20 March 2010

My Darling Dreamcast

♪♫ Two thousand zero zero party over oops.... out of time ♫♪
♪♫ So, to-night I'm gonna party like it's 1999 ♫♪

It's been over ten years since the dreamcast came out, and since I'd recently dug-out my old dc, I thought I'd take a few pics of it to show-off some of my earlier mods.

There she is, in all her beautiful blue glory, a launch-day PAL DC with a two-tone translucent blue shell and a few extra goodies inside.
The DC was way ahead of it's time in many ways, it was online at release, and gave an exquisite 480p picture with the VGA box.
For my DC, I built a small circuit to buffer the sync signals like the VGA box, and installed an HD15 socket on the back of the unit. I also added a 3.5mm jack for the audio so I could play on my PC's monitor and speakers.

Later on I swapped the PSU out for a Gamecube's dc-dc board so it would run from 12V. (didn't ever get round to mounting the jack properly though @'.'@)
I added a couple of switches under the lid. The first controls the overclock, switching between 200MHz and 240MHz. (more details here). The other, enables the VGA port on the back. I also swapped the power led to a bi-colour that changes from blue to red with the overclock switch.
I've so got many fond memories of the Dreamcast; Crazy Taxi, Soul Calibur, Rez, Virtua Tennis, Shenmue, Space Channel 5, House of the Dead 2, not to mention the myriad fighters/shmups from Japan, and of course all the great homebrew that came out back-in-the-day. I remember the SNES emu rocked at 240MHz.

Now I've got all nostalgic, I'm gonna go party like it's 1999.

edit:
VGA box schematics, via gamesx.com










4 comments:

  1. If you are ever willing to let go of your "precious" send me a line, I'm extremely interested in having a DC this awesome!

    Adam

    ReplyDelete
  2. Why the 12v mod?

    ReplyDelete
  3. The stock PSU wasn't 100% stable when overclocked and also kicked out a huge about of heat, much more than the rest of the DC itself. It runs a fair bit cooler from 12V and the OC is more stable.

    ReplyDelete
  4. hey bro!! why not added hdd-ide mod?
    please make it!

    ReplyDelete