G1-ATA (IDE) Connecting HDD to Dreamcast
1 Option The cheapest and easiest, but you need to be able to solder. Open the prefix and solder the cable to the motherboard to which through the optional power supply connect the HDD. You will have both a drive and an HDD.
Option 2 Buy or solder the OzOnE PCB board yourself. You will have both a drive and an HDD, only without a cover.
Option 3 Buy a USB-GDROM Controller board from MNEMO Dreamcast drive emulator. There will be only HDD.
Option 4 Buy a GDemu board Dreamcast drive emulator. There will be only SD.
Comparison:
With GDEmu, almost everything is simple, connected it instead of a drive and threw it onto the games SD card. Compatibility can be said complete. With regions and a choice of games, this is a separate song, but it seems that all the inconvenience is more or less smoothed out by inquisitive users. But one fat minus still remained - this is the price. At the current rate, it costs around 8500 rubles, which seems somewhat ridiculous. At the same time, SD cards are still very limited in size, and high-capacity flash drives are not cheap, especially of good quality, which are generally needed.
Almost the same goes for the adapter from MNEMO, its main difference is that it has USB, not SD, which reduces the cost of a gigabyte. There are still nuances with the format of images and a change of disk for this adapter, but not very critical. The price is somewhat cheaper, but still the order is about the same.
Pros:
1) Compatibility about 100%
2) No installation problems, set instead of the drive and that's it
3) High download speed for GDEmu and normal for MNEMO
Minuses:
1) Very expensive
2) Does not start games in other regions without shamanism (GDEmu)
3) Expensive large amounts of memory (GDEmu)
4) Only supports GDI and ISO (MNEMO)
5) Overhead of interface pairing reduces speed (MNEMO)
With DreamShell, the picture is completely different. Compatibility is certainly not at that level, but it may turn out to be quite enough for a specific person, the main thing is to understand what games are in principle needed. True, to boot without a drive, you need a BIOS mod and this is of course a minus, But this is not a problem if you know how to solder. But there are undeniable advantages.
Pros:
1) It's free
2) A gigabyte of space is much cheaper (or even free, because you can find old IDE HDDs, in principle, for free). You can hook SATA through the adapter.
3) No problems with regions and VGA forcing (where it is generally supported)
4) The download speed of games is equivalent to GDEmu
5) There is a chance)) get extra. functionality that cannot be implemented using iron emulators
Minuses:
1) Compatibility more than 80%
2) You need to be able to hold a soldering iron in your hands to solder a dozen wires
3) If there is no drive, you need a BIOS mod (basically equal to the second point)
More to the advantages of DreamShell.
With the boards of the aforementioned comrades (GDEmu, MNEMO), the console is fenced off, losing its native drive, and after all, many people still have stamping / license collections, to this day people continue to collect.
With DreamShell, it’s just the opposite, when installing HDD, SD-Card, Bios Flash,
the console retains everything that was originally in it, plus acquires new
functions, and these are just the pros in hardware, not to mention the functionality of DreamShell.
In general, if everything is averaged and rounded, it turns out that the difference in money is in fact. A paid solution is simpler and works better, a free solution is more complicated and it still does not work as well as iron emulators, that’s the whole difference ...
At the same time, you get a full-fledged console, instead of one emulator board, which without a console is generally useless.
The main thing here is to understand how critical 100% compatibility is, whether it is worth the money in your case. For some, this may be the main argument in the decision, and if there is extra money, then why not simplify your life And some have both at the same time.
In more detail with pictures how to do IDE, BIOS mod and region changer here -
http://www.dc-swat.ru/forum/thread-2260.html