32MB RAM upgrade

[ShindouGo]

It would be interesting to test the unreleased Might and Magic 3 with this addition of RAM to see if it works better and crash less often

[Ian Micheal]

It would be interesting to test the unreleased Might and Magic 3 with this addition of RAM to see if it works better and crash less often

It should have no effect since the software would not know it had the ram..

[fafadou]

Other question this new memory is also faster than the original ?

[ShindouGo]

It would be interesting to test the unreleased Might and Magic 3 with this addition of RAM to see if it works better and crash less often

It should have no effect since the software would not know it had the ram..

really ?
Too bad...

[Wombat]

This is such a cool feat. I really hope this will kickstart the ability of playing Atomiswave and/or NAOMI games on the Dreamcast.

[SMiTH]

i honestly wondered how long it would be until some1 successfully completed a memory upgrade on a dc. i always wanted a memory upgraded og xbox (and a tualatin p3 cpu upgrade). congrats on an upgraded 32mb memory dc. also thank you for the new mod to scummvm too.

wombat i bet that atomiswave and naomi games would work. what would be truly kick ass is if you set up a bios bank to choose between 4 bioses at boot. normal dc stock bios, modded katana bios, atomiswave, naomi.

and make it even better by using a gd rom emulator to load roms or dreamshell with hdd, hell might as well add internal dreampi, internal sd card reader, internal vga/hdmi, 999 led lights, overclocked cpu, and gold plate the entire thing and dip it in ranch dressing lol

ok im ranting again. sry lol

[Anthony817]

WOW! This has been a pipe dream for so many people in the Dreamcast community for so many years! Other consoles such as the original Xbox can be modded with double the memory as well, and it GREATLY helps with things such as HD resolution patches, or giving emulators and homebrew ports that extra needed hardware to be able to run more taxing things. I can't wait to see Half-Life patched for this and how amazing it will run! The memory overhead on the Windows CE titles has always been a sticking point for why those games often times are not as smooth as native Katana SDK built games.

I would love to see a video tutorial for this, as I have a premodded OC'd 240mhz DC, with dual bios and GDEMU with 128gb SD card. I would LOVE to attempt this, but that system is my baby and my soldering skills need some serious improvement. Damn, this is the future I always hoped would come! Now a true ULTIMATE Dreamcast is actually possible! The one shortcoming of the system by far was the low memory! Next mod we should see if it is possible is upgrading the internal flash storage! Then see about updating the memory on the VMU's. I heard there was an actual theoretical limit for those that was never reached.

It would be interesting to test the unreleased Might and Magic 3 with this addition of RAM to see if it works better and crash less often

It should have no effect since the software would not know it had the ram..

really ?
Too bad...

Well, the way it works on upgraded OG Xbox systems with double ram is that you have to patch the games to use the new added memory. Same should be possible here!

So that is at least the good news!

[Wombat]

wombat i bet that atomiswave and naomi games would work.

There are actually modified atomiswave roms out there, hacked to work on a Naomi! So if one manages to get NAOMI roms running on Dreamcast (and I guess a GDEMU will be critical in this configuration in order to keep acces speed on par with what a NAOMI would expect) we'll automatically be able to run all those sweet sweet Atomiswave games also.

[|darc|]

For those attempting to do this, I have uploaded an updated DreamShell CDI image with nearly 50 different BIOS images in a variety of flavors: DreamShell 32MB Flasher
Includes stock BIOS images, Link83, japanese-cake, DreamBoot, DreamShell, etc. A list of BIOS images included here!
This image also contains an updated bflash.klf module to support flashing the MX29L3211 32 megabit chips to accommodate triple-BIOS mods!

Just note before you use this disc that I HAVE NOT TESTED ANY OF THE 32MB HACKED BIOS IMAGES! I simply blindly patched the required bytes in all BIOS images, with no testing at all. I have no idea if any of the other BIOS images will work, especially dreamboot, dreamshell, etc. Make sure you have a backup plan or way to recover your Dreamcast BIOS if you flash one of these and it doesn't work! I plan on doing the mod when I get back from 4th of July vacation. jc-v1.032-32MB.bin has the same sha1 as tsowell's firmware hack so that one should work.

[Anthony817]

wombat i bet that atomiswave and naomi games would work.

There are actually modified atomiswave roms out there, hacked to work on a Naomi! So if one manages to get NAOMI roms running on Dreamcast (and I guess a GDEMU will be critical in this configuration in order to keep acces speed on par with what a NAOMI would expect) we'll automatically be able to run all those sweet sweet Atomiswave games also.

Yes, the same is possible on the OG Xbox with the Xbox based Sega Chihiro arcade machine games, House of the Dead 3, among many others now run on the Xbox. I really don't see why this shouldn't also be possible on the Dreamcast to run all those more advanced Arcade games? Maybe possibly Naomi 2 might be too much to run?