Dreamcast-Talk.com

Anthony817 wrote:Of course they are good. You can get them for $40 or so. I have had mine for a year and can't complain. You can't update the firmware on them just yet, not unless the clone makers release their own firmwares. The reason is clones have slightly different chips and firmwares in order to make them work they hacked the firmware slightly. Thus if you update the firmware you will brick it. No worries though since they are already using later firmware updates and the only issue, Bleemcast protection with the retails is being patched out by Japanese Cake, so no protections will be on them allowing it to load from all ODE emu projects. As of now you can only load the Bleem beta stuff, but hey, everything else works great and at $40 you can;t go wrong!

I got mine for $48 shipped from Ali 3 months ago, and days later dropped from upper $40's to lower $40's.. oh well, could always wait

Mine works well too, so far, even after long play sessions and without any airflow adjustments. I just hope it withstands the test of time ... Where'd you get yours from? Problaby one of the first clone batches since I recall you being on It as soon as they came out relatively speaking

what do you make of these stylistic new clones too ? They seem to have already hit eBay and Ali

...I really do wish I went authentic tho, I don't think the dev is as much of a jerk as most people + I'm convinced these are solid , since so many people are happy with their clones that is based on his work / a rip of it, and my Phoebe is amazing.

Does he have problems? Sure. Enough to wanna be spiteful? Nah

I was just impatient + cheap at the time. And, truthfully, feel less protective of dreamcast hardware than Saturn since dreamcast is easier and cheaper to find than Saturn. If a clone fried my DC I'd definitely be bummed, but not devastated like a good shape Saturn that are increasingly tougher to find.. moot anyways though since there are no Phoebe clones and I haven't really heard reports of clones frying dreamcasts, just some not working out of the box and some not working over time out of the blue but that may be a minority

After much deliberation, I ordered a white 3d printed tray for my GDEMU clone with my black Sega sports dreamcast, went with white interior and cant wait for it to arrive

have the same white interior set up for my black model2 Saturn with Phoebe.. and imo it looks CLEAN. originally wanted the all black look, but after seeing how the Saturn one turned out I want the same for this

Plus the 3d tray comes with pegs, my clone from Ali never came with any which sorta bugged me

current price ~38$

areyareadyherewego wrote: Where'd you get yours from? Problaby one of the first clone batches since I recall you being on It as soon as they came out relatively speaking

what do you make of these stylistic new clones too ? They seem to have already hit eBay and Ali

I got mine from a seller on eBay from the UK. It was ALMOST close to the price of the real ones then, but the guy had it shipped to my house in Texas in 5 days, had a 30- day warranty which even the official ones lack, and was just more widely available. So I went with it.

The new stylized ones look cool, and I guess the heatsinks do help if there is any heat which really there is not but hey, more or less a built in redundancy.

Excuse my ignorance but is it difficult to install in a dreamcast? Is soldering etc required? I am thinking of putting one in my dc. I have troubles with disc drives, games not playing etc.

Wrath of Khan wrote:Excuse my ignorance but is it difficult to install in a dreamcast? Is soldering etc required? I am thinking of putting one in my dc. I have troubles with disc drives, games not playing etc.

its extremely easy

remove housing screws, remove the screws holding the cd drive in.

plug in the GDEMU to the gdrom connector slot and thats it pretty much

sd card maker by mad sheep will organize your SD card to the proper file structure for gdmenu to load game titles

There may be a detail or two I've omitted (read up on proper formatting the card, I think its fat32 and 32k or 64k cluster size)

But absolutely zero soldering required its an internal 'plug and play' solution

and some people remove the 12v regulator on the PSU (which requires soldering or potentially even just chopping the solder lead off the bottom of PSU , not sure, this is an optional step), others add a resistor in the PSU power slots to offset the load (matter of buying a resistor and jamming it in), others do nothing at all and are fine ... and Deunan the creator himself said should be fine without mods / 3d trays and stuff help with airflow to be a physical surface in absence of the way gdrom takes up space, because the gdemu draws less power than the gdrom and the PSU gets a bit toastier because of that

areyareadyherewego wrote:

Wrath of Khan wrote:Excuse my ignorance but is it difficult to install in a dreamcast? Is soldering etc required? I am thinking of putting one in my dc. I have troubles with disc drives, games not playing etc.

its extremely easy

remove housing screws, remove the screws holding the cd drive in.

plug in the GDEMU to the gdrom connector slot and thats it pretty much

sd card maker by mad sheep will organize your SD card to the proper file structure for gdmenu to load game titles

There may be a detail or two I've omitted (read up on proper formatting the card, I think its fat32 and 32k or 64k cluster size)

But absolutely zero soldering required its an internal 'plug and play' solution

and some people remove the 12v regulator on the PSU (which requires soldering or potentially even just chopping the solder lead off the bottom of PSU , not sure, this is an optional step), others add a resistor in the PSU power slots to offset the load (matter of buying a resistor and jamming it in), others do nothing at all and are fine ... and Deunan the creator himself said should be fine without mods / 3d trays and stuff help with airflow to be a physical surface in absence of the way gdrom takes up space, because the gdemu draws less power than the gdrom and the PSU gets a bit toastier because of that

I see. I will get one soon then. I have bad luck with cd drives in dreamcasts. My current one has a pico in it but still does not read all discs. Guess I will have one gdemu and one normal dc. I have lots to catch up with. Hdmi thingy, new games, retrobit pad when its released etc

^ I am so excited for some retro bit wireless and/or retrobit 3d controller / dreamcast controller hybrid as I saw that mold even if its wired

in the interim the extension cable retrobit cable has saved my butt from hunching over the couch to reach the system

Interesting but one thing to note is that on the image I think the chip is an ATSAM3U4E which would be an older revision of the clones, the latest revision of the clones which is 5.15b uses ATSAM3U2E - same as the official GDEMU.

Maybe they are repurposing old stock of clones (pre 5.15b) with these designs to make them more appealing?

CodeDream wrote:Interesting but one thing to note is that on the image I think the chip is an ATSAM3U4E which would be an older revision of the clones, the latest revision of the clones which is 5.15b uses ATSAM3U2E - same as the official GDEMU.

Maybe they are repurposing old stock of clones (pre 5.15b) with these designs to make them more appealing?

I wish someone had their hands on this pro clone just to see if it works alright for others

I dont place much faith in whats printed on the chips, they could easily be generics with fake labels . hard to say.

Can someone post a link to the GDEMU's for $40? All of the ones I find on Aliexpress and eBay are $60+