SEGA Dreamcast Modding.

Hey, everyone.

I've never modded anything before, but, man, the Dreamcast is not the most reliable console ever, is it?

Long story short: I've thought about doing the SD Card mod.

The question is, has anyone here tried it? Are the transfer rates high enough to make it worthwhile? What's the difficulty of the project?

 

Look in The ASSEMblergames Marketplace forum, you will find a thread.

 

I am about to start SD mod myself... I should get some sleep first.

 

Never did any sort of modding or circuitry before I did the VGA mod to my Dreamcast - It's actually a pretty simple system to work with imo, never once messed up on modding one (and I've modded about 5 as of now), so I can't speak with it being unreliable - as for your other questions, I'm not sure if I can answer them as I've never done that specific mod myself, but from what I can tell it looks rather simple. Make sure to double check everything, messing up a mod can mean messing up an entire console

 

I've never had any reliability issues with either of my DCs. What happened, @BobNewbie?

 

If you wanna do the sd card mod for playing games, you're better off buying a gdemu. The sd-card works, but it's slower than the gd-drive and compatibility isn't perfect (but it's much better than it was at first). It's perfect for ripping gd-rom, loading homebrew and backing up your vmus though.
The downside of gdemu is its price.

 

Also the GD-EMU goes in and out of production, so it's rarely been available to straight purchase. Plus I don't know how easy it is to swap the EMU out for a GD-ROM if you want to play actual games. With the SD mod you can still do both.

 

Speaking from my own experience, I've had half a dozen dreamcasts fail on me. Some would not read discs, some would have weird graphical glitches and one just looped at the bios. I even had one that messed up all kinds of weird things like in Sonic Adventure floors would be missing making you fall to your death at startup, but you could remedy everything by removing the modem. So weird.

At the time dc were still in production, there was a used game store in my town. He had a ton of broken dc in stock so he could swap parts to sell usable ones. He told me that the gdroms drives was the most common problem.

 

Huh, I guess I haven't played with enough systems to find that out. I assumed they weren't on N64 level of stability, but I wasn't aware so many had issues. I guess I've gotten lucky with the ones I've had.

 

I completed the SD mod last night and as someone new to modding I can tell you it was difficult, but very possible and rewarding.

I have heard the data transfer rate is faster then from disk (not sure) . From the 3 games I played last night they seemed to be slowed down almost unnoticeably, with slightly differing functionality. I know there is lots of info about this out there just haven't yet really stuck my nose into it.

 

Wow, thanks for the replies. Jake585, I'd love to know everything - Materials used, tutorial used, etc.

To answer MMBM, my DC just keeps freezing during games. Skies of Arcadia is unplayable because some battles and battle animations transition to a black screen, and Shenmue can't get past the first cinematic. I've been trying to transition away from it, but, let's face it, some things on the Dreamcast aren't available on any other platform.

 

Never had issues with my Dreamcasts except a dead laser after 7+ years of service, that was fixable by adjusting the potentiometer. I guess your unit wasn't the best out there.

For the sd-card adapter, I'd suggest Helder's nice little PCBs with a ribbon to put the sd-card conenctor further away on the side of the shell, very nice stuff. Check it on the marketplace.

If you wanna do it yourself, here is the schematic:

 

SD card mod!!! YEAH

Supplies:
1x Electrolytic capacitor 47uF 25V
1x Decoupling ceramic disc capacitor 0.1uF 50V
1x Metal film resistor 470ohm 0.6W
1x 3mm LED
1x Stripboard
1x SD card interface - I bought a cheap multicard reader and gutted it for parts.
1x SD card I have 16 gb but I don't plan on putting more then a few gigs of data on it.
courtesy of youtube.com/watch?v=qh6SxdUk_Xk

Here is the parts placement chart for your strip board:
The red lines are cuts and the green (wire) and blue(resistor or whatever leg) lines show what strips need to be connected where. Here is mine

Software:
http://www.dc-swat.ru/page/dreamshell/
To boot from sd card I used
15.08.2010
DreamShell 4.0 Beta 4 (Form SD Loader)

More to come!

 

Wow, thank you for all the info! This should be just about everything I need to know.

I've never done any modding, so I have to ask: Can you elaborate on how difficult it was?

 

Sure, the hardest part was the precision soldering. It really took a long time for me to get secure connections to the serial port that did not bridge. Be sure to use thin gauge wire and a fine soldering tip. One slip of the hand could potentially mess things up bad. I did the led then vga followed by the sd card mod and felt as if each mod helped to prepare me for the next. I would recommend that. Its a great idea to practice soldering first, learn to "tin" your connections and use flux. I honestly feel as if some luck was in play for me because the connections are sooo small. Lots of time and many very tiny careful steps, that's all.

 

As this topic has modding in the title and is about modding... moved to the modding forum

 

buy an adapter maybe?

 

Isn't there an ide hdd mod that let's you keep the gd and use a hard drive? I think I've seen those for sale somewhere.

 

So after having the SD mod for a few days I have noticed a lower level of functionality then I expected. My main desire was for a genesis emulator which seems to work great. But all in all the Dreamcast game iso's don't seem to really work so great. Anyone had a different experience?

 

Loading ISO's from a SD card has always been a little crappy, either do the ide mod for fairly cheap or spend 100 or so euro to get the gd-rom replacement