Hyperdrive

[novenary]

With meneerbeer nearing completion of his, I guess it's time for me to put this out there for the curious. It's currently far from being as polished, but I'll get there eventually. I got it booting games over a year ago, and it's kind of been on hold ever since. Currently waiting on various pieces of hardware to resume work.
I've found a nice surprise in the drive interface thanks to YAGCD and my own testing, and I intend to exploit it fully. I'm not gonna give away the details for now, but it has a fair amount of potential.
I'm still debating whether I want to release the source, but I do plan to have it manufactured and sold either way, so hopefully there will be easy to install units available for those interested.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2T_m73DaB0

[meneerbeer]

You kept it hidden all this time!

It looks like you are sending the game data over USB? Does it also support other media?

My initial idea was also to use USB but then I had to wait for new hardware anyways and had a lot of time to write the SD card core. I never got around to testing the USB portion on my board.

[novenary]

Yeah right now it's an ftdi pushing the data over SPI. It's a little faster than the real DVD drive (constant speed, almost 3MB/s), but I'm planning to use a microcontroller to handle SD access. It could also do USB drives like the wode (the chip in question supports high speed USB), but it's too much effort to implement in my opinion, for little benefit considering the price to capacity ratio of SD cards. It does however have some interesting features that I plan to use like a hardware I2S controller and another for that secret feature I mentioned.

[meneerbeer]

Yeah right now it's an ftdi pushing the data over SPI. It's a little faster than the real DVD drive (constant speed, almost 3MB/s), but I'm planning to use a microcontroller to handle SD access. It could also do USB drives like the wode (the chip in question supports high speed USB), but it's too much effort to implement in my opinion, for little benefit considering the price to capacity ratio of SD cards. It does however have some interesting features that I plan to use like a hardware I2S controller and another for that secret feature I mentioned.

Sounds good. You really got me wondering what this secret feature will be.

I also thought about using a microcontroller with an SD card controller, but I did not like the idea of using too many separate ICs. With a separate microcontroller you can, however, probably use a very cheap FPGA.

I guess in one or two years 400GB+ SD cards should not be too expensive anymore. That should indeed be plenty of space to store your favorite games.

[novenary]

I could get away with a very cheap FPGA indeed. I'm currently using a spartan 6, but I'm not sure if it's worth downgrading to something like a lattice, considering how cheap they can be from china.
I'm personally fine with a 32GB SD card, I can store any extra games on my PC and rotate them as needed, and I don't have a huge collection anyway.

[Sierron]

2018 seems to be a good year for gamecube stuff as it seems Can't wait for your product to come out.

[novenary]

Every year is a good year. Thanks for your support, I appreciate it.

[MockyLock]

hehe
Can't wait to see the product !

[Sassokee]

Loading games over USB would be amazing dude simply because USB drives are much cheaper thank high capacity SD cards! Keep up the good work!

[novenary]

Since the hardware is capable of it, USB might be an option worth considering in the future and could be implemented with a simple firmware update. No guarantees though. If it happens at all, it will have to wait until a mature USB stack in Rust is available. I don't want to rely on the USB stack provided by Atmel.

[Toadiller]

When is this going to be released?? Cant wait as I want to build a gamecube portable!

[novenary]

Still pretty far off, definitely no ETA yet. I currently have no plans for a portable version, you should consider building a portable Wii instead.

[TiredKorok]

Hopefully things are still going well, looking forward to an update

[novenary]

Nothing worth posting about for now, the custom dev board I had been waiting for turned up with a major design flaw so it's still blocked by that.

[Hucklebuck]

Really cool, another ode. This one has a surprise in it. Can't wait to watch this one develope.

[cFmisfit]

Waiting patiently.

[EthernumRasa]

I would deffinetly buy this if it is ever released. Will be lurking until then watching over this and waiting patiently.

[Haydinho]

Watching with wide eyes, cant wait to complete my cube something like this.

Is your vision to build this and keep existing disc drive function?

[Sassokee]

Is your vision to build this and keep existing disc drive function?

I was actually wondering the same and I hope it will be the case, I'd love to keep the drive, I have a brand new factory sealed GC that an ODE will go in for sure once there's one available.