VMµ - RetroPie Gaming Handheld Inside a Sega Dreamcast VMU

hey guys I wanted to show you something that I've been working on and if you follow me on Instagram then you've probably already seen this one of my all-time favorite game consoles is the Sega Dreamcast and if you're not too familiar with it one of the more unique features of the Dreamcast is this guy this is the visual memory unit or via mute and it's basically just a memory card with a screen and some buttons kind of looks like a tiny Gameboy and it would slide into the controller like this and it has this window here so that you could still see the screen while you're playing the game some games would display information like how much health or ammo you have left some games even have little mini games that you could download to the vmu and play on their own you could even connect two of them together like this and share save data with your friends that way so yeah one of the more interesting and ahead of its time ideas that Sega had with the Dreamcast and I say ahead of its time because as cool as the idea was the technology in 1998 just wasn't quite there to make these things really compelling as a portable gaming device which made it more of a novelty at best so you can probably see where this is headed I wanted to see if I could fit a Raspberry Pi in here and turn it into what I always wanted it to be growing up this has been on my to-do list for like a year and a half at this point so even though I've seen a couple people beat me to it on the forums in the last few months I still wanted to do my own and here it is I've got a Raspberry Pi 0 W in here so it has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth along with about a one and a half inch screen got a charger with a micro USB port on the side for charging it's got a 500 milliamp hour battery in it so that should last between an hour and a half and two hours or so and on the bottom you have access to the SD card as well as a power switch and yeah it's kind of limited in how many buttons it has you can play a lot more games than you might think you can play any game boy or Game Boy Color game in the original Nintendo game a lot of Sega Genesis games and since I added L&R buttons on the back you can actually play a lot of game Boy Advance games as well and since I actually ported a lot of Super NES games to the Game Boy Advance those were brought over with an a/b LR button set up in mind so that means you can also play a lot of Super NES games too like Super Mario World and a lot of the classic Final Fantasy games now getting everything to fit inside here on my build was a huge pain in the butt and the biggest reason for that is because I really really wanted to keep the connector on the top and the reason I wanted to do that is that I also modified a controller I've got an Arduino inside of here as well as a battery charger I've got a two thousand milliamp hour battery inside of this memory card on the bottom I've got a power switch and micro USB port I also added a select button since the controller doesn't have one so when I put it inside here and turn it on the image on the screen rotates the controller charges it up and there should be enough charge in here to charge the vmu up between three and four times and while it's in here you can use the full set of controls to play more comfortably and play games that you wouldn't be able to otherwise like Super NES games and yeah playing games on such a big controller with such a tiny screen looks a little absurd but that's part of why I love it so much and I know this might be a little disappointing to some people but I'm not gonna be doing as in-depth of a guide as I have with previous projects and there's a couple of reasons for that first I really don't think that there's gonna be a lot of people who are gonna want to put one together the way that I do it really was kind of a pain has kind of messy on the inside but the good news and the other reason is that kite from the pseudo-mod forums you may know him from his super all-in-one board that he did for the gameboy 0 project he's working on some custom parts for this that'll make putting it together much much easier I'd say about at the same difficulty level as the minty pad so if all you care about is the end result and you can be a little bit patient then keep an eye on the forums and those should be available relatively soon but if you just really want to put one together right now then keep watching I did take some video and some pictures while I was putting this together and put together sort of a bill blog slash high-level tutorial that'll hopefully give you enough to go on if you want to do it yourself alright so taking it apart it's pretty simple on the inside the only things that we care about saving are the connector on the top as well as the bottom portion of the board where the button traces are the screen just pops right off and you can remove the connector with a bit of hot air could probably do it with the soldering iron as well and then we also need to remove the chip that sits behind the screen it comes off pretty easily with some hot air as well and fun fact the codename of the chip in the vmu is potato get it potato chip so once you have that removed there's a cluster of pins along the bottom row on the right side here and those all lead to the button traces so you can use a dremel or something to cut it just above that row of pins and once you do that you can use a multimeter to determine which pin goes to which button all have them listed as well in the blog post it's pretty challenging as far as soldering goes one thing that you can do to make it a little bit easier is to alternate which direction you have the wires facing that will give you a little bit more breathing room to fit each wire in there in order to fit the Raspberry Pi inside the case we're gonna need to remove both USB ports the HDMI port as well as the camera connector this is probably the hardest part of the whole project and a hotter rework station is much a necessity for doing this the trick for getting them to come off easily is actually adding some more solder preferably rosin core solder and getting it to kind of flow underneath there it actually makes it easier to heat it up and get it off and it'll take several minutes of heat on each port to get it to lift off and I forgot to hit record but you can remove the camera connector pretty easily using the soldering iron it kind of just winds up falling apart it's really fragile but we don't need it anyway so that doesn't really matter this is what it should look like when you're done and you can see it's quite a bit thinner than it was before now the screen I used is a really cheap 1.4 4-inch SPI display you can find them for a few bucks on eBay and the first thing that you need to do is remove the screen from the PCB you have to be really careful doing this and make sure you kind of cut towards the PCB so that you don't cut anything on the bottom of the screen itself once you've cut through all the tape that's holding it to the PCB you need to remove the actual ribbon connector from the PCB this might be easier with some hot air but I didn't want to risk damaging the ribbon cable or the screen so the trick here is just to not pull very hard don't put a lot of force on it or you will tear the ribbon cable and then just kind of go back and forth with the tip of your soldering iron and it should come loose pretty easily after you do that then you can use your multimeter to figure out which pin on the ribbon cable it goes to which pin on the PCB and check the blog posts all have listed for my screen anyway which pin goes to which GPIO pin on the Raspberry Pi so now you can go ahead and connect some wires to each pin that you need on the screen itself again I haven't damaged any screens doing it this way and I've done several of them but just be careful with that ribbon cable and you can see here I wound up removing one of the wires at the top and bridging a couple of the pins because I realized that those pins that I bridged we're going to be going to the same place anyway now for the case you're gonna need to pull out your Dremel and cut some of the insides out and you need to make sure that you cut down to about where I'm pointing here so that the whole screen can fit inside there and to make it easier to I designed and print it out this part this will do a couple of things it'll line up the screen for you and it'll also give you a couple of nice places to put your battery charger as well as your soundboard so you can just place your screen in there and glue that part in place and then here you can see what it looks like after you put the battery charger and the soundboard in there as well which by the way I'm using an I squared s sound module for this it sounds great but it doesn't take up a USB port and it's incredibly loud too and you'll notice I use the Adafruit micro lipo for this and the reason I didn't use the cheaper alternative board that I used on the last minty pie is because the batteries that we're using is 500 milliamps and that cheaper board charges at one amp and that's not recommended to charge it at a higher rate than the capacity of the battery and then you're also going to need to cut out quite a bit in the back side of the case so that you can fit the battery and the speaker and the L&R buggies and you can see the speaker sits where the original one did and I've got the L&R buttons on either side of it I'm actually using the start and select buttons from a set of DS Lite buttons to push those tactile switches so they poke out a little bit further on the back and then the actual Raspberry Pi just kind of gets sandwiched there between the two halves this battery door I've also cut with a dremel and made it nice and thin and smooth and then it's just glued into place there now I didn't do a very good job of taking video while I was working on the controller but here's what I have there's a chip on one side of the controller PCB I went ahead and removed that and then I figured out which pin goes to which button and then by supplying power to one of these pins as well we can tap in to the analog controls for the analog stick and the L&R buttons the way that those work on this controller are pretty cool we've got these little Hall effect sensors along with magnets and the L&R triggers and in the analog stick itself to kind of sense where those magnets are so anyway by applying power to the right pin where the chip was we can read the voltage from the corresponding pins and figure out where they are that way we've got everything connected to a cheap spark fund pro micro clone and then I've got the USB pins on that connected to some of the pins on the vmu connector so when you plug it in it's like you're plugging in that USB device as well underneath the PCB I've got a power boost pretty standard setup I've got the battery pins on that connected to the corresponding pins on the battery memory card that I made so it will charge that up and then I've got the five volt output connected to both the pro micro as well as a couple pins on the vmu connector so that it'll charge it up when you plug it in and then here's the inside of the memory card battery really simple I just got a jst connector wired up to a couple of the pins and since this memory card isn't attached permanently to the controller I could actually put more of these together if I wanted so that I could change out the battery well I think that about does it if you made it this far then thanks for watching guys and if you want to see what I'm doing in between videos be sure to follow me on Instagram I post there pretty regularly and my goal for this year is to post a lot more videos of all kinds of different projects I know last year was kind of dominated by the minty pod so keep an eye out for that and I'll see you guys next time

Channel: wermy

Views: 459,727

Keywords: sega, gaming, gamer, sudomod, wermy, retro gaming, emulation, electronics, raspberry pi

Id: gNoBQ5nTeuk

Length: 11min 27sec (687 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 28 2018