Dreamcast-Talk.com

It does sound awesome! Here's to hoping they will be very long (10'-12')

Will there be another tier of sales to buy just parts with no labor or another with just design but no physical pieces?

Right now its just complete cables. I did eventually release my VB cable models for people to build on their own but I usually do that about 1 year out. I'll consider it for this cable too but it will be a while. I don't currently plan to just release parts. There's always some hand holding that goes along with selling kits. Maybe in the future.

Current planned cable length is 5'. I believe the original cable was 6'. I could do 6 possibly. 10' would need tested to make sure signal quality is still OK.

Hi there,

At the moment, a friend of mine is currently in talks with a Chinese manufacturer to get these connectors made. We expected to have a quote months ago, but coronavirus interfered with those plans.

However, we planned to do a group buy where other people could purchase connectors. I don't know if you are aware or not but there are many more uses for these connectors than just the link cable so I fear you are missing out on a tremendous opportunity to not make your connectors available for purchase by themselves if you are looking to reduce cost by increasing volume.

At the moment the cheapest PC-DC development link is less than $5 in parts to solder a serial-USB interface but we really need a plug-and-play connector for this so we have a better off-the-shelf option for development than the ~$150 broadband adapter.

In addition, the Dreamcast and Arduino basically speak the same serial language so I imagine some homebrew developers would love to get connectors available so they can interface any kind of Arduino accessory to the Dreamcast.

We can also make better quality SD card adapters, MIDI cables, Neo Geo cables, etc.

|darc| wrote:Hi there,

At the moment, a friend of mine is currently in talks with a Chinese manufacturer to get these connectors made. We expected to have a quote months ago, but coronavirus interfered with those plans.

However, we planned to do a group buy where other people could purchase connectors. I don't know if you are aware or not but there are many more uses for these connectors than just the link cable so I fear you are missing out on a tremendous opportunity to not make your connectors available for purchase by themselves if you are looking to reduce cost by increasing volume.

At the moment the cheapest PC-DC development link is less than $5 in parts to solder a serial-USB interface but we really need a plug-and-play connector for this so we have a better off-the-shelf option for development than the ~$150 broadband adapter.

In addition, the Dreamcast and Arduino basically speak the same serial language so I imagine some homebrew developers would love to get connectors available so they can interface any kind of Arduino accessory to the Dreamcast.

We can also make better quality SD card adapters, MIDI cables, Neo Geo cables, etc.

If that works out that would be great for the Dreamcast community. I’m guessing that you’d need to have 100,000 or more made to get them to bite. For the cost of what people will want to pay for a connector only, it doesn’t make sense for my solution. It would make sense for a machine manufactured solution.

For now I’ll continue with the carbon fiber printed cable because, more times than not, these things don’t pan out like people hope. If it does work out then I won’t have to hand build cables and I’m OK with stopping at that point.

I'd be up for a cable (or two depending on eventual price)

Glad to see more of these are being made. I used to have one of the official ones, but sold it off years ago. Playing virtual ON was a blast on it.

Agreed that the connector is important. So the more of these out there, the better. The price is steep, but understandable. Thanks for all your hard work. I hope you can get a lot of orders.

added ordering info to OP. I'll continue to spread the word

Oh, I don't have $100 USD to spare on this ATM :/

Maybe later on in a future batch I'll have enough to order one or if a cheaper material version gets made later. Either way I wish you well on this project.

The original and 3rd party cable had a chipset in the middle of the cable. If I understand this cable doesn't have that. What exactly did that hardware do in the original cable?