This is why people cloned the GDEMU hardware.

[derFunkenstein]

https://gdemu.wordpress.com/2018/12/03/running-in-the-90s/

 

Prepare to spend all morning madly refreshing your browser next Saturday, only for all of the boards to be bought up by resellers and scalped on eBay. I'm *pinches fingers* THIS CLOSE to just buying a clone GDEMU, and Professor Abrasive's Saturn cart can't come soon enough.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Yeah...I was about to give up hope on ever getting a Phobe or Rhea..etc. and then a friend of mine literally in my town was sitting on a few Rhea's. I asked him about having one and it took some months, but he showed up at my door one day with an already Rhea modded console ready to go?! It has been interesting to get it to work properly and I found it was best to use Disc Juggler to create my own images from my games in my collection as those seem to work. Minus In The Hunt..as that tosses errors during the image creation process. Then again, In The Hunt is the only game that has noticeable holes in the disc layers (Disc Rot) but it actually plays fine in the Saturn itself.

 

And I have sooo many DC games, I'm not sure the GDEMU is for me just yet.

[power]

he needs to do what the Lynx flashcart guy SainT does, make waiting lists. This works well as far as I can tell, is fair and easy to run. http://atariage.com/forums/topic/250637-lynx-multi-card-preorders/

 

Instead he creates chaos and frustration.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

he needs to do what the Lynx flashcart guy SainT does, make waiting lists. This works well as far as I can tell, is fair and easy to run. http://atariage.com/forums/topic/250637-lynx-multi-card-preorders/

 

Instead he creates chaos and frustration.

I can kinda understand the reason for him doing what he does. That chaos and frustration actually creates legit hype and he knows that what he gets made and prepared to sell...will sell. Though not nearly the same, I've kept waiting lists in the past for mod work and then when I contact those on my wait lists some months later, they never reply or cancel out. Luckily I find others that want the work done so I'm not left with parts on hand that I've preordered. But I would image that a wait list on his products would be very large and require quite a bit to maintain in regards to emails to send out..etc. And then when you have people that change their minds, then what? So having his store front and listing when they are available to go back on sale is likely his best tactic for how he wants to operate.

[derFunkenstein]

I think that people would be willing to pay more if it meant more open availability. Have them contract constructed and just sell them. Instead it seems like hes building them all by hand. Thats gotta get tedious and really old. Theres a lot to be said for regular availability and also being able to not have to make every board yourself. If it costs more I think most folks would pay it, considering what it does.

 

Besides, theyll be sold out before I can buy one. I need to finish my Christmas shopping first.

Edited December 4, 2018 by derFunkenstein

[xenomorpher]

I just installed my clone unit and so far I'm satisfied with it. I didn't have it in the connector good enough, which caused an "Oh crap" moment. After I fixed it, it felt fairly sturdy despite not having screws to secure it in, something I would have preferred. If the original wasn't such a pain to get, I would have easily supported it. Maybe competition will benefit the consumers, who knows. I'm hoping Professor Abrasive will finish his work and it won't be such a chore to get. It's something I'm especially looking forward to since even though my Saturn has a modchip installed, the disc drive won't speed back up to load the next game area if I have it paused for awhile.

Edited December 4, 2018 by xenomorpher

[Master Phruby]

I've been reading that guy's blog for years and he really comes off as a jerk. He can at least sound like a business man that puts his customers first. He just sounds hostel most of the time. If these things are so popular, why not consider manufacturing them? It's insane to build them all by hand. Also, I'm not thrilled with trying to win a lottery, that I know I will never win, and send off a lot of money to a foreign country in hopes the item will someday arrive. These guys that build things really need someone else to do their PR.

[Punisher5.0]

Yeah...I was about to give up hope on ever getting a Phobe or Rhea..etc. and then a friend of mine literally in my town was sitting on a few Rhea's. I asked him about having one and it took some months, but he showed up at my door one day with an already Rhea modded console ready to go?! It has been interesting to get it to work properly and I found it was best to use Disc Juggler to create my own images from my games in my collection as those seem to work. Minus In The Hunt..as that tosses errors during the image creation process. Then again, In The Hunt is the only game that has noticeable holes in the disc layers (Disc Rot) but it actually plays fine in the Saturn itself.

 

And I have sooo many DC games, I'm not sure the GDEMU is for me just yet.

Do you have any ideas why music doesn't play on some games with the Phoebe? Im assuming there is an issue with Redbook music. Ive tried multiple ROMs and had no success. Typical ones that dont work are:

 

Virtua Cop

Virtua Racing

Panzer Dragoon

 

Ones that work:

 

Panzer Dragoon 2

Sonic R

 

Ive almost given up. Otherwise im pleased with it. But yeah definitely looking forward to the VCD adapter and would love to put one in my second Saturn.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Do you have any ideas why music doesn't play on some games with the Phoebe? Im assuming there is an issue with Redbook music. Ive tried multiple ROMs and had no success. Typical ones that dont work are:

 

Virtua Cop

Virtua Racing

Panzer Dragoon

 

Ones that work:

 

Panzer Dragoon 2

Sonic R

 

Ive almost given up. Otherwise im pleased with it. But yeah definitely looking forward to the VCD adapter and would love to put one in my second Saturn.

I would guess it is the format you are using for the images that causes this.

 

I wasn't having much luck with my Rhea at all at first. That was because the images I was using were older image burn images and they just weren't very reliable. That is when I started reading up and found that the .ccd format created by disc juggler seems to work just fine. I also updated the firmware on my Rhea so that it supports the new menu option instead of having to press the button each time to swap discs. I still have to reset the saturn or push the button to swap discs for games that have multiple discs to them, but it seems to work just fine.

 

Another tip, is that by default the Phoebe and Rhea don't seem to work with SD cards overs 16gb. But they will...you have to use a separate format utility that will allow you to format higher capacity SD cards to fat32 still. That is all these emus can read is fat32 file structures. By default, Windows 10 at least won't give you the fat32 format option once you go past a 16gb sd card. Having said that you can get 128gb sd cards to work easily using this method and damn near store the entire US library on one SD card in the process.

 

I actually own those three games you've mentioned but I only have Virtua Racing imaged up on my Rhea. I get music in that game except during the race replay...what happens there is the music just repeats the same starting measure over and over and doesn't actually play the full tune. I have to assume there is something odd about how that particular tune kicks in on the replay option causing the issue. But aside from that one spot, music plays throughout the rest of the game just fine as I recall.

 

I don't know that I've created images of my Panzer Dragoon yet though again I do own it so I could and see what happens. If I can remember to do so...hehe.

Edited December 4, 2018 by -^Cro§Bow^-

[Blazing Lazers]

Just because I think it might help somebody, here's some copy-pasta of my method for making Saturn disc images:

 

Multi-disc games, most especially PDS, do work fine. My method is to rip them as BIN/cue with Imgburn (which it automatically recognizes as the proper rip format) and use UltraISO to quickly convert them to the two MDF/MDS formats. Then, just copy them directly to whatever SD card I'm using and run the rmenu.exe (Rheamenu) so it recognizes the newly copied folders. Each disc has its own folder. Dead simple process, really. I'm often appalled at so many various online postings indicating that DaemonTools, Alcohol 120, Discjuggler, disc-mounting and other convoluted steps are required- they're not.

 

This also works for emulators that I've tested. I'm sure that some games probably won't work via this method, but every disc I ever tried worked this way and so long as the discs were clean I got flawless images. Actually, even some scratched discs still gave good images, but as always ymmv.

[Punisher5.0]

I would guess it is the format you are using for the images that causes this.

 

I wasn't having much luck with my Rhea at all at first. That was because the images I was using were older image burn images and they just weren't very reliable. That is when I started reading up and found that the .ccd format created by disc juggler seems to work just fine. I also updated the firmware on my Rhea so that it supports the new menu option instead of having to press the button each time to swap discs. I still have to reset the saturn or push the button to swap discs for games that have multiple discs to them, but it seems to work just fine.

 

Another tip, is that by default the Phoebe and Rhea don't seem to work with SD cards overs 16gb. But they will...you have to use a separate format utility that will allow you to format higher capacity SD cards to fat32 still. That is all these emus can read is fat32 file structures. By default, Windows 10 at least won't give you the fat32 format option once you go past a 16gb sd card. Having said that you can get 128gb sd cards to work easily using this method and damn near store the entire US library on one SD card in the process.

 

I actually own those three games you've mentioned but I only have Virtua Racing imaged up on my Rhea. I get music in that game except during the race replay...what happens there is the music just repeats the same starting measure over and over and doesn't actually play the full tune. I have to assume there is something odd about how that particular tune kicks in on the replay option causing the issue. But aside from that one spot, music plays throughout the rest of the game just fine as I recall.

 

I don't know that I've created images of my Panzer Dragoon yet though again I do own it so I could and see what happens. If I can remember to do so...hehe.

Ive tried converting them with with disc juggler and it didnt change anything. Im using a 32gb Sandisk card but I dont think thats the problem. It seems like half the games dont have in game music. Its annoying but not a deal breaker.

 

Yeah the Rmenu is way better than the push the button several times to find the game you want. There seems to be a bug with it though. When I name them all on the PC and save it, all the games will have the same name of the last one I edited. The names are fine on the Saturn though.

[Punisher5.0]

Just because I think it might help somebody, here's some copy-pasta of my method for making Saturn disc images:

 

Multi-disc games, most especially PDS, do work fine. My method is to rip them as BIN/cue with Imgburn (which it automatically recognizes as the proper rip format) and use UltraISO to quickly convert them to the two MDF/MDS formats. Then, just copy them directly to whatever SD card I'm using and run the rmenu.exe (Rheamenu) so it recognizes the newly copied folders. Each disc has its own folder. Dead simple process, really. I'm often appalled at so many various online postings indicating that DaemonTools, Alcohol 120, Discjuggler, disc-mounting and other convoluted steps are required- they're not.

 

This also works for emulators that I've tested. I'm sure that some games probably won't work via this method, but every disc I ever tried worked this way and so long as the discs were clean I got flawless images. Actually, even some scratched discs still gave good images, but as always ymmv.

Ill give this a try when I get back into the Saturn. Thanks for the advice.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Just because I think it might help somebody, here's some copy-pasta of my method for making Saturn disc images:

 

Multi-disc games, most especially PDS, do work fine. My method is to rip them as BIN/cue with Imgburn (which it automatically recognizes as the proper rip format) and use UltraISO to quickly convert them to the two MDF/MDS formats. Then, just copy them directly to whatever SD card I'm using and run the rmenu.exe (Rheamenu) so it recognizes the newly copied folders. Each disc has its own folder. Dead simple process, really. I'm often appalled at so many various online postings indicating that DaemonTools, Alcohol 120, Discjuggler, disc-mounting and other convoluted steps are required- they're not.

 

This also works for emulators that I've tested. I'm sure that some games probably won't work via this method, but every disc I ever tried worked this way and so long as the discs were clean I got flawless images. Actually, even some scratched discs still gave good images, but as always ymmv.

I wasn't able to get Bin/Cue to work even though I believe newer firmware states it should work. And again I haven't had an issue with disc juggler. I just pop in my Saturn game in my drive, set the options as needed for the rip and it is done in a few min. Take those files and put them into their own folder next in numerical order just as you stated, run the menu util and edit names as needed.

 

 

Ive tried converting them with with disc juggler and it didnt change anything. Im using a 32gb Sandisk card but I dont think thats the problem. It seems like half the games dont have in game music. Its annoying but not a deal breaker.

 

Yeah the Rmenu is way better than the push the button several times to find the game you want. There seems to be a bug with it though. When I name them all on the PC and save it, all the games will have the same name of the last one I edited. The names are fine on the Saturn though.

 

Can you take video or something to show me what you are getting or not getting as the case may be? That way I know more what to look or listen for I guess? Again, the only game I can think of right off hand that has any sound issues is the stuck measure of music that plays over and over when the replay after a race is playing in Virtua Racing. Strange thing is if I stop the replay the music suddenly gets past that and plays normally but then immediately fades since I was canceling the replay playback and going back to the main menu anyway.

Edited December 4, 2018 by -^Cro§Bow^-

[+-^CrossBow^-]

So last night I decided to give the Imgburn + Ultra ISO conversion a go. I haven't tested any of it yet, but an interesting thing..

 

ImgBurn appears to already create a .cdi file by default on most of the CDs it rips. Not sure why I was specifically using DiscJuggler to do it then? Anyway, I will give the games I ripped and converted a go hopefully tonight on my Rhea and see if there are any issues with them.

 

Also...what is the actual different between the .cdi and .mdf formats? Because with the exception of like 1 or 2 games I ripped last night out of about dozen, the .CDI image size was the exact same as the .MDF so it isn't like I'm saving any space using one format over the other.

[Greg2600]

The one good thing was that GDEMU allowed custom menus, but part of that reason is how idiotic you need to place the files on your SD card. He also should have transitioned from card to USB. To say nothing about his foolish insistance at building every unit personally.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Ill give this a try when I get back into the Saturn. Thanks for the advice.

 

I tested both Virtua Racing and the first Panzer Dragoon. Both have music where they should and Panzer had constant music playing during the levels as normal. Now I did find out however, that Metal Slug doesn't seem to play music and only has SFX and it locks up just as the first mini-boss helicopter appears on the very first mission. Going to have to look into that as I thought my physical disc of this was working fine last time I tried it. Still no success with my copy of In The Hunt working when ripped through. It just locks up the Saturn pretty much as soon as it tries to load it from the RHEA. But my actual disc with pin holes throughout it and all...actually does work when I play it physically in my other model 2 Saturn from beginning to end without issue. So...not sure why the rips won't take. And yes, the rips do throw errors due to those pinholes in the disc rot coming through. But again, actual Saturn hardware seems able to read through it.

 

Also kinda tricky to use an Action Replay with a RHEA. On mine it will immediately load up. So I have to start without cheats and then the RHEA menu appears. If I choose a game then the game appears to just load up as normal. But if I choose to load the cart, then the AR loads up again. So... I'm not convinced that an AR can be used with the RHEA for anything more than storing save files at this point. Because I haven't tested it, but I would imagine that if I load up some cheats from it for a game, that could very well affect the operation of the RHEA itself in trying to load up said game.

 

Guess I need to test with that more soon...

[Punisher5.0]

It appears to be the .cue ones that dont have music. Is there a free way to convert these?

 

The only issue I have had with the AR is sometimes I need to reset the system and then it goes straight to the game that I was trying to load previously.

 

[+-^CrossBow^-]

It appears to be the .cue ones that dont have music. Is there a free way to convert these?

 

The only issue I have had with the AR is sometimes I need to reset the system and then it goes straight to the game that I was trying to load previously.

 

Find and download the UltraISO that was mentioned above. It will convert the .bin and .cue formats to .mdf as needed.

 

BTW the .cue files work with the .bin files containing the actual data. So what you could also try, is to burn the files you have to an actual CD (I keep a small pile of CDRW discs just for this purpose). This way you can verify that the actual audio tracks are there starting with track 2.

[derFunkenstein]

The one good thing was that GDEMU allowed custom menus, but part of that reason is how idiotic you need to place the files on your SD card. He also should have transitioned from card to USB. To say nothing about his foolish insistance at building every unit personally.

 

If you want USB there's always USB-GDROM, which also has high wait times associated with it. And another maker that's not really into the whole communication thing. If I want a manufacturer to ignore my questions, I'll just buy the cheap Chinese models.

[Greg2600]

Don't get me started on that guy!

[Punisher5.0]

 

Find and download the UltraISO that was mentioned above. It will convert the .bin and .cue formats to .mdf as needed.

 

BTW the .cue files work with the .bin files containing the actual data. So what you could also try, is to burn the files you have to an actual CD (I keep a small pile of CDRW discs just for this purpose). This way you can verify that the actual audio tracks are there starting with track 2.

I converted VR and still no dice. To make matters worse I checked out some other games and Road Rash is in .cue format and the music works just find so I have no idea whats going on.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

I'm not sure either. All games I've tested seem to work just fine. I was finally able to get my Metal Slug working. Just ripped it again and converted and now it seems to work without locking up and all music finally playing. So only my original disc of In The Hunt won't rip and work properly for me. Other than that I've got just south of 80games loaded up on a single SD card in my RHEA now.

 

Still not sure how the Action Replay+ will work with the RHEA in the mix but I can mess with that later.

[Punisher5.0]

I'm not sure either. All games I've tested seem to work just fine. I was finally able to get my Metal Slug working. Just ripped it again and converted and now it seems to work without locking up and all music finally playing. So only my original disc of In The Hunt won't rip and work properly for me. Other than that I've got just south of 80games loaded up on a single SD card in my RHEA now.

 

Still not sure how the Action Replay+ will work with the RHEA in the mix but I can mess with that later.

Thanks for the help. I'll eventually figure it out

[derFunkenstein]

GDEMU orders opened and immediately closed again because they sold out. All before I got out of bed this morning.

[xenomorpher]

GDEMU orders opened and immediately closed again because they sold out. All before I got out of bed this morning.

Yeah I saw that earlier today too. At this point I'd just get a clone system from an eBay seller with good feedback if I were you. So far I love mine and the load times seem much faster compared to actual disc games. I haven't done any tests, so it could be just my imagination. I'm wondering how long until we see clones of the Saturn version since that's a popular system in the community as well. I know it's something I'd jump on.