Dreamcast Devbox Bios on retail Console!

Let me know when everyone receives them. US people should be getting them now.

 

I got mine day after you shipped it. California gets Nevada mail within 1-2 days without fail.

Started to solder it in tonight and gotta pick up the resistors tomorrow. Having to resort to soldering 41 odd wires in there as my solder skills aren't up to the crazy Russian standards yet. If anyone could link me to a tutorial on soldering gaps like that I'd be grateful, though I'm about 15 wires short of being done. If it fails I'm going to start pulling hair....

Then I'd have to buy another chip and find someone to stab.

 

Question, because I'm paranoid. Are pins on the DC's onboard BIOS supposed to be grounded around 35/36? I'm too tired to count these tiny pins but my multimeter tells me two are shorted but aren't shorted on the piggybacked chip until I jump the piggyback pins to the onboard's pins.

 

pin 32 is ground and pin 33 (/BYTE) is connect to ground too (This put the flash chip in 8bit mode).

Using wire for this is the hard way, you could flat all flash pin and solder them directly on top of the other bios.

 

Some advise to get the chip easily soldered on top of bios, start by using a flat pliers to flatted all pin of the flash chip like this:







After that use a flat surface like a table to bend all pin at once vertically much like a DIP chip.



Now pull up back the needed pin. (Be carefull to not break them)



Now all pin will touch the pin of the original bios (Or almost) so you can solder easily.





Also I would suggest anyone not much skilled in soldering to use flux pen (either Alcohol or Rosin based) so solder get easier to go on pin.

Kester make those pen, #186 is rosin (leave rosin after solder, it's ok but not nice to see. You can clean it with alcohol)
#951 is alcohol based, (don't leave any trace, but the alcohol evaporate so you need to solder quickly after application unlike rosin based one.)

Their are both available from Digi-key.

 

Darthcloud, thanks for the helpful suggestion and pictures. Much appreciated!

 

Yeh thanks. I'm skilled enough to handle most SMD soldering but I don't make a living at it. I tried to use a pair of needlenose pliers to flatten the pins but I was paranoid as to how much flexing I had before I broke them (been a while since I tried to do this particular procedure).

Flux helps a lot, and so do those pictures. My gaps are about 3-4mm and yours look like 1mm at most. My solution is UGLY but with that info about BYTE and GND being shorted (like I was paranoid about) it should work out. Live and learn, then close the case and never show your horrible soldering job to anyone. Now to head to Rat Shack to get 10k ohm resistors.

 

Unless it stops working and someone insists on fixing it for you but I hope not! :thumbsup:

 

I just wired up the switch and if it doesn't work I will soooo end you.

 

Turned it on, nadda. Crack it back open, oh hey look CE is shorted when the shielding/heatsink is screwed down. Derp.

Piece of paper later and it boots! Now to flash the chip and see what happens.

 

Take pics !

I still haven't had time to mess with mine yet. I will probably mod one White and one Black

P.S. Anyone looking to sell a Black BBA? I have obtained a white one! Just need black now :>

 

Tis all I can offer for now, still waiting to see if Link83 will PM me a link to his hacked BIOS proper. You can see the god awful soldering job I did that, somehow against all odds, has no shorts in it. I don't know if it's properly piggybacked or not yet but this damn thing won't be going anywhere. Could have made the wires shorter but my fingers are kinda stubby. You can clearly see how CE got shorted across both chips though. Followed DarthCloud's setup since it looked rather nice.

If anyone has the BIOS Link83 made and he said it's OK to share it I'd love to get a PM.

 

This BIOS included in Dreamshell
\shared\bios\1_011_01_hacked.bios

 

Is the /WE line connected to pin 9 of your DC flash? Just want to make sure you didn't followed my instruction to much (Like connecting /WE to pin 7), my DC was different than your, you need to follow DC-SWAT instruction in your case with /WE to pin 9.

Btw Link83 bios file do not match that 1_011_01_hacked.bios, wonder what the difference though.

 

Yeh no I didn't follow it too precisely just a stupid mistake by not paying attention to clearances.

I did note that I needed pin 9 over pin 7 on there though, found the original datasheet for it and triple checked everything. Pin 7 simply doesn't have a trace jutting out on my DC revision. Mine is from October 1999 and looks virtually identical to the one I've had since X-Mas 99 that was manufactured in September 1999. First glance at the pin count told me that it was an entirely different chip. Pain in the ass to locate the datasheet though.

 

no need for exact datasheet this are standard parallel tsop flash chip. The fisrt DC like mine used 128k flash, where later one used (uselessly) 256k flash (upper address line is hardwired to gnd (or vcc) so only 128k is accessible)


So:
40 pin => /WE on pin 9
32 pin => /WE on pin 7

 

I don't work with tsop chips that often but being the paranoid type I wanted to be 100% sure. So far this has worked out better than I had anticipated and am glad I spent some time learning how to use my fine point iron tips.

 

There goes that attempt for now. ImgBurn doesn't handle self-booting CDI images apparently and had to grab DiscJuggler to make sure it burnt right. Then as it was booting the unsecured switch pulled the pin out of the piggybacked chip. Joy.

Will have to pull out my dremel tool in the morning and see if I can grind away enough packaging to solder a wire to what is inside. Thanks for all the help and worst comes to worst I'll just be stuck with a standard Dreamcast boot up sequence. Right now it doesn't do anything without that pin in place. Bleh.

And if anyone happens to have a compatible chip about drop me a PM, I want a backup just in case this goes wrong.

 

And AFAIK (I've never seen one myself anywhere) there was only white BBAs produced. Obviously that'll clash a bit with the black Sports DC but it'll clash with the nice red/blue of the Bio Hazard limited edition DCs as well.

I'd suggest some spray paint if you really want a black one. I picked up some that was capable of sticking to plastic without any need for prep beyond a simple cleaning of the plastic. Made a beige Zip100 drive match my black case nicely. Though it did add a noticeable amount of bulk to the casing that made it a tad more difficult to insert disks.

 

There actually was a black BBA, but it is scarce as hell. Expect to pay around double what the white one is worth.