Ultimate Sega Dreamcast Hacks and Mods!!!

the Dreamcast was Sega's last attempt at a game console and with it they released lots of pretty cool accessories ranging from a VGA box that outputted really high-quality 480p video to a memory card that also doubled as a portable game console and even a microphone that allowed you to talk to fish people anyway the Dreamcast community has kept up the tradition of pretty cool accessories in this video is going to showcase my favorite hardware add-ons as well as some general tips and tricks [Music] I'd like to start with some tips that don't require any modding at all and seeing that this is on the retro RGB Channel let's do a quick rundown of video output options the Dreamcast outputs really high-quality 240p video that make arcade games look perfect on an RGB monitor or even through an upscale er solution but in my opinion the Dreamcast also does a great job output in 480p making some games look right at home on a flat screen next to modern consoles so my suggestion is that people get some kind of solution that could flip between both modes my favorites are things like the Toro box from the behar brothers and I have started testing a new solution from an eBay seller call to the food that has just a simple output cable with a switch that goes between both and there's even future options coming soon from retro gaming cables in the UK and HD retro vision all are high-quality solutions that let you flip between whatever settings you'd like and really allow you to get the best out of your dreamcast without any bonding whatsoever now I already have a pretty in-depth video about the best ways to play on CRT monitors it's not a really high polished video but it does the trick and I'll soon have a detailed video on the best ways to play Dreamcast on a flat screen but the short short version is if you get a solution that outputs both signals the 480i and 480p and you run it through an upscale er like the open source scan converter that's really gonna get you at least for the moment the best no mod required solution and if you're looking to save money or you really just want a cheap way to get dreamcast on a flat screen you can get certain cables for around 30 dollars or less that go direct to HDMI now I'll be honest most of these solutions are not good the quality of the video isn't good most don't support for ATI and 240p requiring you to have 480p only games but for around $30 sometimes that might be a great place to start either to hold you off before you get some kind of upscaler solution or for the people that predominantly play on analog monitors and CRTs and really only need a few quick solutions for flat screens or HDMI but either way look for the video coming up soon that will show all of the detailed and best options and I'll have a little teaser at the end of this video - another easy no mod required trick is showing how to boot games that only support for ATI modes into 480p now sure you could use patched iso's or other methods but if you'd like to use your original disc for a game-like bust-a-move as I'm showing here you're gonna have to use this trick otherwise you're going to end up with a screen that says the game mode is not supported so now you see we have an output cable the toggles between 480i and 480p and if you can see the screen right now it's very obviously in 480i mode well watch the screen and wait for the Sega logo so when you see that flick the switch over to 480p mode and now the game boots and it's in 480p not for ATI so this is a great trick for any time you need to use an original disc and you want to force 480p mode I don't think it works on every single one but it certainly works on a majority and so if you have an original disc that's running in for ATI only just give this a try and see if it works for you another cool trick to know is that some games could be forced into 240p mode using just a button combination upon boot now for people that aren't familiar with these terms it might sound a little strange that you would want a lower resolution than for ATI but since the 480 I picture is interlaced it looks flickery and on top of that it doesn't have that same scanline look as 240p which is the same resolution used on most arcade games and most of the old consoles so with just a button press you could actually boot many of those games into a 240p mode and I'm gonna show Street Fighter 3 third strike right here and now as this game boots again I'm gonna hold down Start and left right pretty much as soon as you see the dreamcast logo and i'm going to keep holding this through all of the different screens you'll get to this screen and it'll still look for ATI but once the game itself boots then you'll see a switch into 240p mode as it so that button combination probably won't work with every game so I would just look up which game you're looking to launch but right here as you can see now we have a true 240p Street Fighter 3/3 strikes all just by hitting a couple of buttons when it boots so those are the most common scenarios you'll run into while forcing video modes with the Dreamcast it's pretty easy if you have a game that won't boot into 480p just do the switch trick if you really want to play a game in 240p look up online and see if there's a button combination or maybe even an iso patch available that could force it but overall those are pretty straightforward there's some more strange issues going on with Dreamcast games but only a few games like giggling will only boot in composite video or s-video modes and won't boot at all running into RGB cables and I've heard have pretty bad issues while running through VGA at least with certain regions see a big problem is a lot of games have been patched over the years and those are the ones that we most commonly find online and I know a ton of people that have large Dreamcast collections and still download the ISO somewhere online because it's faster than rear ipping so sometimes it's hard to keep track of all this stuff but to be honest I think I've covered the basis that your average Dreamcast fan might run into and if you guys want me to go through a more detailed video of Hobbit force video modes or patch for the very few small percentage of games that won't run in RGB or VGA modes let me know in the comments down below and I'll see what I can come up with another no mod tip that many people might already be aware of is the ability to play CD ARS on certain model Dreamcast's over the years I've heard of different ways of trying to identify which dreamcast can play CD ARS I've heard to look at the model number and I've even heard to look at the date but the surefire way to do it at least on NTSC consoles is by looking for the number number zero and one will be able to play CD ARS but numbers two will not the only way to know for sure is just by burning a CD and trying yourself you can get a copy of the 240p test suite for free right from their website burn it to a CD are at the slowest speed possible and see what happens now to be honest burning GD roms to a CD are like this isn't the best idea the way it works is by using a hack that could put a bit of strain on the laser inside your GD ROM Drive so for things like loading the 240p test suite in my opinion it's completely fine but all of these cd-rom drives that have had years of use by playing hacked games I'd imagine that playing those games probably wore down that drive a lot faster than real games or CDs burnt using a different method the other thing is that GD roms can actually hold over a gigabyte of data whereas CDs can only hold around 700 megabytes so very often for these to work you would end up having to compress the data on the CD and the game wouldn't be a true experience to the original you might have compressed audio compressed graphics or who knows what else so overall while I would consider this a great solution for testing and really maybe even just a temporary solution until you have another method of booting backups I really wouldn't use this as my main way of playing Dreamcast games this next thing isn't a tip but more just like a short reminder Sega made some pretty cool arcade sticks for the Dreamcast that supported the vmu units and functioned fully as a controller just in the form of an arcade stick but you could also use professional-grade arcade equipment while using something like the MC Cthulhu or Brook retro boards all you would need to do is either purchase or make a custom cable and it'll work right with your Dreamcast one quick tip on that though you might have to boot the game with your original controller for the VM you support and then switch to the arcade stick after it loads but once again that's not really a tip that's more of just a reminder because there are some amazing arcade quality sticks out there these days and in my opinion using one of those with a Dreamcast really brings the arcade experience right to whatever your solution is one last thing to mention before going over to the hardware mods is the batteries in your vmu unit will eventually die I'm not really sure if I'd call this a mod or not maybe just general maintenance but here's how you're replacing the batteries and the Dreamcast vmu unit seemed to be doing that a lot lately so it's easy to replace it all you need to do is just grab yourself a smaller screwdriver and pop off this battery door and you'll see it's 2 2032 batteries and there's two of them in there then you just replace them with brand new ones just by dumping them right in you could hear the beep when I put the batteries in and that's it there you go now all you have to do is set the date and the vmu is restored now I'd like to move on to showing some hardware upgrades available for the Dreamcast and I'd like to start with something that every single Dreamcast owner is gonna have to do at some point and possibly already change the dead battery I'm sure almost every one of us has seen the date screen when you boot up your Dreamcast which means the battery is dead and it's a soldered in battery which means that you need to take the Dreamcast apart desolder an old one in and solder a new one so what I like to do is since you need to do all that anyway solder in its place a socket and that way if the battery ever goes dead again you just unscrew the top of the Dreamcast pop out the battery pop a new one in and you're done one thing that you really should keep note of though and I'm gonna make sure to mention it a few times in this video is that this is not a standard coin cell battery the Dreamcast uses a rechargeable battery and if you just put a standard coin cell in it could leak out and hurt the board that it's connected to it could just die right away or possibly even pop which is never a good thing so you want to make sure to get the correct model battery in it the trickiest part is that it's the same size shape and voltage as the other ones so just make sure to buy them from the links that are in the description down below or anything that matches the exact same part number but for now let's disassemble the Dreamcast and get started okay let's start by taking this apart first thing you want to do is just press down here lightly and then pull and you should be able to pull this module right off the side and then just unbolt all four screws and then just lift the top right off now that we have it all apart you can see the battery right here so let's take this thing apart and now that the screws are out you just unplug the fan very carefully unplug the ribbon cable and then you could just kind of pull up all right like that and it comes right out desoldering is actually pretty easy if you have the right tools you could just see here that these are the three pins that you need to desolder because these are the ones connected so first I just like to start out by adding a tiny bit of fresh solder to it which I know seems a little counterintuitive but it helps make the helps break the connection between this you know very old socket that was soldered a while back so we're just gonna add a tiny bit to each of those and then we're going to take a D soldering gun and make sure that to hit each point so this is a little tricky and it's even harder to try to get on camera so as you can see one of them isn't quite out so I'm just going to add a tiny bit more solder and try it again and that was it pretty much just fell right out so as you can see everything's pretty clean but there's a bit of funk on here I'm not really sure what that is believe it or not it was there before I did the desoldering so I don't know if something leaked out or if something's burnt but either way I'm just gonna clean that up one thing that's very easy about these is the sockets themselves are keyed so it's not like you could ever put this in the wrong way so you just line it up the holes and push it right in and that's it and then we just add some solder and that's it now we have a socket let's get this thing back in all right we're just going back in kind of the opposite of the way we came [Music] so this parts just as easy as it looks you could see that this retainer is labeled negative here and positive on the other side and here we have the correct coin cell battery the ml which is the same one that the Dreamcast came with I haven't tried the other ones yet but I figured I would just use the more expensive official replacement so I'm gonna have the positive side facing towards the rear the negative side right in the slot and there you go it just pops right in so that's much easier than having to desolder and resolder every time and this just really makes an easy replacement in case the battery ever dies again all right so let's give this a try I'm gonna stick in today's date alright you can see we have the correct date in the upper right so I'm gonna power the console off I'm gonna very very carefully unplug it this is an open frame power supply and you could be very very injured if you did something wrong if you fell on it or whatever else so be extremely careful around any kind of open frame power supplies and a power this backup and look at that it goes right to the title screen with no more annoying bait the title or the date is still correct and that was a pretty easy mod all things considered one mod that I think every Dreamcast owner should consider is upgrading the fan now this is a mod that could be done to any Dreamcast and it will not affect anything else it could be completely stock otherwise and you could still use all original discs if you'd like but I think at least in my opinion it's a pretty big upgrade first the original fan that the Dreamcast came with is getting old and all fans eventually are going to wear out and die so if you're already gonna consider doing any other maintenance or mods to your Dreamcast you might as well do this anyway but on top of that it's much quieter than stock check this out so let me just put my lapel mic next to the Dreamcast so here's the fan that we're gonna be replacing you just need a small screwdriver now when you lift this off be very careful and remove that screw in there and now you have the Noctua fan the 3d printed fan shroud and the adapter cable so this thing goes in very easily first you put in the brand new 3d printed fan shroud and that's gonna line up exactly with where the old one was bolt that right back in with the same screws make sure not to tighten it too much because 3d printed parts are always a little bit more fragile than regular so just make sure that it's snug then I usually like to plug in the fan first so get that adapter cable plugged in plug this in now we're just going to angle the fan diagonally in point first use the supplied screw and make sure that the label is facing out because this is an exhaust fan not an intake fan and we're just going to bolt it in right like that the only thing left to do in regards to the fan mod is to replace this latch this is what releases the top cover and if you leave this in it'll bump into the new fan shroud so you have to replace it with the one that comes with the kit then just grab the new one and screw it right back in this place and the last thing to do is just to hook on the spring that you took out before there you go so now this thing should work just as the other one it just won't get in the way the fan so now I want to do the same exact test I did before I'm gonna take off my lapel mic and stick it next to the Dreamcast and once again here's audio of the original fan to compare one model I'd like to do to all cd-based consoles that support it is replace the cd-rom drive with an optical drive emulator this allows you to load your games on flash memory and do things like language translation region patches or even patch the games to run in certain resolutions as we talked about before also this would possibly extend the life of your console because in CD based consoles usually the first thing to go is the drive itself sure there are some with bad capacitors but even those can be replaced whereas eventually these cd-rom drives might not have any replacements available on top of that you have the convenience of putting multiple games on one card and have faster loading time luckily for the Dreamcast there are two optical drive emulators one of them is called the USB gd-rom drive and while this works well it requires you to cannibalize an existing dreamcast or Naomi's CD drive and in my opinion the point of these things is to make these consoles last longer not to cannibalize them from parts luckily though there's another solution out there called the GD mu that uses 100% original parts and runs off of an SD card on top of that there's also 3d print designs that can go into the console along with it to keep the original air flow so now let's walk through how to install the GD mu before installing the GD mu you need to make sure your dreamcast is a va1 model on ntsc versions you should be able to go by the number but I would open it up and double-check anyway just to make sure just in case somebody did a case swap or something the first thing you need to do is just unbolt the gd-rom drive and carefully lift it up from the tray now I have no idea how I lost the footage of me on bolting this but it really is as simple as unscrewing the three bolts marked with red arrows and then lift the entire drive assembly up and just note that it's anchored in by the connector where the yellow arrow is so just put a little pressure there now I always recommend that people get the 3d printed trays along with the GD mu both because we about them you could drop your SD card in and then would have to pick your Dreamcast apart to get it but also because it helps with air flow since the original gd-rom drive would cut off right here it would help with the airflow from the power supply right out the fan so I like to just line these connectors up and plug the G DM u in first make sure that's nice and solid and then I slide this underneath line it up with the mounting holes and then just bolt everything down now you'll want to install the other half of the 3d printed part just line it up so that the hole goes over this spot right here and it kinda just snaps into place there you go so I get the two screws installed I use the one that I had from before to bolt this down so this is pretty solid in I didn't have one long enough to go all the way through but this feels really tight everything's in this is still making the connection so I'm just going to go ahead and bolt that fan back in same thing so point down and just be careful of the 3d printed plastic piece the last thing we need to do is make an adjustment to the power supply see the G DMU uses much less power than the original gd-rom drive did so if we leave this voltage regulator alone then it'll just create tons of heat because there's not as much of a load on it and obviously more heat is never a good thing with electronic devices so you have two choices you could remove this yourself altogether using the same type of dishonouring done as we did before or you could put a resistor across it to add load and that way it won't it won't overheat now there's two issues with this first of all if you remove this it's going to remove a 12 volt line on the power board but to be honest I'm not really sure if any devices use that except for maybe the sixteen by nine switch in a scart cable which would really only matter if you're using a start 16 by 9 widescreen TV so if that's the case you know maybe you would have to do the resistor version but other than that I mean I think it's safer to just take it out altogether so now I'm just going to desolder that voltage regulator and I'm gonna try to get it on camera [Music] [Applause] and that should be it all right now I'm just going to unbolt it and hopefully it will fall right out [Music] there you go look at that now if you find a scenario in which you require this voltage regulator to be in one option is just to simply add a high wattage resistor to add a load on it you're gonna want at least a 1 watt resistor and you could just jam it right in so let me show you how to do that and see if I can get a close-up and there you go that's all you would need right now the resistor is between 12 volts and ground you could see it's jammed in the pins and it is a pretty solid connection just by leaving it in like that I mean doesn't really feel like it's going anywhere at all if you wanted to be cautious you could certainly add some solder but I think this is one of those rare moments that if you're modding your own console it should probably just be fine if you're doing this mod for somebody else especially somebody that doesn't understand that this thing could pop out definitely just add a little dab of solder in there or something I always like to hold on to the screw and the regulator it screws in and it doesn't hit the capacitor here so it's safe to just leave in just make sure it's tight so it doesn't back itself out and I just tape the regulator right here because in all honesty I mean I'll probably never use it but it's out of the way it fits perfect and who knows maybe one day I'll find that I need it and it'll just be right here so I could plug it back in okay all that's left to do is put the power supply back in and bolt everything up so I'm gonna make sure the power line is run underneath I'm going to slide in the plastic spacer because that's to protect from any arcing of the power supply and I just plug this right back in and then make sure it lines up both with the back make sure that none of the cables are pinched and make sure that all of the pins on the front are lined up so it's a little tricky because you're going to use your finger in your thumb on both sides all right there you go so everything's plugged in this is snapped back down the wire is free and it's not pinched at all probably see that in there a little better if we want it together you can just make sure that gets a little just a little bit more underneath and there we go so all we need to do is bolt the power supply back in all right and now we just need to reassemble it so you have to keep in mind that the plastic shroud for the airflow is back in that's the 3d printed design we added so I wanted to make sure that nothing was in its way so I have the fan cable run underneath this flex cable which should be fine because it's shielded and won't touch anything okay everything else over here and now we're just gonna drop it right on top it fits perfect on all edges all right let's bolt it back together [Music] alright now let's take a look at the GD mu so as you can see with the plastic shroud there's no way to drop your SD card in there it does it'll fall right in and there's also slot if you want to keep multiple SD cards I think that's pretty neat and to insert it you just put it flap a little hard to do it upside down into the camera but much easier in person and there you go everything's right there there's the button for the GD mu the shroud protects everything so this is keeps the air flow going around on this side so let's power this thing up so at this point all you have to do is just load up the files from the GD mu website right onto an SD card and then create different directories underneath it that are numbered for each individual game but that's pretty much it there's nothing else you need to worry about there's no crazy installation there's just dumping some files on the root and it even boots directly to the menu system so you don't even need to launch it upon first boot but here's how it works basically go right into the menu I leave region freon and force VGA on then for in game reset I leave that on as well but I don't usually use that too often and I turn off the boot intro and the Sega license just to save a few seconds but there might be a few games that require it so if you ever have issues just turn those back on and hit save settings and then that's pretty much it just launch whatever game you want and I've generally found it to launch a little bit faster than using discs I'm not sure if that's consistent across the board but I'm certainly happy with it and if nothing else I really really appreciate the convenience of having everything on an SD card rather than worried about game patching and all that other stuff if for whatever reason you insist on using original discs so the optical drive emulator solutions aren't for you you could look into a bios mod that would allow you to boot disks from all regions on whichever region Dreamcast you have now I'm not too into those mods because they're kind of complicated and you could still get Dreamcast's pretty cheap so it's my opinion that if you have let's say a full pal collection but you also want to play a lot of Japanese games maybe just buy a japanese dreamcast other than that the optical drive emulator solutions will support everything else that a bios mod would support including booting from different languages and of course all of the backup players that i just spoke about before I go there's one last thing I want to mention earlier I talked about an upcoming episode that's gonna highlight the best ways to play dreamcast on a flat screen monitor but I wanted to give everybody a sneak peek of what in my opinion is the best option now unfortunately it requires a mod it's not going to be any kind of plug-and-play solution but I asked one of the creators of the mod to come and talk to me and just give a little quick snippet of what to expect in coming soon will be a Dreamcast digital two digital HDMI solution which offers zero lag and up to 960 P and a 1080p frame this will be available at the end of the year more than likely end of November for more information please go to these websites well that does it for this time I'd like to give a special thanks to everybody that helped out with this episode and I always appreciate people's feedback and of course I have to thank my patreon supporters because without you none of these videos would happen if you like this video please consider subscribing to my channel and also check out my weekly podcast that keeps everybody in the loop of everything that's going on in the retro gaming world also this channel has interviews with some of the behind-the-scenes developers as well as product reviews and tips and tricks videos like this I hope to see all of you again soon

Channel: RetroRGB

Views: 318,606

Rating: 4.8345771 out of 5

Keywords: sega dreamcast, skies of arcadia, sega dreamcast review, sega dreamcast controller, gdemu, retro gaming, third strike, 240p, dreamcast

Id: eOP3ZDUX7Y8

Length: 32min 31sec (1951 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 30 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/mrneo240]

I think it's recent indie game

[u/Dakem94]

Nothing new. TBH he miss the DreamPSU.
Anyway, it's stupid think the USB-GDRom "cannibalize" some "real hardware". The USB-GDRom use "real" chip, like the one on a true Dreamcast. If you wanna play on something that use "new hardware" go and play on emulators. They are 100% "Dreamcast Save".
If dr.mnemo use not working GDRom optical drive, what's the problem?
And there is 3d-printed part for the USB-GDRom too and the USB-GDRom work with the VA0 and VA2. (GDEmu don't work with that.)
So... MMMH. Not the best guy to do a rewiews on "tips" and "mod" for the DC.

[u/stockcar1515]

What's the name of the game that's playing on the TV at the 2:00 mark??

[u/JohnBooty]

I really appreciated this video. Learned some things, and it's a nice introduction to the GDROM and fan mods.

[u/GENlight]

hello im brand new to this. can i conect my dream cast online with only a dream cast, dell insperation 9400, ethernet cord and phone cord?