Posted by exodus on November 12, 2020 at 13:29:07 EST in reply to What is an ODE? (n/t) from SignOfZeta.
it's an "optical drive emulator" - basically it replaces your disc drive with a solid state thing that you can run roms on (but not discs). It reduces or removes most load time which is why it was relevant here. The big difference between the Atomiswave and the Dreamcast was apparently just the way it read data, and once the hombrew folks figured that out, they found it was incredibly easy to port Atomiswave games flawlessly to Dreamcast as long as it had an ODE (which replicates the data loading environment of the Atomiswave cartridge). But once they had THAT figured out they were able to retroactively make disc images too, albeit images that have black loading screens here and there, and some odd incremental load-ins of data. But otherwise it works great even on disc now, when you consider how long it's been since this all came to light (maybe two weeks).
Here's a video of KOF XI running on CD, you'll see the weird loading in the vs screens and some other areas.
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