Case Swapping a Dreamcast?

Basically my situation is this......I have a Dreamcast and a USB GDROM. My Dreamcast is a Rev. 2, and USB GDROM is only compatible with Rev. 0 and Rev. 1. The shell of my Rev. 2 is in EXCELLENT condition. I want to use it for my system and give my crappy one to the nephew. Can I board swap a Rev. 0 or 1 board into a Rev. 2 case? Will it fit?

 

honestly I don't think there was any changes made to the shell between the revisions... could be wrong though.

 

try it

 

You should be able to swap the VA1 and the VA2.1 over - from what I can remember the plastics are identical. The VA0 might be slightly more of a problem - the heatsink on the VA0 is retained by one of the PCB screws, and on the VA1 and VA2.1 it's screwed into a couple of pillars on the lower case.

So puttin the VA0 board into a VA2.1 case should work if you cut the pillars away - but if you do it the other way around you will need to figure out some way of mounting the fan.

 

What's the incompatibility with va2? Is it just the milcd exploit being fixed? If so, you could change the bios to bring it back

 

I believe the incompatibility lies with the physical changes that were made to the VA2 MoBo on the dreamcast.

To Answer the OP's question. Yes. You should be able to without a problem. No major changes were made to the system case shell.

 

You might be right, I've only seen a va2 once and was quite awhile ago - isn't the gdrom connector different or something like that?

 

It's essentially non existent on the MoBo on a Rev 2 model. The Drive is connected directly to the MoBo via a ribbon cable Thus eliminating the Daughterboard found on the previous 2 revsions.

 

x

 

That's MIL-CD compatibility - he's talking about plugging a USB-GDROM into it, which is impossible on the VA2.1 board because the connector the USB-GDROM plugs into no longer exists.

 

Yes I remember now, thanks for jogging my memory

 

Different ribbon cables/ different locations prevent USB GDROM from installing on a rev.2. Other issues also I would assume. I will try to land a Rev.1 on my lunch break today. It shouldn't be too hard to come across. I don't want to have to cut pillars or anything, a straight swap would be ideal. Does anyone know if they make Dreamcast Rev.2 modchips? If I give it to my nephew I want it to be able to play backups, and this Rev.2 won't in its current state.

 

you need to flash the bios to an earlier bios. now how you go about it.... Bad_Ad84 can chime in glad i never encountered a rev 2

 

To play cdr on a rev2, you need to swap (or piggyback) a new bios into it

 

x

 

For the record, in the event that anyone is curious, this does in fact work. I can confirm that you can swap between rev.1 and rev.2 shells. I actually left both in their originals though, because my rev.1 cleaned up nicely.