I’m busy with stuff so not much to report. I had to restart Rhea PCB design as I’ve decided to try a different MCU – it’s a bit more expensive but has more RAM and smaller package, both of which are useful for this project.
This is Rhea V1.5, it’s not pretty but works great so far:
Obviously it was never intended to be permanently installed inside Saturn (though I guess it could be with some glue gun help).
There have been some questions about that so let me make this clear: Rhea is not going to be faster than original Saturn drive. Maybe a bit due to almost instantaneous media seeking but that’s it. Unlike Dreamcast where data bus is faster than drive, Saturn is limited by its serial protocol – which is set to exactly 2x speed and that can’t be changed.