Weird and surprising old school tech

[Twed]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc

Movies on vinyl. Not LaserDisc, this is actual vinyl. And rather than vibration it works via electical capacitance.

[doppelkorn]

I appreciate this is neither weird nor surprising now, but let's reverse engineer a Sega Saturn CD in under half an hour!

I've not actually watched it all yet.

[momatt]

That is ridiculous, watching that on the train home!

[doppelkorn]

I should stress that he's not starting out with a box and literally reverse engineering it in 30 minutes from nowt. It just explains what he's done. Seems like a nice bloke.

[Twed]

Yeah, some impressive hacking going on there.

I'm uncomfortable with the way he says "Sega" though.

[doppelkorn]

Does anyone else wince when an American says "soddering" on these hacking/electronics videos?

Why do they say it like that?

[lazarou]

Some cursory searching around seems to reveal "sodder" as the older form and that we're actually the ones that fucked about with it. It's like "colour" all over again.

As with many of these differences between American English and how you say it in the UK, it's actually a side-effect of the US sticking with an older pronunciation.
"Solder" is a modern spelling of the Middle English "souder", which derives from the Old French "soudeur", which itself comes from the Latin "solidare". In the 15th century there was a movement to re-latinize the spelling of words, and the "l" got added back in to the spelling, although the pronunciation didn't change to include the "l" until sometime later.
Regarding the dropping of the "l" from the original Latin, that was common in Old French, and is why we say, for example, the word "powder" instead of "pulder".

[momatt]

I should stress that he's not starting out with a box and literally reverse engineering it in 30 minutes from nowt. It just explains what he's done. Seems like a nice bloke.

Ha ha, it's ok I had assumed that was the case.
Though now I think about it, that guy is a right lazy fucker for not doing that.

[Dex Sawash]

what do you do with that saturn when finished? play sega titles forever, or ???

if is is just a geeky thing to do to prove you can do it, fair enough.

[hewantstolurkatad]

From what I read, his approach is one of the easiest means to play games on the original hardware into the future as the optical drives within the machine break quite easily.

[NoSleep]

It's a follow-up to similar projects on the Dreamcast, where the "CD" drive is actually the rarer Gigabyte-CD format.

[doppelkorn]

Yeah, the CDs have no read protection so you can rip an ISO on your PC and put it on a USB stick to use in the modded Saturn.

[momatt]

what do you do with that saturn when finished? play sega titles forever, or ???

He said a few times in the video he also wants to use it for chiptune music and make it easier for homebrew game programmers.

[Dex Sawash]

ta.

thought I may be missing something huge due to not knowing all the ATLA[nb]another three letter acronym[/nb] used in that video. so no back door into financial markets or ruling the world or whatever.

Glad people do stuff like that, just too far from my "thing" to grasp the why of it without some help.

[hewantstolurkatad]

It's a follow-up to similar projects on the Dreamcast, where the "CD" drive is actually the rarer Gigabyte-CD format.

I though the CD's were the same, but the way they were written onto/read from was different?

[NoSleep]

Gigabyte CD drives can also read CDs but are also designed to read the larger capacity Gigabyte-CDs, so if you rip a DC game it might fit on a CD, but there's no guarantee; some iso's are too big to burn to CD.

[hewantstolurkatad]

When I tried looking it up I kept coming across things saying stuff like this https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/3amhfp/dreamcast_emulator_that_reads_physical_discs/csei4c0



Not quite related, but I really enjoyed reading about the history of piracy on dreamcast in this article https://medium.com/@michaelgapper/land-of-the-free-467f0eb2f395#.ufltz5ewk The means with which people downgraded GD-ROMs nearing full capacity so they could fit them onto CDs, adding junk onto the isos for smaller games like ikaruga so the dreamcast wouldn't strain itself from having to constantly read from near the center of the disc.

[Blumf]

We all like 8-Track, and we all like Techmoan.
Well here he is with an compact cassette to 8-Track adapter, which has a really neat hack for the power supply. Then he brings in a MP3 to compact cassette converter. You know you want to see that!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppo3IgHWDzA

In his words "That was a complete waste of time, but it's made me happy"

Oh, I also found this:

[NoSleep]

"Dogs love it!"

I can imagine the confusion of the dog the first time you fit it into that, but the second time you might have more of a struggle.

[Twed]

As long as the car doesn't get marred.