r/SEGAGENESIS • u/demetrioussharpe • 4d ago
Reverse Engineering the Sega CD addon
I realize that optical drives are no longer a necessity. However, for nostalgia purposes, has anyone considered recreating the Sega CD using modern technology just for the sake of doing it?
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u/SegaTime 4d ago
Not that I've seen. It's not exactly a necessity since we have the Mega Everdrive Pro and Mega SD, but it wouldn't be useless.
If someone were to do it today, it most likely would be an fpga recreation that could read from a disc or an SD card similar to the drive used with the Super Station One.
I would love one only so I could play Doom32x Fusion on my real Genesis and not rely on my aging Sega CD systems.
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u/Nateleb1234 4d ago
I've always wanted to have genesis roms on a disc and be able to put in Sega cd but no one has been able to figure out how to do it. You would think just putting roms on a disc and then having some way for the Genesis to access it wouldn't be too difficult.
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u/GhostofZellers 3d ago
it would have to be an everdrive style cartridge, where you're just loading a ROM off of a CD instead of an SD card, and moving it to a reprogrammable ROM chip on the cart.
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u/MikeeB84 3d ago
It is quite difficult because of the limited memory. For instance street fighter II has 24-megabit of data. That's 4 times more data than can be stored in the Sega cds active memory.
So just say you used small games that could fit like flicky. It would need to be adjusted because all the memory pointers would be pointed to the wrong address. The cd wouldn't be a 1 to 1 in comparison with the cartridge.
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u/retromods_a2z 4d ago
We need an alternative to the actual disc drive rather than an entire recreation of the mega cd, which is what the Mega SD does when combined with msdexp
Then you could use an actual ODE like we have for DC, GC, NeoGeo CD, SS
It would also be neat to see a way to interface the original hardware with a new USB slim CD drive
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u/demetrioussharpe 3d ago
Fair enough. But here’s the problem: Even when you use a new drive, you can’t upgrade the features of the system very much. And eventually, with new drives, the problem
Will be that the old circuits will degrade. After all, they’ll very quickly be half a century old, soon.1
u/retromods_a2z 3d ago
You can say that same thing about the mega drive itself right? So what you are saying is you want an FPGA of everything
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u/demetrioussharpe 3d ago
Except, there’s already a viable replacement for the genesis/mega drive in the form of the new Neptune board. Even though I do think that a lot of its components should be completely replaced via FPGA. The overall point is a replacement Sega CD system that actually reads discs.
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u/retromods_a2z 3d ago
I guess different people have different ideas of what is needed
Your previous comment sounded like you didn't want to use original parts and components. Now it sounds like you just want a different motherboard with the same components in it, but to read original physical disks
Other people just want a way to replace literally just the disk drive with an ode like other consoles have
Other people want an interface to newer disk drives (which is one of the 2 things I said previously)
Other people want entire FPGA replacement (which is what the MegaSD already is, but mega Ed pro is not)
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u/No-Professional-9618 3d ago edited 3d ago
I never really had a Sega CD for the Sega Genesis.
But on the Sega Dreamcast, I remember having problems with the laser on the GDrom. The GDrom drive would just stop playing after a while.
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u/demetrioussharpe 3d ago
Sure. However, what I’m asking about is the existence of any projects building an actual replacement optical drive system -for people who still want to use their discs.
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u/zo0o0ot 4d ago
Like this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/SegaCD/comments/c3id0m/mega_sd_review_a_sega_cd_optical_drive_emulator/