DVD Drive Emulator Question

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meneerbeer
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by meneerbeer » Tue Jul 04, 2017 9:01 pm

I have finally made some progress. The problem with DIDIR seemed to be the main problem, which was making me try all kinds of crazy things.

After fixing the DIDIR, it turned out I actually had a mistake when I had to read from offsets that were not perfectly aligned with a block address.

I can boot Wind Waker from the GC menu now + actually get in-game. I have given Sonic 2 and Zelda Collector's Edition a try too. These are not showing up in the system menu and instead the GC seems to get into an endless read loop at repeating adresses. However, I can boot those fine through Swiss and actually get into gameplay segments. I have not observed any in-game crashes either.

I am not sure why those games are not showing up in the system menu. Is there perhaps a read timeout in the system menu? My current implementation only gets around 430KB/s, so load times are awful.

Next I will look into multiple block reads + actual 4 bit SD (although I will probably wait until I have a dedicated PCB to do that).
meneerbeer
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by meneerbeer » Mon Jul 10, 2017 7:59 am

I have implemented the multiple block reads. I get around 900KB/s in Cleanrip now. I have hooked up an LED to show SD card activity. I can see it blanking for some period inbetween reads, so it seems that Cleanrip itself might be capping the speed?

I am still having trouble with recognizing games from the system menu. From the games I have tested I can boot Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, and Melee. The loading times are a bit high, but stuff such as videos plays fine.

The other games I tried are usually not showing up at all in the system menu. They end up in an endless loop of sending the same read commands. However, it seems that some games are recognized at some point. For instance, Metroid Prime sometimes shows up after repeating the same reads for 2-3 times. Does anyone have any idea why that happens?

All games boot fine from Swiss and I have not encountered any in-game crashes, except for Zelda Collector's edition, which does not get past the Nintendo logo. This may be because of Swiss, since it applies a lot of patches at startup.

Edit: it seems a lot of games also have the audio streaming bit set in the header, but are not in the list of audio streaming games.
novenary
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by novenary » Mon Jul 10, 2017 12:44 pm

Cleanrip is limited by the SD card and hash calculation, build a custom version with both disabled to benchmark your drive.

Some games have the audio streaming bit set because they do issue audio streaming commands, even though they don't actually use it. I think the real drive would complain without the bit set.
Bakuku
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by Bakuku » Mon Jul 10, 2017 2:20 pm

Looks promising mr.Bear! Im keeping a close eye on this thread!
tueidj
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by tueidj » Mon Jul 10, 2017 11:25 pm

If they're attempting the exact same read commands multiple times it sounds like they might be timing out (and automatically being retried). But that should only happen a few times before showing an error.
meneerbeer
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by meneerbeer » Tue Jul 11, 2017 7:07 am

tueidj wrote:If they're attempting the exact same read commands multiple times it sounds like they might be timing out (and automatically being retried). But that should only happen a few times before showing an error.
I suppose the IPL is responsible for the timeout? In that case, I should be able to compare a game that is detected and one that is not detected. I would expect the game that is not detected to request longer transactions. I am pretty sure my emulator is faster for short transactions, as I do not really have any seek time.

Do you know if the read timeout is per read or over multiple reads?

And yes indeed, I do not get any errors from the GC, it just keeps reading and reading..

Edit: also does anyone know what to respond to cmd 0xe4, when it enables audio streaming? At this moment I always respond with 0x00000000.
tueidj
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by tueidj » Tue Jul 11, 2017 8:37 am

The timeout is reset for each individual read request.

cmd 0xE4 enables/disables audio streaming. 0xE401xxxx enables it, 0xE400xxxx disables it. When enabling, the last 2 bytes possibly specify some buffer size; they're normally 0x000A, doesn't really matter for an emulator. A response of 0 should be fine.
meneerbeer
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by meneerbeer » Wed Jul 12, 2017 8:37 am

tueidj wrote:The timeout is reset for each individual read request.

cmd 0xE4 enables/disables audio streaming. 0xE401xxxx enables it, 0xE400xxxx disables it. When enabling, the last 2 bytes possibly specify some buffer size; they're normally 0x000A, doesn't really matter for an emulator. A response of 0 should be fine.
Thanks for the information.

I don't think timeout is the problem. For reading from SD card I have a non-DMA and DMA mode. The non-DMA mode first goes from the SD-card to the CPU and then to the GC. Because of that it is very slow (takes a few minutes to boot a disc into the start screen, up to a minute to show the disc logo in the GC menu). Even though it is so slow, it still recognizes the games it normally recognizes too in DMA mode (which is way faster).

If timeout would be the problem, I would expect it would not recognize any disc in non-DMA mode. Unless the disc itself is able to set a timeout while being read in the system menu? Then it would depend on which disc is being read, but I am probably overthinking this.

I checked the multiple reads problem a bit further. Basically, the GC sends a reset signal to the drive and then it starts all over again with asking the disc ID, then the enable/disable audio streaming, and finally multiple reads, after which it sends the reset again.
tueidj
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by tueidj » Wed Jul 12, 2017 11:29 am

That definitely sounds like some sort of error handling sequence.
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emu_kidid
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by emu_kidid » Thu Jul 20, 2017 3:38 pm

meneerbeer wrote: I don't think timeout is the problem. For reading from SD card I have a non-DMA and DMA mode. The non-DMA mode first goes from the SD-card to the CPU and then to the GC. Because of that it is very slow (takes a few minutes to boot a disc into the start screen, up to a minute to show the disc logo in the GC menu). Even though it is so slow, it still recognizes the games it normally recognizes too in DMA mode (which is way faster).

If timeout would be the problem, I would expect it would not recognize any disc in non-DMA mode. Unless the disc itself is able to set a timeout while being read in the system menu? Then it would depend on which disc is being read, but I am probably overthinking this.

I checked the multiple reads problem a bit further. Basically, the GC sends a reset signal to the drive and then it starts all over again with asking the disc ID, then the enable/disable audio streaming, and finally multiple reads, after which it sends the reset again.
The reads up to the point of failure may be small/fast enough that the timeout isn't hit. The timeout is 10 seconds I believe, and some games read in 512KB sized chunks. It sounds like you're hitting the timeout based on the "starts all over again with asking the disc ID..."
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meneerbeer
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by meneerbeer » Thu Jul 20, 2017 5:19 pm

I will take a look at the requested read sizes between working and failing games.

Meanwhile, I ordered a PCB so I can work on this thing a bit more easily. I really do not like having a lot of wires running all over the place.
SilverStar
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by SilverStar » Wed Oct 11, 2017 10:40 pm

I would love to see a an ODE for the GameCube similar in function and form to something like GDEMU. I wonder how much interest there would be if something came of this and word spread around the internet?!?
pyroholic
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by pyroholic » Tue Oct 24, 2017 9:25 pm

meneerbeer wrote:I will take a look at the requested read sizes between working and failing games.

Meanwhile, I ordered a PCB so I can work on this thing a bit more easily. I really do not like having a lot of wires running all over the place.
What debug capabilities do you have? Can you log the drive commands/response with a time stamp and print on uart? I can get you some command/response logs with time stamps if it helps.

I am just about to continue my own project after a break that was not as short as I intended, some other projects came in between and time flew. Just to finish the pcb design and then work out the final pieces...
meneerbeer
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by meneerbeer » Thu Oct 26, 2017 9:09 am

pyroholic wrote:
meneerbeer wrote:I will take a look at the requested read sizes between working and failing games.

Meanwhile, I ordered a PCB so I can work on this thing a bit more easily. I really do not like having a lot of wires running all over the place.
What debug capabilities do you have? Can you log the drive commands/response with a time stamp and print on uart? I can get you some command/response logs with time stamps if it helps.

I am just about to continue my own project after a break that was not as short as I intended, some other projects came in between and time flew. Just to finish the pcb design and then work out the final pieces...
It is no longer needed, but thanks for the offer. :) The custom PCB ended up working fine. The games that failed to be recognized are now recognized and playable. I have not encountered any crashes, except for the games that use audio streaming. However, I do not reply at all to audio streaming commands, so that is probably the reason.

I am still confused why the FPGA dev board did not work, as it was working really nice as soon as I got games to boot through Swiss.

I am currently looking at getting the SD card to work using the native protocol, rather than SPI. SPI is just too slow for my taste and I do not see much point in adding audio streaming + file system support before the native protocol is working. Just like you I took quite a long break after the custom design PCB was working..
meneerbeer
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by meneerbeer » Mon Jan 08, 2018 2:54 pm

I am still working on it every now and then, whenever I have some time and motivation.

Unfortunately, it seems the FPGA I designed the board for is a bit small, which made it impossible to fit any existing SD card interface solution. Therefore, I am now working on another board with a bigger FPGA and also looking into adding a high speed USB interface to make life easier..

What I learned from this, is that it is a good idea to give prototypes more resources than you think you will need.
krimstah
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by krimstah » Sat Jan 20, 2018 2:21 am

So looking forward to this can't wait , I've gone through 4 gc lazers in the last 12 years.

Do you know if the final product will support high capacity sd cards in the final revision ? SanDisk have a 400gb micro SD now

Do you need any gc's to do any testing on I have a few Japanese gc spares I'm willing to donate for the cause pm me if interested
meneerbeer
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by meneerbeer » Mon Apr 16, 2018 11:24 am

Started working on this project again. New board is almost ready to be ordered. Making promising progress with SD Card interface.
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KirovAir
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by KirovAir » Mon Apr 16, 2018 6:38 pm

Awesome! Really interested in this project and it's progress.
"The only thing more dangerous than a hardware guru with a code patch is a programmer with a soldering iron."
Sassokee
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by Sassokee » Wed Apr 18, 2018 9:52 am

That's great to hear, looking at the lack of any option for an ODE for the GC at the moment.

With your design, would you be able to keep the optical drive in conjunction with the ODE? Will it only support SD cards or USB drives are an option?

I will keep an eye on this thread.

Thank you for all your effort.
meneerbeer
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by meneerbeer » Fri Apr 27, 2018 7:26 am

Sassokee wrote: With your design, would you be able to keep the optical drive in conjunction with the ODE? Will it only support SD cards or USB drives are an option?
At the moment the board would only support SD cards. I do not have any plans to support USB. I am planning to test some of the bigger SD cards on the market (200GB+) and I think those have plenty of space.

It should be possible to keep the optical drive. However, if it ever comes to a final product, I would be more interested in easy installation. The goal of this drive emulator is anyways to never make you want to use your slow DVD drive again. ;)
Sassokee
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by Sassokee » Fri Apr 27, 2018 7:51 am

meneerbeer wrote:
Sassokee wrote: With your design, would you be able to keep the optical drive in conjunction with the ODE? Will it only support SD cards or USB drives are an option?
At the moment the board would only support SD cards. I do not have any plans to support USB. I am planning to test some of the bigger SD cards on the market (200GB+) and I think those have plenty of space.

It should be possible to keep the optical drive. However, if it ever comes to a final product, I would be more interested in easy installation. The goal of this drive emulator is anyways to never make you want to use your slow DVD drive again. ;)
That's great to hear, I can't wait to see how the final product will look like, I mentioned USB drives as they are cheaper than SD cards, for example a 250GB USB HDD is loke 8 times cheaper than a 256GB SD card. For keeping the optical drive, in case you get hold of new games you want to play.
xboxman2
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by xboxman2 » Sat May 12, 2018 5:03 pm

Really interested in this project, any progress?
What would be the price range?

Thank you for the hard work!
novenary
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by novenary » Sat May 12, 2018 10:55 pm

Sassokee wrote:That's great to hear, I can't wait to see how the final product will look like, I mentioned USB drives as they are cheaper than SD cards, for example a 250GB USB HDD is loke 8 times cheaper than a 256GB SD card. For keeping the optical drive, in case you get hold of new games you want to play.
I would argue that you don't really need a card or drive this big anyway. A 32GB card can hold ~20 unscrubbed games (note that scrubbing is not recommended), which is plenty. You can keep your game collection on a bigger hard drive drive and rotate them as you beat them and start new ones.
meneerbeer
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by meneerbeer » Mon May 14, 2018 9:04 am

xboxman2 wrote:Really interested in this project, any progress?
What would be the price range?

Thank you for the hard work!
I received the boards. Did only basic testing, but they seem to work. Software and RTL side still needs lots of work..
To make the board yourself would be in the range of the price for a WASP.

As for the SD vs USB debate. I am planning to test some bigger SD cards (128/256GB range). That should be able to hold plenty of games.
DieKatzchen
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Re: DVD Drive Emulator Question

Post by DieKatzchen » Tue May 15, 2018 8:34 pm

I'd be willing to pay the price of a Wasp, if it meant I could actually receive an ODE. Those things are rare as hen's teeth. I only ever hear about them as "you should have checked a week ago. There were a few, they're all gone now."
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