Thanks for the help. My fault on that. There has to be someone on here with a 2001 console. I'm having a really hard time finding anything elsewhere.
Isn't the answer posted here: http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/non-mil-cd-dreamcast-any-back-ups-possible.43668/ http://www.epforums.org/showthread.php?54893-Dreamcast-versions-Mil-CD-Selfboot-Compatibility http://theisozone.com/tutorials/dreamcast/burning-and-backup/newer-non-mil-cd-dcs-and-workaround/ http://www.segagagadomain.com/dreamcast-ntsc5/space-milcd.htm As I said in my earlier post, no 2001 model, that I owned, worked with CD-R's using the old Utopia Boot Disc.
My guess would be that they were more likely to be made for NTSC-J than UC, especially since Sega still did hardware repairs up until 2007. I looked, and mine are 1999 and 2000.
This strikes me as odd, seeing that the only mod-chips for Dreamcast I came across were only for defeating it's region-coding. Don't you mean a replacement BIOS?
Assuming what Sega claimed was 100% accurate, no. Either way I've yet to see irrefutable evidence of January units. Let alone after that. It may be DC was stealth discontinued in December, then they waited a few weeks to confirm the news.
I do recall that there was an faq of the Dreamcast timeline and stated that around mid or end of 2001 the Dreamcast finally stopped being manufactured. EDIT: Well... http://www.ign.com/articles/2001/10/17/special-last-dreamcast
This is interesting: http://kpark.co.kr/2804534 Yes, it's all in Korean - but about halfway down the page there is a photo of the mold markings from one of the DC cases - and according to that they shot the plastics in May, 2001.
There is something strange about that, though - assuming that the case is the one for the VA2.1 board that's also on those pages there is a huge difference between the date of the parts on the board and the date of the housing. The latest date code I can see on that board is 0033 (week 33, 2000) on the flash chip - which would correspond to July, 2000 - and assuming 6-8 weeks between chip production and the PCB assembly would still leave you with about 9 months before the unit was assembled, which would be an unusually long time for a completed PCBA to be sitting in the supply chain. Having said that, there are some rather clear signs of rework on that PCBA, so it's possible that it was made earlier, failed production testing and was then later repaired and built into a system. If this is the case, it would also suggest that that was one of the very last units to come off the line, since clearing all the rework parts is normally about the last thing you do before shutting down production.
