Epic Sega Dreamcast - Installing ALL of the mods

this is a no expense spared sega dreamcast built by mark and i in today's episode and when i say no expense spared i really mean it and that's why we're so grateful to pcbway.com for their support of this episode pcbware.com have all of your needs covered when it comes to pcb design manufacturing and delivery populated unpopulated your own designs picked out of the pre-made community designs everything you need is at pcbway.com do go and check them out because it's with their support that we've been able to afford this monster build that we're putting together today pcbware.com check them out and now on with the show [Music] hello cave dwellers what would your ultimate sega dreamcast look like this is a question that mark here from mark fix's stuff and i have been tackling today and i think we've come up with it i think we've got a pretty good solution here what do you think mark i think it's going rather well from a few little flubs along the way which we'll share with you we will we'll share with you because there's a lot of modifications that have happened to this dreamcast the first and most obvious one is the case so let's start with that it's this lovely kind of a smoky gray semi-transparent look yeah with a gunmetal logo on the top which i particularly like and it was rather expensive how much was that that came in after shipping and customs and excise duties at just over 100 pounds 100 pounds for a case and it's literally the case with the badge and that's just the tip of the iceberg there's no expenses being spared on this thing so the case i mean we'll get a close-up of it here it's a nice looking case it's got everything you would expect it's got the power button the eject button the control ports it has got a sega logo on the front despite not actually being an official sega product this is that's right knock off from the far east it's very very gray area yeah but anyway it's a nice looking thing let's move on swiftly and get into the good stuff that's inside so which modification should we start with well i think the first thing that we should talk about is the fact that the 100 and odd pound case wasn't even ready to use because we had to cut a hole in the back which we'll show you here just so that we could put in our wonderful hdmi this one that's that one dc hdmi which uh came and was kindly donated by bit funks now this was not a simple modification to make this was probably the most complex one i think i was the simplest thing in the whole equation yeah um i think it's an 8 out of 10 on difficulty yeah let's take a look at it because we've got some footage here of uh mark fitted this modification in fact he fitted most of them i i was more of a cameraman for this one but this does involve the use of a soldier in iron it needed some drag soldering didn't it just talk us through the process of fitting this mark so uh simply put you've got a board which goes in the bottom of the case um from there you've got a ribbon cable onto a cable that goes around a couple of chips and what you have to do is attach it to the very fine pitched pins of those surface mount chips and a couple of other points and there's three wires so in theory i thought it sounded quite easy but um as my eyes are getting older it's becoming slightly more difficult to to see these things so we made full use of the microscope which we've got some recording of here it's not 4k so the quality may drop a little bit while we look at it but i think it's important that you see this because um well you just can't see as you said we just can't see with our eyes whether the joints are a good or bad joints i'm not entirely sure if anyone could see to be honest yeah so we got writing clothes to have a look yeah and uh if you haven't tried drag soldering before then this is not the project to experiment on you've got to do this with some scrap boards you've got to be comfortable to do this absolutely because it's not a cheap kit how much was the dc hdmi kit again the dc hdmi kit comes in around depending on who you buy it from between 90 to 112 pounds and i hate to think how many of these have been damaged during the installation uh it calls back to the support line saying it arrived broken like this oh yeah but even with your skills it wasn't straightforward because we had a little accident didn't we with a resistor twice in two different locations tell us about that so um everybody knows what a resistor is it's a small component that reduces the flow of electricity so what you have is a resistor pack and it looks like a little chip with eight legs and it's on the ribbon and it's very close to where you're soldering so what happened was i i um heated up the pins and the resistor pack floated off yeah you know flux it just literally lifted up and floated off into flux and i thought oh that's jolly shane uh so i replaced that one which only took what about an hour well you were being very you've got to be so careful about it because it was on the ribbon and the last thing you want to do is jab the soldering iron through the ribbon so many points in this installation it could just be instant game over instant death yeah um and then i went to do the other chip sold onto the other chip and another resistor pack decided it was going to liberate itself and run for the hills but we got there in the end we did so that is the dc hdmi anything else you want to mention about that the installation of that mod uh no uh we've got some footage of that and it's uh yeah yeah it's an eight out of ten difficulty i think um so that was the most difficult part of this whole mod um what what next do you want to talk about what else went in there oh and actually before we move on there is an alternative if you don't want to take on that dc hdmi installation from the same company this is from bitfunk defense as well yeah they very kindly supplied for me to muck around with and this is simply put a plug-in hdmi adapter that goes into the port on the back so there's an av out port on the back and that does the um video and the audio it does the video into the hdmi cable and i use this one at home for the dc that the kids use for power stone 2. and also the dc hdmi involves an fpga chip did all of this does blank magic why go to all that effort when you can just buy a cable well is it visible is the difference visible is what i'm asking is there's really a splash there's a slight visual distance there's a slight visual difference um but what people on the internet say because i can't detect it is there's more lag with the plug-in um than there is with the installed but you are talking thousands of a second here and if you're a vintage gentleman such as myself you probably don't have the reactions to take advantage of that one thousand five speak for yourself so speak for yourself i'm sure those hardcore street fighter alpha players uh they might notice the difference so but it's good that it's an option uh can you remember how much that one is uh that is quite reasonable i think that's around 17 or 18. that's not bad depending on the exchange rate and that's from bitfunk says well well worth a try so we've got our case we've got our lovely crisp hdmi output and we will demonstrate this shortly we're going to show you this all in action um the next thing we ripped out was the power supply the power supply big old power supply that takes up pretty much the whole side of the dreamcast there straightforward snapping modification it was it's a dream psu which came from the same supplier as well um and it's really not too much to add what it does it takes away the old traditional power supply format and uses the new modern technology to give us a smaller package in there and one that's not so prone to overheating yeah so the side effect of that is less heat are there any extra protections in there that you might not get in the original power supply i don't think so really but the original power supply was incredibly safe anyway yeah okay and there was a small 3d printed part at the rear of the case if we just turn that round turn it around and i'll show you all its bottom so um yeah i mean not quite factory fitted but that 3d print slots in there nicely and of course with that new power supply you don't use the original plug dude you've got a new plug yeah we've got an external psu that comes with the the front psu so okay so nice easy modification um get rid of that old psu get a nice safe new one in there now the next modification the one that i really love is uh well i think you need to pop the eject button to see that one and i'm sure many of you were expecting to see this in your dream dream dreamcast which is the gdmu this is the gdemu now this is a clone of the original gdemu and we won't go into the whys and wherefores of the origin of the original or the availability but um as you can see we've got a lovely 3d printed tray here that was kindly supplied by coaster 2k and finally 2k okay and when we were fitting this you actually had a choice of colors 3d printed trays kindly sent a white one a mid gray one about 18 gray and a black on which we chose for this because we felt it fitted the best this is your other dreamcast has this been modified as well that's an all stock original va zero japanese dream car okay so i didn't know if you had a gdm hiding in there but um yeah lovely nice black finish on the tray uh talk us through the installation of this modification so with the gdemu basically you screw it inside and it has an sd card slot on the board now the lovely tray here that's installed screws to the underside of the case and it has an extender which is an sd card on a ribbon cable with a fake sd card on the end that goes into the slot so uh you can put your ridiculously oversized 256 gigabyte sd card in there which uh perhaps it's actually a bit overkill because you've got so much on that card when we turn it on takes about two minutes to boot up so uh i think the key is maybe more smaller sd cards rather than one huge one um but it works really really well um so that's the gdmu i love that modification but i think everyone who watches this channel knows the first mod i try to make to any system is get rid of the tape deck get rid of the cd drive get an sd card in there it's the ultimate mod for pretty much every system so it's great that it's there for the dreamcast and we've also done some modifications on the front here some smaller modifications but very useful ones just talk us through that yeah they're more standard mods neil so uh for example we have a bright blue led which is blue and everybody loves blue what's the original color um it depends what region you're in oh okay okay i believe it was orange i can't remember i've got a japanese one um blue because everyone loves a bright blue led tell us what color your dreamcast led is in the comment section below um so there's that and then there was a fuse that we swapped out yeah the fuse is the fuse for the controller ports and because they share the same bus what can happen is when you're jiggling around your controllers or swapping them for multiplayer action you can blow that fuse now the original fuse that came with the dreamcast was a simple fusion when it blew you'd have to have it repaired desoldered and replaced but the fuse we put in here is a resettable fuse which means if you have that problem your controller's still working you simply turn off the dreamcast count to 10 touch your toes turn it back on and your controllers will work again right so nice convenient mod then just to prevent you having a a well a pretty useless dream car yeah that's right yeah nice and there was something else we did yeah the final mod the final mod which we've got in here is a rechargeable battery mod because everybody knows now if you plug in your dreamcast the first thing it asks you is what's the date and time please um so yes what we've done we desoldered the fixed battery we've put in a holder and we've put in an ml 2032 rechargeable cell and that's in a holder so you can just pull that out and put a new one in dead date simple future five years ten years time when probably nobody cares about it so i think those are all the modifications we've made it's a hell of a lot we've got the case we've got the fuse we've got the led your battery mod the wpmu set the dc hdmi yeah i mean what there's nothing more you could possibly need is there for a dreamcast short of waiting for sega to come out with their mini dreamcast that's rumored or the dreamcast 2 or the dreamcast 2. i think that's pretty much everything that you could hope for in a dreamcast in the modern day um well you know we're not everybody so maybe some people would have other preferences so if you have got other preferences i'd actually like to rather hear about yeah let us know if we've missed something here but i think what i'd like to see and what you'd probably like to see is this thing in action so let's fire it up i'll stop talking let's just play some dreamcast let's go [Music] so this is the machine in action and i gotta say the first thing that struck me was the quality of the picture i know it was all about that with the hdmi mod but i wasn't expecting it to be this crisp it almost looks like i'm using a pc with an emulator yeah and you can see every bit that isn't that doesn't have anti-aliasing you can see those late 90s um yeah the assets that are lower resolution than the screen sprites over polygons you can see it all now is that a good thing or a bad thing it depends on the game you're playing it really does in this example in daytona i mean the cars look beautiful the tracks look great i think it really works well in daytona actually yeah i think it looks well and the assets are kind of up to scratch so the little pictures and everything there's not too much staircasing going on yeah yeah i mean a lot better than the quality of my gameplay in here anyone who can play daytona will be shouting at the screen the next game we tried was jet grind radio i've got to say this looks like it could be a playstation 3 game easily it looks so good easily yeah i mean if you were sitting right on top of the monitor you can see those jagged lines but then again you can't sit in front of the monitor because your mum told you you'll go blind if you sit too close to the telly in a perfect world you'd have a nice big crt and you know that would be helped a little bit by the natural aliasing of absolutely the crt but a lot of people are going to want this for streaming and in terms of latency i didn't notice a thing didn't notice any problems whatsoever which takes us on to our next game where latency didn't give you any problems no no terrible if it's going to factor into any game whether i'm good at it or not it's going to be street fighter 3 alpha which i am terrible at but again didn't notice any latency problems all bad moves and uh terribleness that you see on the screen here is purely down to my gameplay so um i think this is a winning combination yeah the graphical reproduction in street fighter um is so sharp it almost looks like what the kids have today called pixel art yeah it almost looks stylized but we know it would have been hidden by the scan lines and artifacts of the digital crts that were all rocking back then yeah yeah so that's what it looks like on the tv and in case you're wondering what it looks like through the capture system here's 30 seconds or so that mark's captured for us direct from that dc hdmi mod the output is incredibly crisp and clear in fact maybe too crisp luckily digging into the on-screen menu for dc digital allows you to turn on scan lines to soften that hdmi output you can switch between odd and even lines the intensity of the scan and even toggle thick and thin to meet your tastes aside from the usual beat-em-ups like project justice the dreamcast had a large variety of titles across many genres dungeon crawlers like record of lodus war kept rpg fans happy whilst cutesy blaster fans were serviced with the 3d installment of the cotton franchise aero wings bravely attempted serious flight mechanics and physics on the dc and future sports enthusiasts got the gorgeous looking cosmic smash to play old-school titles with 3d facelifts like ms pac-man gave his family fun [Music] and pseudo alice in wonderland japan-only platformers like nappletale added some mystery point-and-click humor was well presented by stupid invaders whilst a deep rhythm shoot em up rares gave us stunning visuals the dc even kept on giving as late as 2013 with the jaw-dropping sturmvind i think you get a good flavor of our ultimate dreamcast modifications there um mark there was quite a lot of effort involved in fitting all this it wasn't a straightforward process was it worth it it was worth it it would have been a lot easier i have to say if i wasn't so used to it in the first place oh it all went a bit wrong at one point um so i was clawing back pulled it back for a while but um yeah it was worth it i think i really like the look of it um yeah no complaints from listen no complaints so until the fabled sega dreamcast mini does or doesn't materialize this has got to be the best thing available to you if you have any better ideas for what should be in here please do let us know let us know what you think of that footage is it too crisp is it too clear i think a few of you might think that would you rather have a crt monitor or would you go for this let us know your thoughts in the comments down below as always it's great to see you again mark thank you for joining us for this episode if you haven't subscribed to mark's channel it's mark fixes stuff you'll find a link in the description down below do go and check him out and you're going to be showing this off even more on your channel because you're not going to go to all this effort only to put it back in the box aren't you no there's a couple of other bits we'd like to do but i'll uh save all the exciting stuff for uh over on the channel and maybe a bit of live streaming as well live streaming on twitch again might fix this stuff wonderful thank you as always for watching and take care bye [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 99,303

Keywords: computer history, nostalgia, retro, retro computer, retro man cave, sega dreamcast, retro gaming, dreamcast hdmi, dreamcast mod, battery mod, 1080p dreamcast, sega dreamcast 1080p, dreamcast 1080p, dreamcast hdmi adapter, dreamcast hdmi install, dreamcast mod gdemu, sega dreamcast games, sega dreamcast startup

Id: AZXKCHcwEbA

Length: 19min 24sec (1164 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020