Dreamcast broadband question

[tyler_d16]

Hello i was wondering if there is any way for me to build a broadband adaptor for my dreamcast.


Thanks

[NFG]

This has been covered before but I couldn't find the post.  Basically if it was easy or cheap it'd have been done already.  It's cheaper to buy a BBA than build your own, much more so if you factor the time it would take to build such a thing.

[Martin]

Yeah, Unless you already have lots of spare cr@p lying around your house that you could use to build one (like me), and don't have any other use for, Buying one is cheaper in the general run. =)

[tyler_d16]

well i got a broadband card from my older pc  

[NFG]

Forget about it, buy one.  If it was reasonably easy to do it would have been done.

[Endymion]

Here you go.

[Martin]

Forget about it, buy one.  If it was reasonably easy to do it would have been done.

I thought it had already been done by someone, Kiyoshi Ikehara? =\

Or am I mistaken?
Anywho, have you seen the IDE mod schematics for the Dreamcast?
I'd love to have a hard drive hooked up to it lol.  

[tyler_d16]

They go over 200 dollers before they end i cannot afford that thats why i want to make one

[Martin]

They go over 200 dollers before they end i cannot afford that thats why i want to make one

Get a cheap third party BBA then.

[caphynehy]

Where exactly would one find a "cheap third party BBA?"

[NFG]

Where exactly would one find a "cheap third party BBA?"

This is a very good question!  I think Martin's confused.

They go over 200 dollers before they end i cannot afford that thats why i want to make one

Save up the money or give up the dream.

[Aidan]

Kiyoshi Ikehara had extended bitmaster's IDE interface into an ISA interface with the aid of some programmable logic. When BSD was ported over, one of the 3COM ISA cards was the card of choice. However, this interface is only supported by Linux and BSD on the Dreamcast. No commercial software supported this adapter, so it's not useful unless you specifically wish to run BSD or Linux.

[Martin]

Where exactly would one find a "cheap third party BBA?"

This is a very good question!  I think Martin's confused.

They go over 200 dollers before they end i cannot afford that thats why i want to make one

Save up the money or give up the dream.

I saw a non branded DC compatible BBA for like $70 somewhere, I can't remember where, but it was listed as DC compatible and had a DC shaped connector on it. [I know, this thread is vintage, but I got bored]

[kendrick]

As I recall, in late 2003 or so Realtek offerred to manufacture another 10,000 BBA units if they could get enough orders from Japanese and American distributors. NCS in New York was among those who publicized the offer. I think the idea was that Realtek had a bunch of boards and Dreamcast exterior components that they needed to get rid of. If these items were sold, they would have been packaged and distributed without any Sega branding or documentation. But they're functionally equivalent. Of course, given that I was burned last time I went to buy a BBA and got the LAN Adapter in the mail instead, I would insist always on getting the real deal in the original box if possible.

Sorry, can't find the link on NCS's page and Google's gone crazy with their intelligent language query engine. If I find the news item, I'll post it here.

-KKC

[Akir]

Aren't the LAN and BBA the same thing? Every Braudband Internet device (cable and DSL modems, mostly) has a network plug on them anyways, so it wouldn't matter. Network cables are VERY cheap.

[kendrick]

The 'Dreamcast Broadband Adapter' and the 'Dreamcast LAN Adapter' are two different products with unfortunate, confusing brand names. The BBA is the 10/100 network device that is compatible with all games from all regions and supports PPPoE connections. The Lan Adapter is an earlier device which is 10 megabits only, and supports only the Japanese web browser it shipped with. Externally, both devices are the same size and shape and are only differentiated by the easily removed MAC address label.

This is where it gets sticky... A few unscrupulous retailers (and many sellers on eBay) have sold the LAN adapter claiming that it was the BBA. Never mind that the LAN adapter doesn't work with games and isn't compatible with any US software. Without getting into the boring details, it's exactly this situation that motivated me to cancel my Paypal and eBay membership. The moral of the story is, make sure you're buying the right item if you go hunting for one of these two peripherals.

Any further questions on the topic, e-mail me privately. As we've established in earlier conversations the NFG forums are not the place for me to discuss why I think you shouldn't use eBay or Paypal.

-KKC

[TJ_Kat]

Forget about it, buy one.  If it was reasonably easy to do it would have been done.

But Lawrence, I think you're overlooking the fact that it WAS done. The BBA didn't retail for $200 when it was in production and I seriously doubt that Sega was selling them at a loss.

Then when you consider the amount of time that has passed, the parts used to make the BBA should be fairly cheap now.

No one's done it because anyone who could do it doesn't see the need to do it.

If there's some other reason that it should cost $200 to make that I'm not seeing, enlighten me. But if your whole argument is based on the idea that "it hasn't been done, so it must not be doable," I don't buy it.  

[kendrick]

Speaking as somebody who has been exploring the idea of a homebrew BBA, I gotta say that your success will depend largely on what your end goal is. If you just want to have a network interface usable for homebrew and alternative OS projects, then your goal is probably not too unreachable. However, if your goal is to have a completely backward-compatible BBA equivalent unit that will work with all of the games that support the OEM hardware, then you're shooting for something just beyond the moon.

The problem here is a lot like any other technical innovation... Once we have the process down, the actual manufacturing of a tuned and optimized unit will probably be relatively affordable. It's that first tuned and optimized homebrew unit that nobody has come with yet where the bulk of the expense is going to be incurred. Put simply, we ain't got there yet and getting there's gonna be expensive.

I've opened up my BBA and I gotta say that it's not much like a standard ISA or PCI network card. It shares a lot of parts with a standard Realtek NIC, but there isn't enough information out there for me to intelligently backward engineer the thing. More to the point, these things are uncommon enough that I'm not willing to pull the thing apart and dump ROM data and trace circuit paths. It would be like stuffing a Matise into a cyclotron just to see what kinds of paints he used; it's needlessly destructive and doesn't give us enough of the information we're looking for.

Anyway, that's just me shooting of my mouth in defense of Lawrence's argument. But before I sign off, it's worth mentioning that the people who DO know about the BBA aren't sharing. It's a reasonable guess that the use of the hardware for purposes of piracy is motivation enough for Sega to keep a lid on that information, even long after the Dreamcast came off the market.

-KKC, who can't decide what to do for dinner.

[Endymion]

Forget about it, buy one.  If it was reasonably easy to do it would have been done.

But Lawrence, I think you're overlooking the fact that it WAS done.

Really, who did it? The only BBA I've seen anyone just "make" did not have the ability to actually work with any games. Is that your criteria of it being possible? If so it's still not worth doing, I don't consider a Dreamcast Linux server's homemade BBA worthwhile.

Why do they go for 200 dollars? It's called demand, look it up in Economics 101.

I don't think Sega is protecting the hardware any more than they would the rest of the Dreamcast, it is their IP after all, why give it away? Goodwill? They'd get a lot more goodwill out of everybody if they would just start making respectable games again for a change.

[atom]

Sure, you could homebrew some crazy homebrew BBA or IDE adapter for your dreamcast. Then again, you could do the same for your toaster oven, but that doesnt really mean its gonna be anything useful. Unless the people that made the bread... erm i mean game designed it years ago for your future project its useless.

[NFG]

Yes, it's been done, but you're totally missing the point:

Buying a NIC with the proper chipset on it (And make no mistake, the wrong chipset and even the wrong VERSION of a specific chipset will not work!) will be a hard enough task.  Assuming you find one for the price of a new 10/100 NIC you're gonna spend $15.

Now you need to pull the components off it, free if you have the time and tools, or build an adaptor to interface with the PCI slot and hope there's nothing on the card between the slot and the chipset.

Now you need an interface for the Dreamcast - sacrifice your modem, 'cause there's not much chance of buying a blank connector for that slot AFAIK.  You're gonna need to design and print a PCB, so pick up the software and design away.  Don't forget that 1-off PCB prices are at LEAST fifty bucks, and don't be surprised to hit triple that price.

Now you've got: a dreamcast, an adaptor made from a modem to interface with your custom PCB, a PCI card (or a larger single custom PCB), and you've spent at least seventy five bucks and sacrificed a modem making it.  That's assuming you get it right on the first try, if you fry something you're looking at replacing most or all of the whole assembly.

And if you can't find the exact chipset the DC BBA uses?  Well then you're totally fucked, 'cause it'll require rewriting all your software to interface with a different card.

And THAT, my friend, is why you should just STFU and buy the official Sega BBA.

[kendrick]

I wanted to toss this one last thought into the ring before this topic dies a painful death under the weight of our collective despair...

As long as we're dumb enough to try to backward engineer something, I think that backward engineering the Broadband Adapter is the wrong approach. A handful of games support the BBA, but all networkable games support the modem. I think that more valuable than a BBA equivalent would be a 'black box' unit that appears to be a standard Dreamcast modem to the game, fakes a PPP dial-up connection in its own on-board software, and has a standard Ethernet port coming out the other side. It achieves the goal of making the Dreamcast easy to network, and has the advantage of being compatible with more games (and not requiring any changes to the game code.)

BBA units and LAN adapter units are uncommon and not very well documented or understood. On the other hand, the failure rate of Dreamcast drives and motherboards means that in a while, DC modems will be more numerous than DC consoles. And a modem is a modem, and is well understood no matter what kind of bus it happens to connect to. I'm at the end of my rope from the standpoint of technical ability, but this mid-way point might be within reach for somebody with just a little more talent than I have.

-KKC, who wonders if it's not worth hacking a standard headphone jack into the GBA SP...

[Aidan]

Interesting idea. I wonder if would be possible to increase the connection speed over the 56K that the modem provided. In my limited experience, looking after a fast async serial connection seems to chew up CPU fairly rapidly, especially on lower speed CPUs.

Mind you, it means you're effectively stuffing a small computer into the space of the modem, which would be interesting too.

[kendrick]

The approach I originally had in mind was a PPP-server-on-a-chip. The idea was that I would take an FXS modem card suitable for use in a PBX and slap it on the back of a Window CE or Linux embedded system that also had a basic NIC. Such a beast would be able to generate a dial tone, answer the call the Dreamcast made, and make a network connection. As part of my design, I even had the DHCP or IP settings of the NIC adjustable based on the number dialed and the authentication information submitted, just to be clever. This original design also has the virtue of being external to the Dreamcast.

I realized that the FXS card was the complicated part of the equation and required much more than the basic Windows modem drivers or the PPPD part of Linux. I'm also not as smart as I think I am, so I pretty much haven't made any progress. But for the record, I'm perfectly okay with anybody else trying to use my idea and put it into practice.

-KKC, too tired to put anything clever in the .sig portion...

[caphynehy]

What about the NAT method? I know that a new box would be easier and way cooler, but I don't have the know how to build it either. I do know however, about this guide.

[atom]

Thats exactly what he needs. This is so great im gonna try it myself! Now i gotta get a cool online game and some people to play with.

[kendrick]

Yes, you can set up a Windows PPP box externally and connect a modem that way... But this involves faking a dial tone for games that won't connect without it. From the standpoint of functionality, it's a lot like pulling a crank out of your glove box and standing in front of your car for five minutes turning it to start your car. Why not automate that whole messy process?

-KKC, who must resist buying the new Shin Megami Tensei game for reasons of frugality...

[Aidan]

Not just that, but you're limited to a maximum of 33.6K. I've done it, and I seem to remember I did something to disable dialtone detection, but I can't remember what. Not that it'd be useful, as I was using an OS/2 box running PPP to establish the connection, rather than a windows system.

Working around the modem chip could potentially provide a faster connection too.

Edit: There's a KOS dreamcast modem driver over at B00B!, so it might well be possible to do some reverse engineering based on that driver. However, we'd have to be able to simulate all the DSP responses to commands - after all the modem is really an entire computer itself too.

[kendrick]

I keep saying that I'm adding 'one last thing' to this thread. :) For the record, the Dreamcast modem does conform to most of the Hayes standards and responds to almost all of the AT commands, including the one that tells it to disregard the dial tone before making a call. However, this only works for software that allows you to edit or add an init string when making the connection. As an example, you can't get Phantasy Star Online to disregard the dial tone; it won't make a modem connection if there's no dial tone available, no matter what you do with the software.

This thread makes me sad, so now I'm going to go order Gameboy parts.

-KKC, who owns more original Gameboy cartridges than he remembers actually buying. How did that happen?

[caphynehy]

Now i gotta get a cool online game and some people to play with.

This PSO server is awesome. v1 and v2, and a good amount of people playing. You need a codebreaker, which can be obtained by means other than buying as it is hard to find (but I don't endorse that). Basically, you change the IP of the server PSO connects to. The guy who runs it has been doing it for a while and I've played on it quite a few times with no problems.

Edit: BTW, there's tons of great info on the forums there (connecting help, etc.).

[Aidan]

DNS spoofing is the answer to the connection attempt, especially if you're working through a PC or network!

[atom]

Thats what i was thinking when reading his post too. I'm sure it uses DNS, itd be funny if they didnt then lost their ip.