That much is true, but there’s a funny story of how someone discovered that while being completly wrong about, well, everything else.
I value and respect privacy so I would not openly publish my email exchange with GDEMU buyer(s) unless I had no other choice, but not everybody subscribes to that notion it seems. It’s a Comedy Central material by the way: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/127752-flashcart-and-multicart-list-all-systems/page-63
However, I do not agree with the “being petty” acusation. Just because I didn’t share every tiny detail of how GDEMU actually works with the developers of other – let’s call them competing – projects, doesn’t mean I ignored them, or refused to help at all. And I have email history to prove that but hopefully I will never have to make it public. I’ve put a lot of my personal time, and money, into this project and I belive it to be my right to decide what I do with the knowledge obtained. Yes, I could’ve “shared”, but that would only result in other people making and selling their devices, and I would be left with nothing. Forgotten would be the best case scenario, but probably people would still demand I make further upgrades to their devices. For free of course. I bet each and every one of those who call for GDEMU to be cloned and cheaply copied behind my back would gladly work for free as well.
So, in the end I refused a sale. For the first time, too. If you’re on a backup list – rejoice, I’m almost sure now I will be able to fulfill those preorders as well. And if you’ve ever wondered why my terms of sale sound like a legalspeak, and why I reserve the right to refuse sale or repair, it’s because I have to deal with people who have no clue but lot of demands.
So, to reiterate: You’re buying GDEMU as-is. There might be a newer, better model released in the future and if you don’t like that, just cancel your preorder. Or buy one of the competing devices. Frankly, I’ve already reached my primary goal of raising money for software I need – and I would like to thank everybody who already purchased GDEMU for that. What I’m doing now is pretty much assembling and selling out the leftovers. That money will cover R&D costs for devices for other systems – and I make no promises as to what will come of that.
Also, Dreamcast discs can be copied, at the very least in a sufficient way as to obtain fully functional backup images. These backups are nowhere near 4GB in size. There are SD (well, SDHC to be precise) cards bigger than 4GB and that has nothing to do with FAT32 limits of single file size or total volume size. And yes, PayPal could rain on my parade anytime by locking my account again.
And finally, pretty please, read all the pages with instructions and explanations I’ve provided. If I sound like a prick answering your email questions then maybe it’s because I’ve already had to do it 100 times and by now it’s even more annoying than spam – because spam at least can be filtered out and/or ignored.
GDEMU 
Well, of course I would prefer to have GDEMU as a “freely-updatable” device a la Everdrive, but I take as a personal rule that if I’ve been warned about something and still go on, I’m on my own. I can understand your motives for not sharing info as well: of course, it would be desirable to have your work on an open source license, but I also find desirable to win the Euro Millions jackpot and that hasn’t come neither.
Your motives and aspirations are, well, yours and while there would be a lot of people who would complain about an expensive, no-warranties-of-any-kind device, I think the sum of your disertation is precisely “Would you do all that work just for free?”
Great stuff.
I’m ready and excited to hopefully get hold of one of these so let me know if they become available again! 🙂
O my god this guy is so stupid…
Known Facts
Fat32 have 2TB limit per partition and 4GB file limit per file
GDROM have 1.2GB Capacity so a “32GB LABELED SDCARD” (29GB Real) will hold at least 28 games
The only thing that Deunan needs to make to complete this nice piece of emulation is the Menu selection.
@Deunan Knute
Keep walking…
Exactly.
I think that Mark guy don’t know anything and now throws shit all over the place like a child just because he’s out the list.
I like Deunan attitude with this kind of people 😀
Jebać gimbusów.
Deunan sir good for you!!! Keep up the good work as always. You’ve definitely got the business sense to go along with your hard work!!! Anxiously awaiting your e-mail for payment request so I can bring this baby home to Kettering Ohio (ha-ha). Looking forward to playing some D2 without all that reader noise!!! I’m sorry though you have to put up with all the dumb asses on all fronts though.
All hail Deunan Knute!
Abrasive breaker of hearts;
Emulation King.
Deunan – I completely agree with you, don’t let people like this get to you they are seriously not even worth the effort!
Attitudes like his are really annoying – The device you have thought of, developed and have now assembled is a working product. I know of no other products like this out there for sale at the moment – so you have achieved what you intended to do 🙂
The price is not excessive – think of the cost of parts, manual soldering etc and I doubt that you make a great profit from these either – hell if you factor in the hours of your time in getting the product finished I would say the profit is near minimal if any at all! (I have no idea of how many hours it takes to think of a solution to a problem, design and develop etc – could be 1,000 hours of your time)
People will always want more – but I would hope that when people make suggestions etc – it would be ‘for future consideration’ if an updated model was ever to come out.
Personally for me – the device is already extremely impressive. You included an option to extend the selection button so it could be external or even remote. You stated that an extension cable could be added to ‘case mount’ the sd slot (Though of course you advise against it) Even regarding the menu – the dreamcast already has kind of a built in menu if you go to the audio tracks and press the selection button you can see which image is loaded!
You have addressed concerns about the airflow inside the case and even offered solutions (Though as you rightly stated the caps on the PSU are 105 rated so 70 should not be too much of an issue)
Then to add to all this you get complaints, paypal problems etc – I can understand how discouraging this would be – and of course I can fully understand the reasons why you may want to drop this project after the last of the leftovers are used up.
Personally I would not like to see this happen as I’m sure there are many people like myself who would still want to buy one of these – and I’m sure when the project is finished some of these will pop up on ebay at 2-3x the price as they become rarer!
Kudos to you on your achievement – and don’t let the idiots get you down 🙂
What an idiot. He clearly has no idea what he’s talking about. Neither about GDI’s nor FAT32.
I bought this thing, got it, installed it and it’s working. To me basically that’s where your involvement ends. I knew what I got (because I read the damn blog) and that’s it. Cooling and all that Jazz is my own responsibility. If a menu comes: Great. If not: I bought it as-is, so no biggie.
Fuck these morons ruining it for people who can read and comprehend.
I think now’s the time to sincerely thank you, Deunan, for the work you put into the GDEmu, and all the related stress etc you put up with in the decision to sell to the public. I can only hope that it hasn’t soured you on future similar projects – I am really looking forward to a similar solution for the Saturn (and maybe even the MegaCD?). Optical media in consoles has always annoyed me, and (so far at least) the GDEmu has been wonderful. The menu addition doesn’t even seem strictly necessary, since by viewing the music menu, the DC will show a picture of the game disc as you swap them anyway 🙂
So once again, thanks very much for putting up with the idiots so that the rest of us benefit.
You shouldn’t let it get to you. First of all the gdemu is a great product that works with everything I have thrown at it ( not tried bleem) and the heat is not a huge issue .. People seem to forget the early days of flashcarts . I remember getting a flashcart with a program that only runs on windows 98 with no instructions worse was the both the site that sold it and the support site disappeared after a week or two.. Myself and everyone that wanted this has to remember that we ordered basically a prototype . And like Any product it can be updated at anytime .. Best believe that if a new version of the gdemu comes out with harddrives support, I will buy that also.
P.s crossing my fingers for a menu ( although I’m use to counting how many times i need to tap the button lol )
Even though I want you to release information and a guide on how to build it, I have to look at both sides. You need the money for other projects, the way I was reading his fit was sad but funny.
He clearly doesn’t like that the GDEMU can’t handle his imaginary file system, what’s so wrong about that?
What if he plans to make GDI-files 4x larger just for fun, now he can’t he enjoy that, huh huuuh? 😥
Good For you, that guy is just a prick and you have the right to refuse service. I hope his actions will not discourage you from making any more. I have been following this project for a long time since i heard about it and i hope you do another production run as i missed out on getting one last time. Keep up the good work and good.
Deunan,
Please don’t let impatient folks like this discourage you. Your work is amazing! It is a hobby for you and a hobby for all of us. GDEMU allows people to enjoy the Dreamcast and you are gracious enough to share your work with us.
People should know that there is no magic GDEMU printing factory and should be patient in getting it. I missed the preorder boat by a day or two, but I am patient enough until the day you announce another production batch. People should feel lucky enough to have gotten into the queue for a unit. Products similar to GDEMU are costly and are usually difficult to get. Payment doesn’t entitle them to being demanding or allow them to hassle you into giving them a unit right away. They are buying what they signed up to buy, not a future product or upgrade. They should be happy to be receiving the amazing product at all.
Thank you for your work. I hope you continue to refine and develop GDEMU. I will patiently awaiting future development and announcements.
Thanks!
If you’re interested you can email me and I can share some of the things I’ve learned selling 64drive for several years. I also have some things that can help you make this an even better product. Ping me if you’re interested
Can you mail me, it’s dknute at gmail dot com. I don’t know any other way to contact you and I bet using comments system here is not the best way to do it 🙂
DK, you could also try contacting Marshall here: http://retroactive.be/
Any news on the menu?
Only that it’s not done yet.
I read the link you gave me… LOL that guy’s posting gave me good laugh for a moment.
He doesn’t even understand the basic of FAT32, GDI capacity, etc. ppl tried to make him understand what it is but he still didn’t get it. LOL how many ppl are needed to educate just 1 guy who doesn’t even search at Google ?? … and of course that he has super power to figure out the capacity of DVD or CD by just looking at it – it cracked me up 🙂
… and plz, ignore that prick and move on to the next project or update.
This type of happening is always happened in internet so far. plz, don’t get discouraged by this type of stupid guy. also, I agree that you have the right to refuse not to share any of your work – it’s your hard work. it’s upto u.