Dreamcast-Talk.com

everynewday84 wrote:Sounds pretty easy. I'm going to run this by my stepdad, who is a retired electronics genius (The dude had his own electronics business until another electronics giant bought his business, and gave him a prestigious position at said electronics giant.). He has personally done something like this for me in the past, repairing parts of my guitar rig, by assembling/programming parts of his own. He's fixed shit for me that others told me was "beyond repair, you can't get those parts, they don't exist anymore" etc etc...

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a real clone of the BBA that works identically to the real thing, but you're still going to have the problem of figuring out exactly how GAPS works. LIke I said, likely you'd need to have a BBA or two in order to actually study the behavior adequately with an oscilloscope. Also, you'd probably end up having to reverse engineer quite a bit of it from code that uses the device (and by that, I mean from official Sega code, not KallistiOS' driver, which would be easier to study to get the basics working).

If one could be designed at a fair price, I'd be one of the first in line to get one, believe me.

Well, if he does this, I couldn't, wouldn't, ask any money from you, BC. After all you've done for DC fans, It would only be appropriate to give you one or two

BlueCrab wrote:There is currently no clones of the GAPS PCI Bridge available, although it is entirely possible that someone could design one with an FPGA or something else of the like, assuming they had the time, energy, patience, and drive to do so (and an FPGA capable enough to handle the demands put on the GAPS device) -- not to mention at least a BBA or two to sacrifice to actually study the darn thing and figure it all out.

I'm sure almost any FPGA nowadays would be able to handle that. And once you understood the device it would be easy enough to write some vhdl code to do the same thing. If you added the cost of an FPGA to the rest of the parts needed though I don't think it would be cost-effective to design this, at least with one of those. Since it would need to be considerably cheaper than buying a BBA.