GDEmu (Dreamcast)

the gdemu allows you to load games from sd card instead of the optical drive installation is as simple as connecting it up where the disc drive was it seems if using the gdemu along with a japanese cake bios that it hangs at the sega logo you should not really need the japanese cake with a gdemu anyway as it is region free gd menu card manager insert an sd card into your pc and use https //github com/sonik br/gdmenucardmanager https //github com/sonik br/gdmenucardmanager to upload games to it in the gdmenucardmanager folder also copy and paste the openmenu images (its referenced on the homepage of the github) to allow images to show up when adding games in game reset if you hold abxy + start you can reset the game doing this at the title screen of the game then resets the console as a whole, which should reload you into the gd menu solid orange led this is a common issue i have come across where the sd card extension is not well connected even though it looks it the connector is very loose so if it is not making contact well the led on the gdemu stays solid orange and actually stops the console doing anything (even displaying a black screen) i recommend taping it in place once happy write protect issue & fix in addition to this, there is a common issue with the write protect detection on the gdemu ultimately the problem is at the gdemu pcb side, and the card being write protected or not really doesn't matter it would technically work both ways however, if the gdemu doesn't see the write protect pin shorted to ground (meaning it is not write protected) then it won't boot and show solid orange led the write protect pin on a card is here the slider being closest to the gold contact pins is write protection off (which is what you want) bad sd extension, poor connection, low quality sd cards or write protected cards can all cause a total no boot of the console and solid orange led on the gdemu the gdemu is usually used with an extension wire so the write protect on the extension wire is the one that needs to work well the thing is, the write protect pin on the card really doesn't matter, and the write protect pin being open prevents boot so, the solution is to just permanently bridge the write protect pin, and the system will then boot regardless of the status failing to load game a common issue many people face is when loading a game, the console reboots to system menu there are several causes gdemu ini make sure you have the following settings for best compatiblity with all sd cards (this comes from my own personal testing of dozens of cards over dozens of consoles) open time = 200 detect time = 200 reset goto = 1 image tests = 0 high speed = 0 bridge write pin on the sd card slot on the gdemu make sure to bridge the two end pins as shown in the solid orange led section above this prevents any temporary glitches in thinking the card is locked/not locked sd card type i have tested many brands the most consistent are amazon basics glass 10 xc i, v30, a3 you can get 512gb, 1tb and so on all perform flawlessly and there are no clones on the amazon store so easy to guarantee you are getting what you pay for for example this one https //amzn to/3zki1zz https //amzn to/3zki1zz games on card something i discovered myself and have seen nobody talk about or know, is that the games on the card matter for example, if i pre load an sd card with many games, it can make most/all fail however, if i remove all games except the one i want to play and test that, it can work basically, be careful of max loading an sd card with untested games add them several at a time and if you start to see game load issues, remove some and test individually this can cause so many headaches wondering what the issue with the gdemu is symptoms include games loading back to the system menu, or going black screen often the games causing the issues are not the actual games failing for example, a bad copy of resident evil 2 can cause 102 dalmations to fail loading