Dreamcast-Talk.com

mazonemayu wrote:I really should remove that vid but its the only one out there

where r you from btw?

mazonemayu wrote:aha, dan ken ik u toch van ergens...

elmagicochrisg wrote:Gonna try to open it up and find out how it works. Hopefully it does not have a COB in epoxy like the Dragoncast cable. If not, I should be able to reverse engineer it. I hope... lol

Warp2063 wrote:I have a guess as to what's on that PCB, but it's only a guess. I'm wondering if it's like the Neo Geo Pocket's cable, which apparently "contains a full set of line drivers." As I understand it, the practical upshots of including line drivers would be: a) ensuring a strong signal from either side, and b) helping to keep either serial port from dying a horrible death if a short occurred in the cable. Again, if I understand it correctly, the NGP link cable doesn't do anything to the messages between the system, it's just there to guard against malfunctions from shorts or weak signals.

I'm guessing that this might be the same case for the Dreamcast link cable. If my guess is correct, then theoretically we shouldn't need the circuitry in the middle, per se, although it would definitely be safer and more reliable to have it. I know that the Dreamcast serial port has a couple power pins in there, which would make sense for powering a line driver or maybe some other low-powered piece of equipment. So, if I'm right, all that we would have to do is wire up the right transmit and receive pins to each other from the two systems, and probably some sort of clock synchronization or something. Pretty easy.

I guess another possibility would be that the serial port could have been used to connect to multiple Dreamcasts somehow, and that the circuitry there is just to manage the communications between the two systems instead of more, but I don't think this is the case, as I think there would be a lot more circuitry than what's hidden under that little black plastic bump on the one picture of the inside of a link cable that I've seen. Unless that circuitry isn't needed because there are only two systems... but I'm probably overthinking this here.

One last thing that occurs to me is that there could be some feature of the cable that identifies to the system what exactly it is, not unlike how an Xbox or 360's video cable identifies itself to the system... but I don't think this is the case for the serial port.

Anyway, those are my thoughts.

mazonemayu wrote:its prolly not gonna sell for too much, its unboxed after all so it has no collectors value

Macabre wrote:It does. Unlike the saturn link cable which is a direct pin-to-pin connection, this bugger has some crap going on inside.

I had a thread running at the saturn netlink league where a rather intelligent guy had a few ideas as to what it all could be. I don't think he ever got one for himself, but his ideas all had good logic;

--- wrote:

mazonemayu wrote:its prolly not gonna sell for too much, its unboxed after all so it has no collectors value

not everyone is a collector ya know.

i prefer to buy dc stuff without boxes, manuals, etc.

why pay 100s when I can pay pennies on the dollar?