Naomi/Triforce/Chihiro games: Load games from CF Card

Luddite

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Naomi/Triforce/Chihiro games: Load games from CF Card

Wow I just found this guide to making a CF card reader adapter to load ROMS into your Naomi/Triforce/Chihiro games. Pretty cool.
So now you don't need those gd-rom drives that break down and you can switch out games pretty quick.

If anyone is going to make a few of these... I would buy one.

http://notinmame.blogspot.com

cfbox.jpg
 
Yes, the CF conversion is very cool. It's good to see that the box itself is easy to reproduce. However, to actually use these, you must have the game on an "official" CF card, the security chip of the game you wish to run, and your firmware must be updated.

From reading his blog, it seems you might be able to bypass the Sega CF card if you're building one of these for Naomi, but Chihiro and Triforce games need to be on the original cards.
 
I went this route to convert my Outrun 2 twin to a special stages. Of course, I went with the Sega conversion kit. One MAJOR hurdle that people doing a "hack" might run into, at least in the Chihiro platform, is that you have to update the internal flash ROM of the hardware to a newer official version that supports loading from a flash ROM adapter. If you don't have the official Sega GD Rom flash updater for that particular hardware platform AND the supplied security chip (which is used during the flash upgrade process), then you have to FTP the data directly from a laptop to the CPU unit using a network cable. Even though this SHOULD be rather easy to do, I couldn't get it to work. I AM computer literate, but I don't claim to be a "whiz", either. In the end, I had to use the special security chip and the GD-Rom updater to get it to work. It works fine, but unfortunately, it did not decrease loading times one bit. I expected that it would make the game boot up much faster, but I suppose that the hardware regulates the data transfer speed...
 
I was thinking of doing this CF CARD method instead of netbooting. I can send games to my naomi2 setup from a laptop but it does take about 2-5 minutes to load the game up. I was hoping the CF card would be faster...

There are some amazing games for the Naomi. I have been playing Zero Gunner 2 and Border Down the last few days and yesterday I discovered Under Defeat to be awesome as well. It is nice to be playing the actual ROM on the actual system also. It isn't emulated.
 
Man that is really cool! Also about the load times, it might have something to do with the speed of the CF card you used. There are fast cards and slow cards.
 
Perhaps my experience is an outlier, but my CF games load much more quickly than their GDROM counterparts. I can't speak to how it compares to net booting as I've never done that.
 
If you like those shooters, SURELY you are playing Ikaruga as well? Just checking...

Lee

yeah Ikaruga is a great game but it is a bit too short.

I am interested where to get the special 4.02 firmware he mentions in his blog. Anyone find a link for it? I assume you can netboot the 4.02 upgrade to load it on your dimm. Google doesn't bring up anything about it.
 
does anyone have a copy of the network pic available?

You don't need a PIC to netboot but I am not sure about the CF card method. When I netboot I don't have any PIC in the DIMM and it works great as long as the laptop is connected and doesn't power down from non use.

Has anyone else gotten an unofficial CF card to work? I would like to find out more info.
 
The CF cards require the original PIC to work. It is not a one (or no) chip solution.

I thought if you are using the unofficial CF card firmware hack "4.02" that you could just load the ROM on the cf card and you are good to go.
Maybe one of those special Security PICs would work??

If that isn't the case I will stick with netbooting. ;-)
 
I thought if you are using the unofficial CF card firmware hack "4.02" that you could just load the ROM on the cf card and you are good to go.
Maybe one of those special Security PICs would work??

If that isn't the case I will stick with netbooting. ;-)

That may be the case with Naomi. I only have Chihiro, so that is my frame of reference. Sorry for the confusion.
 
To clarify a couple of points...

If you don't have the "official" upgrade disc, which REQUIRES a special security chip to put the hardware in a mode where it will boot the update disc, then you have to network a computer to the network cable connection and "net boot" the update into the hardware.

My compact flash update on my Outrun 2 (to convert it to special stages) uses the official Sega conversion hardware. I can not tell ANY difference in the load speed AT ALL versus the GD Rom setup. Im pretty sure that the speed of the flash card used has nothing to do with this. Even "slow" flash memory transfers data at a much higher rate than a GD Rom will.

To boot different games into the hardware (at least with the Chihiro), each game is tied to a specific security chip that must be present for the game to boot. The way around this is that the security chip ID in the program code must be matched to the security chip being used. So, if you are wanting to run multiple games on the same hardware, then the security chip ID information for each game that you boot into the hardware must match the security chip plugged into the boardset.
 
ok this looks promising. I had a gdrom drive die on me in the past and sold off the dimm unit and scsi cable.

In this case, I would need a Dimm unit and a scsi cable, and the benefit here is the unit doesn't need to be a netdimm, since i dont need to netboot if I can get one with the 4.02 dimm firmware.

However, I'd need to source that firmware "hacked" 4.02 which i've never heard of.

If anyone knows of this customized firmware please post here

Does this make sense? I'm into this idea because these gd-rom drives are getting rarer and rarer and alot of them either had pot mods and are on their last legs from about 10 years of service, or are reconditioned and will eventually die.
 
It's possible to decrypt the game images and re-encrypt them with the key of another game, so you could actually just boot all games using the Sports Jam pic.

i see some guy from spain selling a 000000000 security chip on fleabay. So what you're suggesting is recompile the games to look for a 00000000 security chip?

But doesn't that still require a netdimm hacked to accept a cf card/adaptor that's not from sega?
 
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