Could the BBA replace the need for burning CDRs?

GyroVorbis · Post by **GyroVorbis** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 4:15 pm

I've thought a bit on the subject. I went to my friend's house that has a modded Xbox. One thing that gives the Xbox a MAJOR advantage is the obvious hard drive... It's just amazingly convenient and awesome just to be able to run/load whatever you need from the HD.

Also, I've been hearing a lot of talk about people wanting to make HD mods with their DC lately. Wouldn't it be more practical/feasible to somehow use the BBA to let your HD on your PC work sort of like a DC hard drive?

Maybe a program can be written that is booted when you start up your DC, and allows the user to browse their HD via the BBA. You can choose your BIN/ELF/Whatever and load it. But the only difference is that it could treat every /cd/ call like a /pc/ call. Perhaps that could eliminate the need to burn homebrew completely for BBA owners, since I'm assuming it's fast enough that everything can be loaded from the PC rather than CD.

If we build off of that, what's to stop (for example) NesterDC SE from loading an NES rom off of your PC and playing it (when it thinks it's calling CD). You could just drag and drop some roms and stuff in your rom folder on the PC, and when an emulator or something browses, it'll be able to load whatever you've got in there (not to mention you can add more anytime).

Sir Savant · Post by **Sir Savant** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 4:32 pm

Wouldnt the pc need to be on?

I had a similar idea, except the ide HD is connected directly to the BBA. There are some technical problems with that, though, mainly that there would need to be at the very least a usb-ethernet jack of some type. And programmable chips. Which is why your idea is better.

A problem with your idea is that eventually, someone would hack it to load warez. A definite no-no.

Post by **Quzar** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 5:31 pm

Almost everything you mentioned already exists or is already being used in one way or another. Look up CDFS redirection.

GyroVorbis · Post by **GyroVorbis** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 6:19 pm

I'm not finding anything on how it's actually redirected. I'm mostly curious to see what's involved with something like that. I'm sure it's not as easy as replacing a call to /cd/ with /pc/...

chronofurb · Post by **chronofurb** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 11:46 pm

one could make a new device that interfaces (abstracted by the application layer for those familiar with sockets programming) with the dc, and have a daemonized process running on the pc say a server, and when the dc is booted it seeks the server. kind of like a samba share in unix. in fact I think the tcp stuff the dc does is very much like the unix iplementation...

Post by **Quzar** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 3:04 am

with dc-load-ip and cdfs enabled you can point to an iso on your PC and have it read as if that is the cd in the DC.

GyroVorbis · Post by **GyroVorbis** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 9:32 am

Alright, I see what you're saying now.

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-i <isofile>

That's a bit different though. You'll still need to send an .elf, .bin, or .src that would normally load from the CD.

I'm talking about not having to send anything. You pass the ISO (or scrambled bin would be better), and DCLoad boots it straight from the PC exactly as it normally would by reading the CD.

I guess that after the initial boot, it'd work just like the cdfs redirection to an ISO file, but it'd be a lot better if it could just treat a directory like /cd/. That would go back to being able to dynamically update NesterDC and any other emulator. Also, you could dynamically change graphics for a game and add/subtract things as if you were doing it from a CD.

dospro · Post by **dospro** » Tue Sep 06, 2005 4:35 pm

I was also trying to make something like that, but still dont know how to make that redirection. MAybe a program which transalates all "cd reads" in asm to BBA reads where a program in Pc recieves the signal and points to the correct dir.

I was also trying to o that an ps2 but nothing succesful.

GyroVorbis · Post by **GyroVorbis** » Tue Sep 06, 2005 4:48 pm

Is there anybody else who might know? I know it might not sound interesting, but what we're pretty much doing is pwning the whole DC hard drive, and taking it one step beyond (HD as the GDRom drive).

Think how badass that'd be!

quarn · Post by **quarn** » Wed Sep 07, 2005 1:59 am

I just do this in my projects:

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// ...Somewhere in the setup-phase...
#ifndef FINAL
        fs_chdir("/pc/home/quarn/code/dreamcast/<insert projectname here>/data");
#else
        fs_chdir("/cd/data");
#endif

and then load all files relative to this base. That would be:

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// do this
FILE *fp = fopen("image.jpg", "rb");

// but NOT this
FILE *fp = fopen("/cd/data/image.jpg", "rb");

This means that when the project is compiled with "FINAL" defined, the base for all data is on the cd. Otherwise (non-final) files are loaded via my pc.

toastman · Post by **toastman** » Wed Sep 07, 2005 5:59 pm

That's pretty much what I do. It works pretty sweet too.

GyroVorbis · Post by **GyroVorbis** » Wed Sep 07, 2005 7:09 pm

Whoah. *adopts that method*

That works great, especially with the BBA.

dospro · Post by **dospro** » Sat Sep 10, 2005 9:18 pm

Good point. But the this is just a solution for your projects. THe goal is to make normal games like Quake 3 load from the HD instead of a CD.

GyroVorbis · Post by **GyroVorbis** » Sun Sep 11, 2005 10:10 am

dospro wrote:Good point. But the this is just a solution for your projects. THe goal is to make normal games like Quake 3 load from the HD instead of a CD.

That's actually true, but I'm assuming you're meaning a home-ported Quake III, not Q3A, because you've just brought up one of the biggest issues there: piracy.

I was thinking that emulators and any other game that the user is able to add files/roms/music/etc. before burning would greatly benefit.