Some progress, but it seems to be quite unpredictable. I’ve ordered another SD card and a different DreamShell adapter. We’ll see if that works any better in an upcoming video.
Sega Dreamcast
Received my XRGB-mini Framemeister today and had no cable to connect it… So I had to hack up some other random cable I had and… it worked, switched a bunch of pins around and it gave me lovely RGB video. I could not believe how clear the video was. I’ll do some more video later in the week. Below are some photos of the connector before changing around all the leads.
I’ve since purchased a cable that runs from the XRGB-mini through to EuroSCART. From there I’ll be able to use EuroSCART cables running from everything for RGB. I still need to find a suitable switcher to go between the sources. Mega Drive, Saturn and Dreamcast. Although reports have it that the Dreamcast is better at VGA (480p) vs SCART (480i). I guess whether I care much for VGA will be decided in the future when I get the SCART cables for everything.
As a side note, I’ve fallen in love with SCART connectors. They are so easy to reconfigure and do so much much than our composite cables over here in Australia.
Below is the Dreamcast the BIOS was dumped from and the chip it was beamed down through. I’d used httpd-ack-20080711.zip and XDP.rar to get me my BIOS – MPR-21871.zip. Turns out it is version 1.01c and has a misspelling of disco or something. Overly it wasn’t too exciting, but great to be able to dump the BIOS from my own Dreamcast. Last time I even tried to do that would have been about a decade ago. Glad to see it worked much easier this time than previously.
Furthermore I also discovered you can easily generate CRCs using terminal on Mac OS. Simply type crc32 and then the path / filename. Just like that the CRC is generated right there for you, free of charge.
Went ahead and replaced the shell on my most discoloured Dreamcast. It was very yellowed on the underside of the console. The solution? Not Retr0bright but instead a replacement smokey grey case. Perfect to hide the yellowing of the original case. Be sure to check out the above video and the photo gallery.
Today I just couldn’t help myself. Dug into the VA0 PAL Dreamcast and took some photos of the internals. Interestingly it is definitely a VA0 board. There is no denying that. I wonder what the difference is between it and say a Japanese VA0 or a US VA0 though. And how many PAL VA0 units are in the wild today?
