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Question from a non tech idiot. The DC's serial port - can it be replaced upgraded? The slower read speeds make the optical drive replacements a better solution than the serial port adapter but were there further advances in serial port tech/speeds or did usb just become the standard.

Speed is 600kb a sec thats it little bit more it's great for homebrew sometimes faster then a gdemu if many files are loaded at the same time and random seek times.. But want play retail games that were made the engines and code to stream off a disk .. this is not enff speed for most.. nothing can be done it's a hardware limit.. As we have seen if the game is made to be on cart or was not made to stream or run from a gdrom it's fast enff for most things..

Cass wrote:were there further advances in serial port tech/speeds or did usb just become the standard.

The Dreamcast SD serial card adapters don't predate USB. In fact they didn't even become a thing on the market until about 2010. They are all in fact USB SD card readers converted to serial. Serial is just so slow it will never compete with the faster USB speeds. It is just a homebrew device the community came up with after a guy figured out how to use the slot in conjunction with it to load up games and other things like backing up saves. It is not the greatest for retail games but it does run many pretty decent and some very well. It is best utilized for homebrew games and backing up saves. You can back up games with it too but the speeds are so slow and even megavolt doesn't recommend it as it can have bad rips created.

I had one back in 2011, and while it was cool for some stuff like mentioned above, I eventually caved in and got a GDEMU and it does way more games full speed with no stuttering and works.

Thanks for the answers lads. I don't think I explained myself clearly - I was wondering if the actual serial port on the dreamcast could be upgraded / replaced with a quicker serial port. I suspect it's a no because I'm sure someone much cleverer than me would have already thought of doing so if it was possible.

For some reason I think there might have been talk of this a long time ago in the mid 2000's or maybe I'm confusing it with some sort of real PC type serial mod for the Dreamcast.

Cass wrote:Thanks for the answers lads. I don't think I explained myself clearly - I was wondering if the actual serial port on the dreamcast could be upgraded / replaced with a quicker serial port.

No, It is Immpossible
the serial port is not a separate chip that can be replaced, it is connected directly to the central processor

I noticed that some games are running great on SD card but that the full motion videos are stuttering (elemental gear gimmick being one example iirc). Is it possible to extract the FMV videos and lower the bitrate and re-insert them into the game somehow?

shenhulahula wrote:I noticed that some games are running great on SD card but that the full motion videos are stuttering (elemental gear gimmick being one example iirc). Is it possible to extract the FMV videos and lower the bitrate and re-insert them into the game somehow?

Yes you could do that

I made a mistake of Getting a CLASS 4 SD Card , I need the Faster Class 10.

What is the Max Speed that works with Dreamcast ?

I see Cards that are 80 mb/s , 95 mb/s , 100 mb/s and then some over 100.

Would 80 and above be fine ? Is their such a thing as getting one way too fast ?

shenhulahula wrote:I noticed that some games are running great on SD card but that the full motion videos are stuttering (elemental gear gimmick being one example iirc). Is it possible to extract the FMV videos and lower the bitrate and re-insert them into the game somehow?

ALSO , From my understanding , As long as your Final Size is Equal or is Bigger then the Original Game Size it will work just fine.

I am guessing you could Remove a FMV Intro Screen with a Still Image if you wanted to and just keeping adding weird dummy stuff to help Equal
the same disk size as before.