Tag: ode

#oneaday Day 90: Dream modding

The Dreamcast is a notoriously unreliable and temperamental console, particularly now the poor old thing is getting on a bit in years, so I’ve been meaning to look into optical drive emulators (ODEs) for a while, as I mentioned here.

Well, today I finally got together all the bits for one of these possible ODE solutions, known as GDEMU. This included the GDEMU board itself along with a mounting kit that plugs the gap left behind when you remove the Dreamcast’s original GD-ROM drive, and also allows easy access to the “disc change” button for multi-disc titles. (It also supposedly helps with airflow; having a honking great hole inside the Dreamcast supposedly isn’t great for that.)

I’d looked up instructions on how to fit a GDEMU and for the most part it seemed like a very simple job. I normally hand over anything that requires delicate use of tools to my wife as she’s much less cack-handed (and much more handy) than I am, but this looked like something I thought I could probably do myself. So I decided to be brave and to do it myself.

And you know what? It was easy. There were just a few steps to the process that went roughly as follows:

  • Remove three screws from the bottom of the Dreamcast
  • Remove the modem (it just pops out)
  • Remove the screw that is revealed when you remove the modem
  • Pop off the top of the Dreamcast
  • Remove three screws holding the GD-ROM drive in place
  • Remove the GD-ROM drive (it’s just plugged directly into a connector that sticks out from the bottom of the casing)
  • Screw the mounting kit to the GDEMU board (I forgot to do this, but getting the board back out to do it was easy… I then also forgot to put the button for the disc change in the mounting kit, but, again, it was easy enough to undo the work and correct the mistake)
  • Stick the GDEMU board into the socket the GD-ROM drive went in
  • Screw the GDEMU board into the Dreamcast case where the GD-ROM drive used to be
  • Put the case back together
  • Put the four screws in the base back in
  • Put the modem back in
  • Done!

Most places online also recommended putting some resistors in the power supply between the 12V pin and one of the three Ground pins. This is apparently because without the original GD-ROM drive drawing from the 12V… whatever it is, the inside can get a lot hotter than it would do normally, but this can be avoided with the resistors, which basically trick the power supply into thinking the GD-ROM drive is still drawing power. I don’t entirely understand everything about it, but I understood what I had to do, which was twist the wires on three resistors together, then poke one end in the hole with the 12V pin, and the other end in the hole with one of the ground pins.

This was the one part of the procedure I really wasn’t sure about. I haven’t done any sort of fiddling with electronic components before (outside of maybe a term’s work on very simple circuits — mostly logic gates — in secondary school Design and Technology and Science classes) so I was a bit nervous I’d poke something in the wrong hole and make things go bang. I was reassured by some people who take apart old computers and consoles all the time that it was very unlikely putting a few resistors in would make anything go bang, but I was still a bit concerned the resistors might not stay where they were supposed to be or would short-circuit something.

It took a few attempts to get it done to my satisfaction, but eventually I got the resistors in the right place and was satisfied that they were as secure as they were going to be without getting hot glue involved, and I put the whole shebang back together.

And, believe it or not, when I booted it up, it all worked first time! I was expecting something to go wrong somewhere, but no — everything went very smoothly, and I now have a Dreamcast that has a nice selection of games built right into it. No worrying about the drive failing mid-game and causing a reboot to the system menu; no worrying about discs not reading properly; no worrying about region, either.

I’m very happy with how things went, and I’m looking forward to using my Dreamcast a lot more now it’s been “revitalised” like this. It also encourages me to look into similar solutions for other consoles — particularly the Saturn. I have a Saturn that I acquired at some point (but no power supply, AV cables or controllers… or indeed games) that it would probably be fun to get loaded up with games in the same way. So I’ll probably do that at some point.

Long term I’d like to get all my classic systems hooked up with a solution like this, such as the Everdrive range for cart-based systems. As fun as it is to collect for old consoles, I’ve been burned just a few times too many by cartridges that don’t work — I have two copies of Desert Strike for SNES that don’t work in the exact same way, for example — plus I don’t really have a lot of room left for collecting, either.

There’s still a certain magic about playing games on classic hardware — and part of that, admittedly, is using original media; the clunk of the cartridge slot on consoles like the SNES in particular is a fun part of the experience. But as many of these old games are starting to run into reliability issues by virtue of their age, it’s great that we have alternative solutions that allow us to still enjoy the consoles themselves, even if the media is past its best. And for everything else, we have emulation and modern, officially licensed solutions like the Evercade.

Now maybe time for a bit of Dreamcast before bedtime, I say.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 82: Ode to ODE

I’ve bought an ODE for my Sega Dreamcast. For the unfamiliar, an ODE is an Optical Drive Emulator: a replacement for ageing optical disc drives that instead loads disc images directly from some sort of flash storage — usually an SD card of some description.

I’ve been meaning to do something like this for a while, but the seemingly prohibitive cost of doing so was putting me off a bit. But it turns out I was looking at the absolute most expensive possible way of doing it, known as a “MODE” device. This is apparently a nice bit of kit, but a much more affordable means of doing almost exactly the same thing is known as a GDEMU.

I’m generally hesitant to go for console modifications because I’m not at all confident with my own skills at taking things apart, putting things that weren’t originally supposed to be there inside, then putting it all back together again — and the instructions for doing so are usually put together by the sort of person who installs Linux for fun. But the Dreamcast GDEMU operation looks so simple I’m pretty sure even I can do it. You unscrew the case, unscrew the disc drive assembly, take the disc drive out and then plug the GDEMU directly into the same socket the disc drive was in. And that appears to be it — aside from a slightly scary-sounding suggestion that you stick some resistors in one of the bits of the power supply to help prevent overheating since the disc drive is no longer using that part of the power supply.

The way I see it is this: my Dreamcast is already a battered old thing that likes to reboot Sega Rally while I’m in the middle of playing it, and I’m pretty sure that the disc drive is to blame for all the woes I have with it. So if you take that out of the equation and replace it with something solid-state, then it will become much more enjoyable to use, and thus I will probably be more likely to use it on a more regular basis. If it all goes wrong, I’m left with a Dreamcast that didn’t work all that well in the first place, so no biggie. And if it does work, I have a revitalised machine that will hopefully be a lot of fun to use.

The reason I’m considering this at all in the first place is because although Dreamcast emulation is in quite a good place, it’s nowhere near as “near-perfect” as emulation for the classic cart-based systems and the PlayStation at this point. There are just enough little graphical glitches and considerations with Dreamcast emulation to make me want to take this approach with real hardware; I’m sure that will change with time, but for now, I think it’s going to be a more practical, enjoyable option.

The Dreamcast is a delightful system with a small but well-formed library filled with some great arcade-style games. It’s probably the last console where classic arcade-style games was a priority of the library — and while that probably contributed to its downfall as more ambitious, more hefty games took hold of the public’s imagination on other platforms, it makes the Dreamcast a very appealing prospect today. An ideal system for when you don’t want to get involved in anything too deep, but you still want to play a game.

So I’m looking forward to giving all this nonsense a go. It’ll be a while before all the parts I need arrive, but I’ll give a full report when they do.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.