Making Dreams Come True - Sega's Katana!

this is a Sega Katana dev kit a tower that made dreams come [Music] true hello all and welcome back to the corner 25 years ago as of the release of this video Sega released what would turn out to be their last games console the Sega Dreamcast it had a lot Weighing on its shoulders with some even speculating that neither it or even Sega would survive the first year how however this video is not about the Dreamcast Bittersweet end of an era but about the tool that went into making dreams or rather Dreamcast games although if you would like to listen to a discussion about the Dreamcast you might enjoy the crosswires Legacy podcast we've got all the electronics lined up the cables coming up the bottom but sir the players they wanted coming out of the bag it's it's someone looked at it goes what is the cheapest possible solution we have that doesn't involve re-engineering the entire controller I know have me about drel you're a genius a link to this podcast will be in the video description from the front it wouldn't look out of place next to some late 90s computers except for maybe the switches the front controller ports and of course the pop out gd1 drive whilst I don't know what the original cost from back in the day would have been current prices for these units are very expensive so once again I'm very grateful for this being loaned to me by my friend jupitus on the back panel we will see a bunch of connectors namely VGA midi s video and rco composite video and audio above that we have two scuzzy 2 connectors a pass through for the GD writer unit and an MDR 68 connector labeled extension IO finally above that is an RS 232 connector a modem connector and a strange de9 Port labeled c1/ C2 of which the purpose I currently don't know now this unit is here for two reasons one of which is so that we can have a look at inside and using this tool complete with the development environment the other is to verify that everything is in good working order now this tool uses a standard ATX power supply and knowing what I do of late '90s PC power supplies it's probably best that we open this unit up just to make sure that there's no burst capacitors or leaking batteries it also has an internal 4 GB scy hard drive which if there's any data on there should be archived now this is going to be a long video so to help out with that I have added chapters to this video which you'll be able to use to skip around to the various parts that you might be interested in should you wish to do that I also want to clarify a few things before continuing first of all this video is not going to be about how to fully set up or use the katana I also won't be doing any coding or showing you how you would use the SDK tools outside of interacting with the katana further to that last point I am not a game developer nor do I have any experience with the katana I am just taking a look at the device it's accompanying software and having fun playing around with it with all of that intro out of the way let's open it [Music] up [Music] get a load of [Music] that here is the scuzzy hard drive a fast scuzzy 50 pin 4 GB hard drive made by Seagate I'm removing it for now until we're ready to Archive its contents once I had removed the the rear screws for the power supply and unpluged both the GD run board and the main ATX connector I tried to remove the PSU but then I realized that the GD ROM drive section and thus also the main boards were in the way of some screws I needed to remove as well well I guess it will just have to entirely come apart [Music] then this board is the modem and rs 252 PCB it needs to be removed first before I can remove the main pie [Music] CB as does the rear audio video connect to ribbon cable and the gdrom trace stutters cable the front power switch cable the devkit settings cable and the front controller ports rear ribbon [Music] cable the motherboard is a variant of the Dreamcast specifications which has the same sh4 CPU power VR GPU and the Sega Yamaha I sound chip also present is the expansion IO p and a special version of the bios for this system now I'm curious if the expansion Port is similar to the Dreamcast expansion P or was it used for developing games of the Dreamcast arcade sister than Naomi which has extra hardware for JVS and cabinet controls to continue to remove the GD ROM drive I had to remove the top half of the case framework with that off we can have a look at this curious PCB this is a GD ROM emulator system which sits between the katana motherboard and the GD ROM drive and allows you to either load a game from the GD ROM drive or use the internal 4 GB scuzzy hard drive this board is very complex consisting of dual sh2 CPUs xylin and Altera fpgas dual scuzzy controllers and a bunch of cplds and a small side of ram but this is perhaps understandable given the fact it has to read data from the hard drive and then convert that data into into the GD ROM format that the Dreamcast expects as this board is also where you would connect your development PC2 it also needs to act as a scuzzy device to the computer as well I'm curious to learn why there are two scuzzy buses however perhaps one is just for the drive emulator and the other is for the Dreamcast system but I'm not sure continuing with our disassembly we can remove the GD ROM drive and finally remove the ATX power supply and if you're curious the rear I/O panel is effectively a breakout board just extending the I/O from the motherboard the same can be said for front control or Port PCB now whil I don't need to take apart the GD ROM drive section I thought it prudent to check for any leaking SMD capacitors and I'm also just too curious under the shielding we can find the drive controller which is very interesting it's using an 0ti 922 chip which looking at the data sheet says it's a CD ROM drive controller with an IDE interface now CD ROM makes sense as the GD ROM format is very closely based off of CD ROM just using a section of the dis where the data lands and pits are spaced much closer together to get the higher density that's required to make up the 1 GB storage capacity however I'm more intrigued by the IDE part as that means that the drive emulator is also speaking IDE to the katana motherboard which means it's not only converting the hard drive data to a gdrom image it's also converting from scy to IDE no wonder it needs the same Hardware as the Sega Saturn in there this board is also what the c1/ C2 port on the back is for it's a debug interface for the CD ROM controller error correction system which might be useful for when you're using the gdrom writer system finally there is a gdrom tray however it might be readily apparent that this mechanism is the exact same Drive mechanism used by both the Dreamcast and the Naomi GD ROM system also as a side not not whilst using scuzzy 2 connectors the Naomi GD ROM system in fact all systems using the GD ROM drive use the same IDE interface which is why it's also possible to use compact flash cards on these arcade systems as gdrom Drive Replacements provided you have the correct firmware installed and no these drives are not standard IDE drives they will not work in computers trust me I tried several years ago it didn't work all it did was make the IDE controller hang as the drives don't support the at Drive information commands with the katana all taken apart and spread across the desk you can see just how complex this system is we have the main Dreamcast based Dev board the GD ROM drive emulator and scuzzy interface board GD ROM controller PCB the modem card and a debug controls PCB wait why did we take it apart again just because we [Music] could after taking apart the ATX power supply for a visual inspection I didn't see any signs of bad caps leaking or not so I moved on to test the voltage levels to be sure I'm using two ultra scuzzy hard drives just to load down the 5 and 12vt rails during the test as some power supplies won't show correct readings if you don't do this the 5V rail read 5.15 volts which might be a tiny bit high but it is within spec and it also might go lower when the katana is running the 12vt is reading 11.2 volts which is a little low but seeing as the system is only using the 12 Vols for fans and mechanical Parts it's probably fine I also check the 3.3 Vol the -1 12 Vol and Theus 5 Vol lines all of which read normally even if unloaded however the latter two are probably completely unused in the katana and just to preempt the question or even demand that I recap this power because it's good practice it's just an 8X power supply it's far easier and better to just replace it if it was even slightly bad with the power soft I tested and my confidence in it being what it is I reinstalled the PSU and started to put the unit back [Music] [Music] together now let's turn our attention to that Seagate scuzzy hard disk drive it's an st34 555n hard drive with a capacity of 4 GB now I have heard that the hard drive size has to be 4 GB exactly or at least no bigger than 4 G GB otherwise the GD ROM emulator will not use it I'd imagine there's a firware reason for this and probably due to the fact it will only be expecting a driver of a certain size but I also don't want to install it back into Katana just yet as I want to try to Archive what's on the drive whilst it's out of the machine just to avoid any interference or variables in the process now scuzzy whilst using a lot of computers and servers this means archiving it using modern systems can be tricky as USB discussi is not nearly as common as usb2 IDE now whilst these do exist I don't currently own one and I don't have any other fancier method so instead I'm going to be using this external scuzzy enclosure and this compact Desk Pro en as my tool the external enclosure will power the drive and provide an interface to allow me to connect the drive to the compact [Music] PC [Music] right so we're ready to go I have my pensum free uh compact Desk Pro ready to go what you stop doing that light yeah the backl might be flickering I hope it's not going to do that too frequently so the only difference that I've done is I've uh taken out the Zip drive from my scuzzy box or scy enclosure and I've just replaced it with a generic 3 and 1/2 in to 5 and 4 in Drive Bay and the only reason I've done that rather than using the setup before where I had it the hard drive on the box is because this unit has already um shocked me once before and when I say shocked I mean with 240 volts ac the power on switch at the back it's insulated except for like one or two mil of the switch and every time I was reaching around the back I could sometimes catch it so well what I'm going to do is I'm going to boot clone Zilla is what I'm going to use to actually make a backup of the drive I've got it on this really tiny 64 gig memory stick and I'm going to boot off this because I do have a CD drive I could burn the CD but I've lost my CD burner somewhere in the mess that is this studio but this PC doesn't boot off of USB natively so what we're going to use is a primary boots loader stage which is plop I love plot it's a great boot manager um basically if you got a bios system or you know an old system like this this will basically let you boot off of pretty much anything provided it is bootable so what we're going to do is we're going to then save the image onto this 32 GB compact flash card uh this is one that originally I was going to use for an Xbox modding video and what does BST stand for well depending on your interpretation it either stands for basic service tools or Blood Sweat and tear is let's get our floppy and we'll put it in and this is going to be genuinely the first time that I've turned on this hard drive um I've wanted to turn it on for ages but when you've got a drive that you don't know especially when it's a scuzzy drive there's always a chance that when you power it up that may be the last time you ever power it up so I wanted to do this all in one shot and then make sure I've got a working image before I turn it off just so that if it does die we've not lost anything anyway let's see if it works o I don't know how much of that you heard but that doesn't sound uh promising okay I thought it was terminated so unfortunately I'm going to have to power this off and the reason I say unfortunately is because again that drive doesn't sound healthy but it might already be dead so so I'm just screwed in the drive can you see the problem cool so it turns out termination power was enabled but the Terminator on the drive itself wasn't but Sega removed the jumper a note from editing the hooki don't use Clonezilla to Archive these drives or if you do at least force it to make a raw Drive image instead what Clonezilla did is see that it had a fat 16 files system and whil it did back up the drive contents it didn't save any unused or deleted files files and data that's not stored within the file allocation table which could have been recovered by using special tools I only real realized it was missing this data when I was checking the backup files out with that said I doubt there was much data that would have been lost if anything at all but it's still always better to check your backups thoroughly first I would have reimaged the drive but as you will see later in the video I had already tried to remake an image to get the drive's content bootable I would have used a spare drive to do this but I don't own a spare scuzi HDD or working emulator and just so that people are clear I have actually enabled the right protect um those so on some scuzzy drives you have a right protection um jumper I have enabled it on this one so this is going to be the bit that takes the longest that was fast way faster than I was expecting which makes me think there wasn't much on there if anything at all um so regardless what files it does have on there we are safe that if the drive fails we don't need to worry about it right with the drive dumped what I'm going to do now is I'm going to change the setup so that we can have the katana on the right hand side it's going to have its own little screen speakers we'll have the Windows 98 machine on the other side and we'll try to get it so you can see both um although I just want to reiterate the points I made at the start of the video which is I'm not going to go into the whole development inside and how things work cuz I don't honestly know about it this is just a look into the katana dev kit and the setup as it were so well with the drive archived For What hassle it was worth anyway I went and reinstalled the hard drive back into the katana and put the cover back [Music] on what we want to to look at now is connecting the PC up to the katana and as far as I'm aware you need to use scuzzy port B now this is the scuzzy port that is connected to the hard drive as well as the gdrom emulator and you connect your PC up here so what I've got here is a scuzzy 2 cable which is funny enough a Sega Naomi uh GD ROM system and we'll put one end in here and we'll put one end up here here and now I need to find a scuzzy Terminator several months later my kingdom for a bigger table so I had a look around and it turns out I didn't have any scuzzy 2 Terminators so after a couple of months I now have four my friend ordered one and then two and then the other one didn't turn up so I ordered two and now all of them have turned up anyway so these two scuzzy Terminators are for the back of the katana and these are going to go on to the scuzzy a port no sorry scuzzy B port and the GD writer Port so I'm going to put those on cuz otherwise it won't boot so we have the katana hooked up to the compact Desk Pro The Desk Pro is running Windows 98 um the scuzzy connections are hopefully all right um we've got the katana also connected up to this D monitor over VGA I think this is to do with region and this is to do a video so I'll have to check to make sure I've Got the Right video output otherwise won't see it anything I've got these two speakers hooked up to it so we can hear the sound output uh this monitor is hooked up to the Compact and I do have a Dreamcast controller that I will plug in right now actually yeah just your standard issue Dreamcast controller is a bit dusty but it'll do right so what I'm going to do is first of all I'm going to power on the Compact and then we'll install the software for the katana right about five or so hours later I finally got on Windows 98 booted um for whatever reason the compact flash card I did have stopped working so I then tried to reinstall it onto another compact flash this one well it worked but then it ran out of space cuz there's only 512 mbes on there so the third install of Windows 98 and we finally have a working system so this is just a fresh install of Windows 98 at the moment there's no other software in there I also had to change the monitor out because yeah the other monitor stopped working um but yeah there's no software on here at the moment so why don't we go ahead and install the SDK first of all and then after that we'll put on the uh what was that c tool kit Windows C tool kit okay there's no a to play on that one I guess oh what where's my where's my CD drive oh why be right back right so the IDU controller for some reason needed to be reinstalled [Music] but well this is going to take a while to install it seems ah it's done I was uh sorting up my vmu so that the uh time and date was working on it right so that's the SDK installed let's have a look at the other disc which is the C tool kit ooh uh right I guess we need to install oh right well I guess that would make sense let's install this cuz I'm not going to be programming anything on the Dreamcast dev kit so let's just uh cuz I'm not going to be programming anything on the dev kit I'm just going to be having a look at the tools so cool so that's the SDK installed okay so let's have a look so it's saying to connect the dev box like so so we've got the scuzzy Terminator on Port A we've got the scuzzy Terminator for the GD ROM drive here if you have one yeah and then I've got the scy connecting this PC to the dev kit um cool yes that's correct oh let's have a look at the settings so it's talking about these settings here so this is obviously the flash right protect this is the region and then this is the video information so we've got that set to VGA this is currently set to Pal cuz I've got pal stuff and this is on normal operation okay so that looks good to me right well I'm not going to say no to turning the dev kit on I'm curious to see so the way that this is set up at the moment is that the VJ monitor here is connected to the katana I have got these speakers connected so I'm going to turn those on they are not plugged in let me go plug them in all right so let's turn the volume down because I'm not sure how loud this is going to be and I guess we'll turn it on and see what [Music] happens I'll be honest I was expecting a uh boot animation but maybe that's what the software is going to do okay yeah so this is saying that it can't connect and it might be because the um it could be two reasons one is because I've expecting it to have come up with the animation logo and I've not seen that but I'm also wondering if maybe it's because the scuzzy card hasn't picked up the fact it's got a um Dev box attached to it so let's reboot the PC to see if that'll help Okay so we've got the katana dev kit and we've got a GD drive so that was the GD emulator drive so that's good that means it's all working at least the emulator PCB is working definitely getting hard drive activity right that's interesting so it's still not doing anything and I'm wondering if that's because the katana is not actually booting up also we're not seeing the uh a secondary disc not sure if I have to install any drivers for the katana dev kit after struggling for a while to understand what was going on I followed the centuries old advice of rtfm I double checked my scuzzy connections and made sure I had the scuzzy termination set up correctly then after a reboot of the katana and the PC in that order it does come up and say Dev box is connected which is good so it is booting so we click on continue and for some reason I get this setup cannot reset the Dreamcast Dev box um and it says you might need to reboot whilst the dev box is turned on so I'll do that because it is at least trying to work now we're still getting that error message but I I'm not sure if I need to worry about this because from the manual it suggests that when you are going through this it's reinstalling the firmware for the devkit but this was a unit that was already in use so the firmware should already be there and flashed onto the system um so what we're going to do is we're just going to exit out that and I believe that's the case because if we open this code Escape debugger uh this wouldn't open before but it is opening now so it's definitely communicating with the um Dreamcast dev kit and this is a very interesting system gives you all of the um assembly the sh4 assembly instructions as they're being executed which is quite cool um but really what I want to see is I want to see that um I wanted to see a few things one I wanted to see that boot logo that special boot animation two I want to know what's on this disc because it's unlabeled um but it is recorded onto and I wanted to see whether or not you could boot into actual Dreamcast games so I've got a few Dreamcast games here uh and I wanted to see if they would boot on it I I'd imagine they wouldn't but just a bit of fun really if I go run all what happen oh I'm so happy now so that's all it was yeah you just have to connect into it and um I'd imagine the internal batter is probably a bit past it cool so this just looks like your standard Dreamcast um bios menu but it just got a different boot um animation but everything else is the same so you can see my uh files are on the um vmu so I'm curious now if I had put in a disc a standard Dreamcast game let's go with Garnet Legends cuz why not what happens I'd imagine not a lot I'd also Imagine because I've got it booted into um the Japanese region it's not going to register the game right so let's see what does it do no it doesn't like that okay let's change it into pal which is done by changing this switch to nine reboot oh do we have to click okay like to run it on here as well um execution run all oh yeah it's in blue now cuz we're now in the European region and we have to have a different oh it does boot games oh that's cool so that's so at the moment I've got the most um over-the-top Dreamcast like this is so [Music] extra admittedly not the greatest of games but it's interesting than the earth nonetheless in anent time ay young so let's out there okay so now we know that the um Dreamcast will boot now I think I have to constantly tell it to actually load up the BIOS though which is annoying that would make sense cuz I tried before before it installed any software I did turn it on um this is before I'd actually got my Terminators and it still didn't boot up so I wonder that you have to have the PC always connected it will not boot if the PC is not connected cuz it won't be ever told to start executing which would make sense but it is I don't know bit annoying you can't just turn it on and play games on it I guess I want to see now what's on this disc I also don't know what region this is so I'm assuming it's a European region but I'm not sure well it's not happy with it so let's change the region to I don't know let's go the Japanese region I don't expect it would be so at the moment the Dreamcast dev kit is frozen but what I'm doing is basically going into the debug and execution uh menu and then clicking run all so that allows me to you know if I was actually running a program be able to step in because I can go execution I can stop and I can debug it uh by running by step so every you'll see on the if I hold down F7 we will get a very slow frame rate but we will get it um so I would absolutely love to talk to someone who actually did use codcape or the Dreamcast development software because it seems like such a fascinating program I mean I'd imagine for game developers it's probably run runof-the-mill but for someone like me who's never got to play around with stuff like this this is fascinating to be honest with you so when you do a hard reset it's it pauses execution so I'd imagine that's so that you can get all of your debugging tools set up and ready so to start execution you press crl F9 I believe contr F9 no or is it just F9 I [Music] press and will this SP into a game no so is there anything on that dis so one of the other things that you would be able to use with codescape is the ability to uh either load program files straight into the memory of the Dreamcast or to load a binary file such as if you needed to load stage data or something like that into the memory um to test um and then you could run it and go through doing all the debugging now I did download a couple of files to hopefully run but unfortunately what happens is when I try to load them even if I try to just load the binary only for example um it'll upload it and then it'll say it doesn't work and it's one of those things where because it doesn't work if I try to force it into running it just goes straight into the bios so unfortunately I can't get that working um I'm sure there's something I'm not doing right here but but I'm no expert I'm just having to play around so so you can kind of understand how that side of it would work um I still would like to see this GD Workshop working but I can't get that to work cuz it just won't it does for some reason the hard drive isn't being detected um now I did read the manual and what the hard drive is the hard drive is supposed to have two fat 16 partitions uh one I'm guessing like they're both for the gdrom images um but I think what's happening is the drive it has got it is formatted but it also doesn't appear in my windows um computer and it's supposed to It's supposed to show up as a removable drive and it's not like I haven't messed around with the IDS or anything like that it just it just doesn't show up um if you go into we only get the katana dev kit s we don't get any extra disc drives or anything like that which is a shame here's something that does work though this is the Dreamcast tool um and what it seems to do is boot Windows C on the devkit and then you get a Windows C shell so we'll do that connect to the Dreamcast this will download the C program into the G the memory as you see it's rebooting now this does take a while to boot so I'll skip ahead right so you won't see anything on screen but now we do have a shell on the um program and I don't actually know what I'm doing here right whilst I would have assumed that Quake free arena for the Dreamcast would have a um copy of Windows c on it for developing you know would make sense to Port Quake from Windows to the Dreamcast using that um I can't remember if it does at the moment but I do know that Sega rally 2 does use Windows C so let's put this into the drive I've put it onto um I put it on the European region so let's put this onto the into the drive and then boot the GD ROM so to do that on the PC software I'm just clicking on the boot from GD ROM and then boot Dreamcast and this [Applause] [Music] should [Music] I absolutely love that so there you go this I know is boot uh running Windows CE um and yeah so there you go we've got a Windows C kernel detected and it says that CD ROM has been mounted I wonder if we get a command line I'm going to turn that down a bit no so maybe all the debugging functions have been disabled here which would make sense but yeah it won't give us any response which is a shame I mean to be expected but still interesting the other thing that I wanted to talk about was the reason that the gdm PCB wasn't showing up or was n working within windowss 98 originally I thought it was a Windows 98 an aspy issue so I was going to install Windows 2000 but then I realized that 2000 is not compatible with the katana dev kit so then I was almost about to install Windows NT and then when I was reading the manual it specifies that you need to use a specific scuzzy card or at least they recommend a specific scuzzy card which is this model here now I don't have that model in fact I was using this scuzzy card this is a adaptech Ultra scuzzy card it's a 1 19 160 or 29160 n scy card um but apparently it's not compatible with the katana due to the way the um Drive emulator is because the gdm PCB is emulating a 4 gig scy drive but both the gdm PCB and the PC can read and write to the same hard drive at the same time so the gdm PCB is actually arbitrating access to the drive at any given time so I don't have the scy card that Sega recommend ended so I ended up just looking around in one of my old uh G4 Maxs and it turned out it had and it had some scy card from about the mid uh 1990s and that seems to work fine so I have the katana booted up I've also got Windows 98 booted up and I wanted to show you this scuzzy card that I'm using and it's basically a symbios logic 875 XSI uh 228 X PCI scuzzy adapter but it does work with the katana and the gdm system so I've kept it in there as you can see we've got the katana dev kit there but under dis drives now you'll see the CPL gdm now this is the like I said it's the arbitrating system so this is emulating a 4 gig scuzzy drive to Windows 98 and that's how it allows you to upload whole game images now everyone will probably be thinking well what was on the drive if there was anything at all and I do have good news there was some files on the drive labeled Woody DC now as you can see I've got them on my desktop um because even though I made the image with uh Clonezilla I did because now the drive is working in Windows I can just browse the drive like a normal scy drive but I wondered what the heck Woody DC was I was asking my friend does this ring a bell to you I was asking a few other places does this make any sense because if we go into the Woody DC folder um we'll see we've got Brazil Chile game dirt not head sound there's loads of things Wall-E uh Woody and then NASCAR and I'm thinking to myself how does this make any sense what is this well this is a beta version of well what would have been Woody Woodpecker racing uh for the Dreamcast at least I believe that's the case because it was made by a London studio um so this is possibly where some of that those files come from but that's kind of where the good news ends because although we have these files I can't boot it on the guatana and there's two reasons for that reason one is because of GD workshop and what I mean by that is if we go into GD Workshop you load up project files and then that's what sets up the emulation parameters so at the moment we are using just the built-in GD R reader but what we could do is if we opened up a CD project file let's say well I'll I'll go on to why this says Woody dc2 but if we go onto that you can see that we have our GD ROM image which has both the single density CD ROM area of a gdrom disc and the high density area of the actual GD ROM portion of the disc this is where you get some like your ab ract files sometimes they have like wallpapers or something like that in the data area then um track two is going to be your um cdda um warning to say basically it's a Dreamcast game don't put this in a CD player and then you've got basically uh padding and then the same CD track which is a warning don't ask me why there's these two here I don't quite understand but that's just part of the gdrom specification track five is the actual game data and you see I've loaded up uh Woody Woodpecker into um this data portion so all of these files already uploaded onto the katana's internal hard drive so what we can do is we can switch from the gdrom the physical GD ROM drive to using the gdm emulator PCB and load up these files but let me show you why I'm kind of disappointed so now we've got the project files loaded on there and the files are uploaded I should be able to load up well I hope it is Woody Woodpecker racing now when I change it to the internal emulator using um C GD Workshop you'll notice that the disc drive LED goes off so obviously when the disc drive light is solid that means you're using the internal drive and when it's not you're using the emulator PCB so if we now use GD Workshop to close the GD ROM drive door um the devkit will start loading up all the files using the um emulator PCB and I can go to play and click play the problem is that's as far as it goes um it loads two files and then it it it crashes so because I don't have the original project files for the CD ROM emulation system I've had to rebuild the image um using the files from the Dreamcast hard drive the problem with that is um I don't have the initial program loader so what I've done is I've gone into um the devkit folder you have this IP maker the initial program maker so using this I did try to recreate what I think the game would have used to boot and that's why I've even gotten this far um to booting it but nothing think I set in here makes this game work one of the other things I did try to do was use a initial program or boot sector from a commercial retail game to see if that was also the issue but again that didn't work so although I've got all of the files off the Dreamcast I don't know if this is bootable and you might think to yourself okay well why don't you use the codescape debugger to find out what's going on well I do I try I've tried to do that and what ends up happening is it gets to this software breake and it just it crashes I don't know if there's a file missing from the hard drive I don't know if that the game fils are on here just has some horrible bug that causes it to crash immediately upon loading I don't know it just I can't get um Woody Woodpecker racing to actually boot at least I think that's what Woody Woodpecker is and that's kind of another problem I have although I've got all of the um files off the Dreamcast I don't know if this is bootable um unfortunately I will however put both the raw Drive image or at least the um Clonezilla image of the drive onto archive.org and I will also have the files available on archive.org and I'll put the link to those files into the description but I've tried this these files on flycast and I've tried this on redream they both crash so it's beyond my ability to get that working unfortunately and this is also kind of really sad because that's probably what's on this disc this disc has got some burnt data on there um but we saw that this disc doesn't want to boot um and what's really annoying is this probably has a working version of Woody Woodpecker's racing on here and the reason I couldn't get it to boot unfortunately can you see that the disc is actually cracked now I reviewed the footage that I took originally of um this disc going into the katana the first time I tried it and yeah you can just about see the crack was there it doesn't want to work anymore the other problem is um the crack goes through a par like a portion of the data area which definitely goes through the table of content but I don't know if you could extract the secondary table of contents on the high density section of the disc and then you know recover the data that way so this will be going back to my friend um he is aware of this I did let him know but yeah that's unfortunately kind of a sad tale so hopefully someone can do something with these files and get something that's playable now one of the things I did want to do was to show the GD ROM emulator PCB working so what I've done is I've actually made another gdrom um project file and I've labeled it Sonic 2 now Dreamcast Sonic 2 I'll let you have a guess as to what this [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Music] n and yeah it's definitely loading from the hard drive because there's absolutely no disc in the drive in fact the katana doesn't care whe I've got the drive open or closed so it's running this game entirely from the internal hard drive at the moment which means like you can load any retail game onto the katana and play it like a really expensive and over engineered um OD or optical drive emulator and what you'll be able to see is that there's constantly read access going from the drive it's telling you what it's loading and what um you know how it's going so at the moment it's loading e quart. adx and so this is the actual bgm music for um this level because this game uses the adx format to um you know play background music what also is nice about this is you can emulate um read errors so you've got got one in 10,000 reads there might be an error 1 in 1,000 one in 100 so on so forth so if the disc was really badly damaged you could set that to one in 100 and every 100 reads there's going to be an error that comes up and the reason you do this is so that your file loading routines um would actually be resilient to any errors on the disc if it was badly scratched so at the moment you can hear that the game is playing fine because it doesn't actually need um you know it's handling the errors on the disc quite nicely but if we were to let's say put that up to 1 in 10 that means it's a really badly damaged disc and we should start to see a lot more errors yeah you hear the adx music stopped now because it's getting so many issues with the um read errors so if we now exit out when it's on a really badly damaged disc you'll see it probably will um not be able to load the next file um in fact the game's now crashed properly because it can't load the from the GD drive so yeah that's GD Workshop working with the gdm PCB working on the katana to emulate a whole GD ROM drive now you don't have to just use the internal hard Drive in fact Sega say you can attach other scoy drives um that work with the katana if you attach it to the GD R to uh scoy Port I believe um it's quite a useful bit of Kit just to be able to you know have as much storage as you need and be able to emulate the drive so yeah at the moment this is now just a really over engineered and really over the top Dreamcast in fact I can now turn off the um windows 98 PC and now we can just play Sonic Adventure like it's a um regular game heading to south over the city we're on Route everything's to go this is control tower we have you on radar report cargo status of captured Hedgehog board over attention all units suspect heading south block all major roads and capture the suspect [Music] around [Music] yes huh no problem so yeah I think that's about all I really want to cover with the katana because I mean there's a lot this is only scratching the surface of what it could all do and there's a lot more that I could show but I'm not the best person to talk about it um I just wanted to show you the katana the overview of it what it was capable of and what it kind of allowed you to do and it's a really competent and capable dev kit I don't know whether they're all like this but this to me feels like it'd be a real easy piece of Hardware to use and work with given what it's able to do and how it's able to emulate all of the um you know emulated GD ROMs use real discs burn discs to send out to other places the amount of debugging capabilities are available within the um Katana Dev system uh the only annoyance is that it doesn't work with Windows 2000 which at the time that this came out was well it was as popular as Windows 98 I guess but um you know still it was quite popular um cuz this dev kit I tried to boot it with Windows 2000 and it Windows 2000 just constantly hung it could not um I never got it to boot uh fully to the desktop so I don't know um but yeah that's all I kind of wanted to cover with it and you know just to show off what it was capable of and like I say even though couldn't get um the original game oh we're still going even though we couldn't get the original um hardback game files that were on there tooo um I will keep a link up on archive.org for as long as I don't get dmca for it and uh yeah hopefully someone else can make use of those files but yeah anyway thank you for joining me and if you don't mind I'm going to continue to play this because as cheesy as it is I absolutely love Sonic Adventure 2 there you go take [Music] care

Channel: Naoki's Retro Corner

Views: 130,875

Keywords: naokis, retro, corner, nrc, sega, katana, dreamcast, dremcast, devkit

Id: EIr9YnMgExA

Length: 53min 22sec (3202 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 27 2023