash drive loading. Just put the iso on a usb flash drive and plug into the Dreamcast. A menu will come up to select the image to play. Anyone install one before?

 

http://www.stoneagegamer.com/dreamcast-usb.html

 

 

Edited November 26, 2015 by Master Phruby

[+Darrin9999]

No, But I have been thinking of getting one of these!

[128Kgames]

That's, actually, pretty, cool. Expensive, but cool.

[Classic Pac]

That is very cool

[omegadot]

I've been looking into the DC-SD deals too. I have two Dreamcasts and one seems to have a lot of trouble reading discs for very long. Oh my, that Dreamcast USB is expensive, though.

[fiddlepaddle]

link doesn't work now...

[Gandor]

Would be interested but $260 seems a little high

[Master Phruby]

This site has them for $187 but is in Russia so I don't know how much you can trust it. They have 3DO USB drives too.

 

http://3do-renovation.ru/How_to_buy.htm

 

I think I would rather buy from Stoneage Gamer. I know he is trustworthy.

[goldenegg]

I prefer GDEmu over this, as it doesn't require modification of the case.

 

https://gdemu.wordpress.com

[Master Phruby]

The latest version doesn't modify the case.

[Greg2600]

I have one, I cut a small hole to put the USB thumbdrive in from the back. I have several DC's so I didn't mind. I actually installed mine while retaining the broken GD-drive unit and all, which retains the original airflow of the system. I also installed a resistor to the power supply so that it doesn't overheat. The performance on the unit is great. The downside is the putrid menu system. I also have a GD-EMU, which was obviously less expensive.

 

Buying from mnemo directly is safe, but he is terrible with communicating. I got mine in a group purchase from someone on Assembler/Facebook. That same someone provide the resistor to wedge into the PSU.

[omegadot]

I'm quite interested in these solutions but it seems like ordering is tricky.

[0078265317]

Link does not work anymore.

[Austin]

I also have a GD-EMU, which was obviously less expensive.

 

How well does the GD-EMU perform in comparison? If it's less expensive but works about the same, I wonder if there's any reason to get the one that SAG offers.

[Austin]

Also, the link does work. For some reason clicking on it gives you a 404 error, but if you copy/paste it into your URL bar, it works.

 

http://www.stoneagegamer.com/dreamcast-usb.html

[Greg2600]

 

How well does the GD-EMU perform in comparison? If it's less expensive but works about the same, I wonder if there's any reason to get the one that SAG offers.

 

The Euro is so weak right now, and GD-EMU is priced at 110 EUR, which is less than $120 shipped. SAG is selling USB GD-ROM for $259.99, that's DOUBLE the price! Directly from MNemo will run you around $205 shipped. They both claim the demand is so high. Eh.

 

GDEMU is only compatible with the VA1 DC revision, not the earlier one, nor the last one which featured a massive internal redesign. Not a huge deal because DC's are pretty cheap to come by. USB GD is compatible with VA0 and VA1, as VA2 again is a totally different design.

 

GDEMU has a terrible menu, and loading games yourself would be awful. However, enthusiasts have produced a "GD-Menu" and "GDEMU_SD" software. These will give you a nice GUI to load games, complete with game art, and a windows utility to load games on SD (includes VGA patching). The drawback is that GDEMU (last time I checked) only supports FAT32, drastically limited storage capacity of SDHC. Few have had good results I believe past 32GB, although it could have been fixed.

 

USB GD has a putrid menu, but loading games is simply onto the USB drives, and your capacity is up to 2TB. USB will require a physical lid switch of some kind to tell it to switch discs on a multi-disc game, although DC has hardly any of those. GDEMU can do it with a button on the board I think.

 

The PSIO team are also working on a DCIO solution, so perhaps that one will surpass both of these?

[+evg2000]

does anyone have any links or instructions on how to create iISOs, CDIs or GDIs from ripped games? I've ripped the contents off of one of my DC games (using httpd-ack)

and have all of the files, now I just need to figure out how to put them back together to use on the USB-GDROM.

thanks

[SiLic0ne t0aD]

does anyone have any links or instructions on how to create iISOs, CDIs or GDIs from ripped games? I've ripped the contents off of one of my DC games (using httpd-ack)

and have all of the files, now I just need to figure out how to put them back together to use on the USB-GDROM.

thanks

I'd check over in the Assembler forums if you haven't already, there is tons of info there. I can't help you on this, as I don't yet have the USB-GDROM. Did you also check on YouTube? There are lots of DC specific tutorials there.

 

I do things the old school way at the moment, downloading the ISO's/Games I want to play and then using ImageBurn and/or Disk Juggler to create my disk images to be burned onto CD-R's.

I'll get a USB-GDROM sometime but only when the demand/price drops a little.. I'm not in a hurry.

[Greg2600]

http://www.stoneagegamer.com/dreamcast-usb-en.html

 

 

Dear Stone Age Gamer Customers,

 

Unfortunately, we must announce that we will no longer be carrying any product created by the developer known as Mnemo.

After over a year of dealing with Mnemo we have found him to be impossible to do business with. We normally would not attempt to cause any drama, but in this case we feel without explaining our reasons because it may be hard for our customers to understand why we would stop selling a product that seemed to be in such high demand.

We originally reached out to Mnemo to sell his 3DO USB-CDROM Adapter mods. Although we did sell some units, his production was completely erratic so for a while we stopped selling the 3DO adapter.

Eventually we found out Mnemo had finished development on a similar modification for the Dreamcast. We were very excited at this prospect because the Dreamcast is a vastly more popular system. So, we reached out to Mnemo again in late 2014 and made a much harder push for this product.

We were shocked by his wholesale price; it was basically what we thought the MSRP price should be. We suggested that by lowering the price it would allow both of us to sell way more units. He refused. Although we did not agree with his decision, we weren’t going to beat him up on the price.

Using our normal retail mark-up, we began selling the Dreamcast adapter at $219.99. However, it quickly became apparent that his issues with 3DO adapter production carried over to the Dreamcast adapter as well. Production was sporadic and unpredictable.

Over the year of 2015 it was hard for us to get any sustained production from Mnemo. Late Summer 2015 he alerted me that he would be significantly raising the price of each unit by almost $50/ea. because he only had a few hundred Molex connectors left and he could not find any more so this will probably be the last few hundred he sells.

I told him to hold off on the price increase and I would see if I could find some of the connectors. After much searching, I found most places would only sell me them in batches of 17K at about $4/ea. So basically $68K, which was out of the question. Eventually I found a company that brokered an agreement between another company and I. This company had tens of thousands of these connectors for their own production. That company agreed to sell me 1,008 connectors for $4.57 ea. I asked Mnemo if he was still committed and if I should purchase these connectors. He told me to purchase them. So with shipping I paid about $4,700 out of my pocket for the connectors.

After receiving the connectors, he asked me to ship him about 300. So I shipped him 324 (they came in tubes of 18 units/ea.). He said he would just credit me more for them once he received.

With our new found connectors and an agreement to increase production I told him we were going to start taking back orders on the Dreamcast adapter. Eventually we got to 50 back orders and yet units we still very slow to ship. So we halted all back orders to not further dig anymore of a hole.

After his initial shipment of 20 units for the back orders he tells us from this point on he will now be increasing the wholesale price of each unit by $30/ea. Even though he knew we still had another 30 back orders to fill, back orders that were already paid for. There is no way we are going to go back to customers and ask for more money, but this price raise essentially destroyed our profit margin. So, we begged him to at least fill the remaining 30 orders under his original price and we would talk about new price after the rest of the back orders had shipped. He did eventually agree.

We received another 15 units at the original price. However, before sending the last 15 units he e-mailed us saying that he has the 15 units ready. However, he is raising the price, even though he agreed not to until all 50 had shipped. He said if we want them he will give us our credit for the 324 connectors and we would just pay the difference. Yes, you heard me right, he told us he would credit us for the connectors, but then raised the price by $30 per unit and here’s the kicker: he said if we would not buy at that price he would just sell them himself or to someone else. So he essentially exploited our position and forced us to pay more per unit and effectively making our credit for the connectors worthless, not to mention destroying our profit on the 15 reminaing units we already took money for.

Really, hindsight being 20-20 we should have cut off all business relations with him at this point. He obviously had no respect for us or his customers. After the dust settled I said if the new price means we will get much more consistent production then, we would accept it. So we had to raise retail price significantly.

Finally! We started to receive somewhat consistent shipments. From December 2015 to mid-March 2016. We were receiving about 34 units a month.

On March 25^th he then dropped another bomb. The next two batches he was going to charge us $12 more per unit and also I would need to pay for his PayPal withdrawal fees. Now I send money to him as a Friend/Family so I pay his PayPal fees. So I am not sure why he is also getting charged to withdraw money, but as far as I am concerned that was not my problem. So no warning, nothing, just raises the price for no apparent reason.

So now I am very unhappy. I explain all the stuff I have done to help him, much of which I never even mention in this letter so far, and I tell him I want a good explanation for why he is charging me more for the next two batches. He replies back ending each one of his responses with “LOL.” So he is essentially laughing in my face and basically down-playing anything I did for him. He explains that a full explanation would take too long, but he basically said he was not going to produce any more units until June 2016, so these are his last 34 units until then. So basically, again he was attempting to exploit more money from me, however this time by apparently creating a false demand by halting production for a few months.

At this point we cut all ties with Mnemo. There were a lot of details which I left out of this letter, but here is some of them:

• He had the audacity to insult my employees in one conversation, telling me to hire better people.
• Never once during our whole correspondence did he ever thank me for anything I did for him. He was arrogant and rude, treated me like I was an idiot.
• He thought our mark-up should only be 10% to 15%, anyone who knows retail know this is ludicrously low margin.
• I offered to help him with branding and logo design and offered to make a logo for free. He thought that was a stupid idea.
• Since he did not seem interested in increasing production I actually talked to KRIKzz to see if he would be interested in manufacturing the Dreamcast adapter and just pay Mnemo royalties. Similar to his agreement with Ikari_01 and the SD2SNES. KRIKzz agreed, but Mnemo absolutely refused. I took a big risk by doing this because if Mnemo agreed I would essentially lose my exclusivity over the product, but personally I just wanted the product to exist and for us to be able to sell it, so I was willing to forfeit that for increased production.
• Mnemo was having trouble getting PCBs made, so I actually asked dbElectronics where he got his PCBs made to help Mnemo. He told me, which I passed on to Mnemo and I believe he ended up using this company to produce his PCBs. No gratitude ever given.
• And the list goes on...

His business plan (or lack thereof) appeared to be not using the money he made to buy equipment and/or hire employees to increase production, but was to continue to create a demand with low production and just raise the price to milk the market for as much money as he could with this false demand. We sent him well over $30K by the way, would have been way more if he actually produced more.

I have experience with this kind of business arrangement. KRIKzz and dbElectronics for example. Both of these guys have been nothing but excellent to deal with. I would even consider KRIKzz a friend at this point and I hope to soon be meeting him in person. Even dbElectronics had to raise his price at one time, but he wrote me an e-mail explaining why, it was completely understandable and we offered no objection to it.

I understand that to some people this all may seem like petty drama. However, we tried and tried to work with Mnemo and we could have continued to just go with the flow and keep raising our prices to compensate for his price increases, but we felt we had to draw the line. We personally feel the guy was exploiting us and essentially using us like his personal bank account and we had enough. We will never do business with Mnemo again.

We are still sitting on over 600 Molex connectors for the Dreamcast. So if some other developer out there is working on a Dreamcast adapter we would love to do business with you, please contact us.

We will continue to look for new products to offer the community and we would like to thank our customers for all their support.

Sincerely,
Ryan Cross
President
Stone Age Gamer LLC

 

[Austin]

Wow. Mnemo sounds like a total douche.

[RARusk]

Indeed. Is it possible to reverse engineer this unit and make a better one without all of the drama?

[Greg2600]

GD-EMU is an alternative, but that guy also has refused mass production or distribution, so ordering is not easy.

[mickcris]

ordering of the GD-EMU is not as hard as the USB GDROM though. If you check Denuen's blog everyday, you will eventually catch it open. I had no problem ordering one and a rhea for the Saturn. You just need to remember to keep checking.

[rayik]

The maker of the gd-emu, Deunan is trustworthy. He is located in Poland. I purchased a Saturn Rhea direct from him with no problems.

 

Watch for ordering to open up. When it does order one. There is no payment at that time. You will get a confirming email putting you in the queue. Sometime later when it is made, you'll get a second email telling you how to pay. Make payment then and it is sent to you. I had to wait about 1 1/2 months from ordering confirmation to payment request. Once paid, I recieved it about 1 1/2 weeks later (shipped Poland to US)

 

I would not hesitate to order from gdemu again. Watch closely as the ordering window closes very quickly after it opens.

Edited March 28, 2016 by rayik

[Greg2600]

Deunan is a stand-up guy yes. He's a bit ornery but follows through. I still feel like he should consider licensing and mass production, but that's his call. Rhea has too many bugs yet for me to go that route. I do have the GD-EMU, ordered direct.