200GB Sega Dreamcast Mod - Retro Console Restoration

hey guys welcome back to another repair video today i'm finally working on my sega dreamcast it's taking me a while to complete this system and get all the accessories i need i tend to buy faulty or untested consoles in bulk so this guy's been sitting in my repair pile for a good while but my patience finally paid off i didn't have to go shopping for individual accessories for this unit i ended up getting everything i need in that bulk purchase that i made a couple months ago the system is in really nice shape here i have it hooked up to my capture card to test everything out it powers up just fine the fan's a little bit loud clock batteries not charging up doesn't hold a charge and when i tested this off camera i thought the controllers were all dead but i realized that if i actually wiggle the controller port around a little bit it comes back to life there might be a loose connection i need to take a look at i'll know more once i open it up and take a look inside and as far as the optical drive goes unfortunately it's not working i have given the laser a gentle wipe down with some ipa and i'm using a very clean disc but the system just won't read it so after saying please wait for about 10 seconds nothing happens and if i try and play the disc from the main menu it just says insert disk so there's a few minor things i need to look into but i think this system is going to clean up really well with some tlc i went ahead and bought a few things for this project here i have a gtmu it's an optical drive emulator it's going to let me play games off of an sd card very nice piece of hardware this is going to be a direct swap for the optical drive now i could try to repair the optical drive or source replacement but when i can play hundreds of games directly from an sd card for the same price why bother and here i have a kit to refurbish the controller board it comes with a battery holder so that you no longer need to solder a battery directly to the main board and rgb led pretty excited about that we have a replacement resistor a capacitor and a resettable fuse i'll talk more about this guy later when we're doing the install here i have a rechargeable battery this is an ml 2032 which is a direct replacement for the battery used in the system and last but not least the 200 gig sd card for all the games another minor issue to add to the repair list it looks like the pins on this dial-up modem are a little bit mangled so i'll straighten those out later so i'm inspecting the components on the controller board up close and granted the system's over 20 years old at this point but that capacitor looks like it's in pretty decent shape the capacitor is made by rubicon which is the cream of the crop when it comes to capacitors the capacitor that came with the kit is a no-name brand it's going to be inferior in terms of quality so i decide not to install it and i'm probably not going to use that resistor either i go ahead and mark the three components that i'm going to desolder the fuse the led and the dead battery i'm installing a battery holder so that in future if the battery needs to be serviced it can just be popped in and out the rgb leds just for fun it's just a way for me to customize my unit i didn't even need to wick the solder off the led just popped right out and about that fuse well technically it's a fuse resistor and mine hasn't blown it's actually working but this is a quirky component that i learned more about during my research of this project and apparently one of the ways to easily pop that fuse is by using a bad controller now i'm buying junk consoles all the time i often don't know the history of the components or the systems that i'm buying compared to the average dreamcast owner the likelihood that i come across a bad or faulty controller is probably a little bit higher so i'm replacing the fused resistor with something known as a resettable fuse and as the name implies it's a fuse that resets itself when the system is powered off and then back on so the consequences of using a faulty controller are greatly reduced having said all that if your fused resistor is fine you can probably leave it alone in there [Music] that's that little fuse resistor you can see the letters a and k on the board denoting the anode in cathode the shorter component leg is negative so that goes into the cathode side the fuse can go in either way it doesn't matter [Music] all right those three components are in looking good now if you remember when i tested the unit the controller was acting up i had to jiggle it around to get it to work so here i'm testing all the controller pins making sure none of them are broken i'm taking a closer look inside the ports making sure the pins aren't bent in any way and everything checked out the pins are solid the internal pins are exactly where they're supposed to be i think everything is good here so i move on to shower the controller ports with some contact cleaner hopefully this should resolve the connectivity issues with the controller i was almost sure i was going to find some broken or cracked pens that i'd need to reflow but that wasn't the case it was probably just some oxidation from years of storage that are interfering with the connection now moving on to the power supply we're going to do a bit of a cooling mod by removing the 12 volt regulator the thinking here is that when you remove the optical drive and replace it with a gdmu you're essentially removing the 12-volt load from the power supply and the power supply was never really designed to run without a 12-volt load so the voltage spikes and it starts to [Music] overheat [Music] next item on the list is that noisy fan hopefully by cleaning it out it'll quiet it down a little bit i'm on the home stretch i'm gonna see if i can do something about those mangled pins on the modem this is a dial-up modem and obviously the technology is obsolete and there's no official sega dreamcast online infrastructure that still exists but there are ways to emulate a dial-up connection using broadband and get the system online and believe it or not there's a bunch of games that you can still play online by doing this not something i'm particularly interested in doing but in the future who knows and the fuse on the modem is good at least on the surface it doesn't look like those mangled pens have done any damage [Music] that was a lot easier than i thought it was going to be do there are a few saved games on this vmu from the year 2000 that someone saves from 20 years ago guys i get such a kick out of that [Music] and the gdmu just slots in place where the optical drive used to go now i've already prepared this sd card and i've filled it all the way up with games you'll easily find in-depth tutorials that will walk you through doing that step-by-step last but not least the clock battery and again keep in mind even though this is the same shape and size as a cr2032 this is an ml 2032 which is a rechargeable version of that battery this console was in fairly good shape so i didn't feel the need to do a full teardown and shower the unit like i normally would but i did give it a wipe down and made sure there was no debris that would interfere with the action of the buttons and we are done oh isn't it how about that rgb led guys that looks mighty fine to me but let me know what you guys think all right i'm gonna show you guys how everything works and we'll try a couple of games now none of this footage is sped up so i want you guys to appreciate how quickly the system is about to start up about 15 seconds from the moment you turn it on i can use the triggers to do a fast scroll through the games and each gdi image is just over a gigabyte so i was able to fit 164 on this 200 gig sd card that's not the entire library of ntsc games but it's up there and it's more than i'll ever want to play anyway now i know you dreamcast fanatics are probably waiting for me to fire up marvel vs capcom 2 but guess what i've never even played it and when i owned a dreamcast as a kid and my parents would let me go shopping for games i certainly wasn't allowed to buy anything full price and most of the popular games tended to be i went to the bargain bin like a good little boy and i picked out whatever was on sale and one of those games was mdk and man do i love this game i haven't played this game since owning it in childhood and i was getting sidetracked preparing this video so [Music] for those of you who don't know this game it's a really fun party puzzle game it's an easy game to pick up one round and you kind of figure out the mechanics plug in four controllers and go head-to-head with your friends people are going to have a good time and one of the cool things that the gdmu supports is in-game reset so if you hold down abx y and press start it resets the game and if you press start twice it resets the gdmu altogether so you don't even have to get out of your chair to quickly reset the game or to start a new game altogether this wouldn't be a sega video without a little bit of sonic so let's go ahead and fire up sonic adventure i don't know how you guys felt about this game but [Music] the novelty kind of wore off quick it is fun definitely worth the play the controls do feel a little bit clunky though the camera doesn't feel very smart it's kind of fighting against you at times compared to something like super mario 64 for example and one of my minor peeves about this game is that there are some cutscenes that you can't skip through and they can be a little bit painful to kind of sit through and listen to entirely well guys thanks for sticking around i hope you enjoyed this video i certainly had a blast working on this system if you own a dreamcast i highly recommend the gdmu this modded build rivals my modded xbox it's gonna have a permanent place under my tv and this is one of those systems that i'm going to be firing up on a very regular basis all right take care guys see you next [Music] week you

Channel: Borderline OCD

Views: 214,764

Keywords: sega dreamcast, dreamcast, sega, gdemu, gdmenu, gd emu, gd menu, dreamcast ode, dreamcast mods, modded dreamcast, dreamcast sd card, dreamcast flash card, dreamcast flash cart, dreamcast gdemu clone, dreamcast gd rom, fuse resistor, clock battery, rgb led, vmu, mdk 2, chuchu rocket, sonic adventure, dcdigital, dcdigital hdmi, restore, restoration, repair, refurbish, asmr, retro, retro gaming, video games, video game consoles, vintage, vintage consoles, borderline ocd, borderlineocd

Id: iedD9X5lWLc

Length: 16min 25sec (985 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 17 2020