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GDEMU or use the serial Port for Backups, And What The Best Way Oh Going At It?
Posted: Sun Mar 23, 2025 2:11 am
by Retro-45
Hey fellas so lately I been wanting to mod my Dreamcast except im not sure how to go about it. To start is it better to do GDEMU or Serial Port mod? If I do the GDEMU what is a good place to get one and are the clones good? I been wanting to cut back on having to burn CDs as it’s getting a tad bit annoying to keep up with all of them and I rather be able to use the GDI instead of CDI. I also want to persevere my GD drive as well.
Re: GDEMU or use the serial Port for Backups, And What The Best Way Oh Going At It?
Posted: Sun Mar 23, 2025 4:27 am
by AdeC
Serial port doesn't run all games.
You'd be hard pressed to find a GDEMU that isn't a clone nowadays. They're fine
Re: GDEMU or use the serial Port for Backups, And What The Best Way Oh Going At It?
Posted: Sun Mar 23, 2025 3:51 pm
by Retro-45
So If I want to get a clone GDEMU, Is aliexpress the only place to get them, and if so how safe is ordering something from there? Or can you find them on ebay? As for a clone what’s the price range for one of them? Thanks
Re: GDEMU or use the serial Port for Backups, And What The Best Way Oh Going At It?
Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2025 3:57 am
by Widge
The data transfer speed of the serial port is pretty bad compared to the GD-Rom drive, so there aren't many games that you can play and have a good time if you use it. That said, you can use it to make images of your games for the GDEmu before you swap the drive out for one. I have two consoles, one in original condition, which doesn't see a lot of use, but I occasionally use it to backup new discs for the GDEmu in my modded console.
I bought my GDEmu from Aliexpress maybe 2 years ago. The quality was very good. I was expecting the mounting hardware to be 3D printed parts, but they were surprisingly actually injection molded plastic. It was the first "expensive" purchase I made on Ali so it was a tense couple of weeks until it arrived, but I had no complaints. The only issue I had at the time was that, when I placed an order, the seller would contact me and ask for extra money to cover shipping inflation (or something like that), I just decided to cancel the order and order from another seller rather than deal with that kind of seller.
Check
https://consolemods.org/wiki/Dreamcast: ... mon_Issues for common issues with clones. I wasn't aware of this at the time so didn't know to look out for any of these issues. My disc change button didn't work, so I recently fixed that with the advice there.