Serial port speed read write benchmark

[aldair]

Well, these are the cards I've tried so far (also some Sandisk MicroSD cards not shown). No luck at all. All cards formatted FAT32, 32K and 64K clusters tried. Even tried full format (not quick). I get one of three errors:
No acknowledgement that an SD card is present.
SD card cannot be read.
SD is present but MBR cannot be read.
At this point, I've concluded either there is something about my particular DC that it will not use this SD reader, or that it is so picky about SD cards I'll have to spend a hundred bucks and many hours to find a compatible one. I'm glad my optical drive is still OK, and I have a good CD burner!

If your card reader is known to be good and if the serial port on the Dreamcast has been cleaned and if there have been no mods to the Dreamcast, then this rare issue could be the problem:

serial-1.png

serial-2.png

From the sd card reader designer: jj1odm

This Serial port problem, all Dreamcast will have it soon!

[grenert]

Thanks again, everyone for your advice. The port is clean and in good shape. The SD card adapter light goes on. So I think there is nothing wrong from a physical connection standpoint.

The serial port capacitor possibility is interesting. I opened up my DC, and it is a VA2.1 motherboard. The PCB layout around the serial port is very different than in the photos you've attached (C606 is actually on the other side of the board, for example). Could it be that the VA2.1 board doesn't work with the SD card adapter?

[grenert]

Well, after tearing apart my DC, I figured I might as well try removing those capacitors (assuming the ones with the same part designations are the same on my board). Still no luck.
For my own sanity (I could be playing games, not formatting SD cards and burning boot discs!), I am going to give up on this, and write it off as some incompatibility with the VA2.1 motherboard.
Thanks again for your suggestions.

[Ian Micheal]

Well, after tearing apart my DC, I figured I might as well try removing those capacitors (assuming the ones with the same part designations are the same on my board). Still no luck.
For my own sanity (I could be playing games, not formatting SD cards and burning boot discs!), I am going to give up on this, and write it off as some incompatibility with the VA2.1 motherboard.
Thanks again for your suggestions.

Thanks for telling us what model

[MoeFoh]

Weird! Did Sega do something with the serial port design / bios to inhibit the use of a coder cable or other external devices like the sd card reader on the VA2.1 system? They nixed ODE and mil-cd support - why wouldn't they go after the serial port, too?

[grenert]

They nixed ODE and mil-cd support

I should say that my VA2.1 Dreamcast will play burned CD-R just fine. But yeah, it's a bummer to also find out that ODE is not an option with this particular console.