Any info on Unofficial Dreamcast Broadband Adapter In Development?

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The-Amazing-Mr_V
Metallic
Posts: 821

Re: Any info on Unofficial Dreamcast Broadband Adapter In Development?

Post#21 » Wed Oct 18, 2017 7:23 pm

I never new that was done. But I'm not really a computer guy. I don't know shit about any of it. Still cool to me.

mrneo240
Rank 9
Posts: 926

Re: Any info on Unofficial Dreamcast Broadband Adapter In Development?

Post#22 » Wed Oct 18, 2017 7:34 pm

Yea the other day I was crawling around deep into the internet, fighting through Viagra ads and lycos websites and I found a bunch of old info and stuff.

Originally I was just searching for detailed documentation about the serial interface and more technical stuff related to it.

Found guys from the way back adding all kinds of stuff to the DC: 3 very different builds of adding a custom NIC to the G2 bus, early early IDE mods, a project that added a mouse to the Dreamcast. Then right below all of that a sprinkling of serial port info. I'll see if I can find the page it was on, I wrote it off and moved on.

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BlueCrab
Developer
Posts: 843

Re: Any info on Unofficial Dreamcast Broadband Adapter In Development?

Post#23 » Wed Oct 18, 2017 7:51 pm

mrneo240 wrote:How does this project differ from the Chinese projects of a similar nature ?

They built custom boards to directly interface with the G2 bus as well and use an off the shelf NIC.
Because none of those ever actually successfully emulated the BBA.

They either only were used to make a replacement for the HIT-0300 LAN Adapter, or they used completely different NICs that would only be supported by homebrew code that they wrote.

There was a guy who was working on a BBA clone, but as far as I'm aware, he never completed the work.

dreamcast ™
undertow
Posts: 29

Re: Any info on Unofficial Dreamcast Broadband Adapter In Development?

Post#24 » Wed Oct 18, 2017 8:00 pm

@Kazade: Technically, the dial-tone, etc, are features in that list have been known for years and are easily implemented in the original PC / DC configuration through additional AT commands. Moband is also able to modify packets so games like AFO and F355 can connect to their unofficial servers.

@Sonic1994DC: It's packed away right now, but I may have a video somewhere.

@The-Amazing-Mr_V: While you could 3D print your own case, Moband is designed to replace the official modem PCB and reuse the case.

@mrneo240: You're referring to jj1odm's work. The difference is that his work is in regards to the LAN adapter and the BBA adapter specifically. He did use the modem to determine how communication works on the G2 bus since the LAN adapter uses the same 8-bit bus / select scheme, but no work (as far as I know) was done on creating something like Moband. Moband is reverse engineering the Conexant chipset itself, not just the communication between the Dreamcast and the custom SEGA chipset on the official modem.

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The-Amazing-Mr_V
Metallic
Posts: 821

Re: Any info on Unofficial Dreamcast Broadband Adapter In Development?

Post#25 » Wed Oct 18, 2017 8:10 pm

That is awesome! Sounds better and better.

Btw. Thank you for contributing to the conversation. It helps a lot to get the answers from the horses mouth verses getting answer from the other end.

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Nico0020
Sunday Shootout
Posts: 653

Re: Any info on Unofficial Dreamcast Broadband Adapter In Development?

Post#26 » Wed Oct 18, 2017 8:34 pm

Nice to see this project is still a thing, I was quite excited when I read about this years ago.

For now I use BBA for games that support , and DreamPI for the dialup only games. DreamPI is a dasiy chain, but I wouldn't call it a "mess." It streamlines a messy procedure that wasnt worth fighting with old hardware to do for years.

I wish you the best in your project and hope to see some pictures of videos of your progress.
Last edited by Nico0020 on Wed Oct 18, 2017 8:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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HuntrRose
Vagabond
Posts: 727

Re: Any info on Unofficial Dreamcast Broadband Adapter In Development?

Post#27 » Wed Oct 18, 2017 9:31 pm

love my DPi.. money well spent...

Chael
fire
Posts: 73

Re: Any info on Unofficial Dreamcast Broadband Adapter In Development?

Post#28 » Wed Oct 18, 2017 11:14 pm

Dreampi is great but if we can improve the speed for dialup games and reduce the ping thats interesting.

What speed would we reach with moband? Would the games netcodes really be compatible with higher speeds and see an improvement? Aren't they optimised for 33k upload?

kazade
Developer
Posts: 264

Re: Any info on Unofficial Dreamcast Broadband Adapter In Development?

Post#29 » Thu Oct 19, 2017 2:07 am

dreamcast ™ wrote:@Kazade: Technically, the dial-tone, etc, are features in that list have been known for years and are easily implemented in the original PC / DC configuration through additional AT commands.


Yeah, unfortunately that method blocks the modem; you can't simultaneously play the tone and listen for DTMF signals from the dreamcast, so I had to be a little inventive ;)

The Dreampi plays an audio file of a dial tone down the line while listening for the Dreamcast dialling so the Dreampi knows to answer.

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