I built a MODERN Dreamcast...

In the fall of 1999 Sega of America's newly appointed CEO Peter Moore and myself shared the same side of a bet going into the busiest shopping season of the year. And fresh off the commercial failure of the Sega Saturn the entire Sega corporation bet big on the launch of the Dreamcast. Likewise, I did too well. While my friends were saving for GameCubes and PS2s. I decided to bet nearly 100% of my net worth on the Dreamcast, and it was glorious. The graphics. Sonic the Hedgehog in full 3D. The c

ontroller with a weird screen in it. That's also kind of a game boy. Even Bill Gates gave it the old thumbs up. Alas, it wasn't meant to be hampered by poor sales and a shaky launch. The Dreamcast was all but dead by the end of the year 2000, and shortly after that Sega announced that they just weren't even going to make hardware anymore, making this console the last breaths of a dying era. Which is a shame because this is actually a great system with some really cool games on it. The problem is

it's starting to show its age and it's getting harder to enjoy. So today we're going to take this Sega Dreamcast and modernize it for 2024. Let's get into it. Sourcing the right Dreamcast was a key part of this project. This is a Dreamcast version one, which counterintuitively is actually the second hardware revision. These are the easiest to modify and many mods will only work with this version of the hardware. Once I had the system disassembled, I started stripping away all the parts that we

aren't going to need anymore. Like the fan, the PSU, and yes, even the disc drive. But don't worry, I've got some really fun stuff to replace them with. The only thing that we're going to be removing permanently is the network adapter. Since realistically, I know that I won't be playing this thing online. However, it is still possible to play the Dreamcast online in 2024, which is kind of cool. At its heart, the Dreamcast is actually a remarkably small console, which I plan on taking advantage o

f later. But first, I still had some work to do removing the integrated RF Shield and heat spreader presented our first opportunity to upgrade that system. I removed the original, tried out thermal pads, thoroughly, cleaned the motherboard with isopropyl alcohol and then took a second to admire the hardware that had generated so many childhood memories. Then I cut some high performance replacement thermal packs. These will keep the chips cooler and ensure that they live a nice long life. But tha

t wasn't enough for me. So next, it was time to replace the stock fan with a higher performance fan from Noctua. It's bigger so it'll move more air while simultaneously generating less noise. It's your classic win win scenario. Unfortunately, installing it was going to be a bit of a challenge. You can't just splice all the factory connector and then plug it into the Dreamcast. If you do, the system won't properly detect the fans RPMs and will shut itself down after 10 seconds or so to keep itsel

f from overheating. So in order to prevent that, you also have to solder a 10K resistor between the positive wire and this yellow wire that reports the RPMs back to the Dreamcast. So now that we've got the fan upgraded, our next mod is also going to dovetail into this theme of making the system run cooler, but it's also going to make the Dreamcast more convenient to use. This is the stock PSU from the Dreamcast, and as you can see, it's quite large. Its prone to failing with age and it also dump

s a ton of heat inside the Dreamcast as it converts AC to DC power. It's also not really compatible with some of the other ones that we're going to be doing later. So yeah, we're going to say goodbye to that tonight. And now let me show you what we are going to be replacing it with. This is the dream PSU and it outsources the conversion of AC power to a wall adapter. Basically, you give it 12 volts of DC power via a barrel plug and it handles the rest from there. But I thought that I could make

it even better. The first thing I did was hardwire the Dreamcast Power switch directly to it in a normal Dreamcast. There's plenty of room for that big connector, but I'm not making a normal Dreamcast. Next, I replaced the original barrel plug with a USB power delivery trigger board. I configured it to deliver 12 volts of power by bridging these two contacts. And now I can power my Dreamcast with all the USB power delivery adapters that I already have scattered around the house. The only catch i

s that not every adapter will supply 12 volts because, well, frankly, the power delivery spec is a complete mess. So what I'm going to do is put some links to adapters that I know will go down in the video description along with links to all the other tools and materials I've used throughout this project. Finally, I fixed the design flaw that at this point affects every single Dreamcast. This is the CMOS battery and eventually, like all batteries, it dies. Sega, in their infinite wisdom, decided

to solder it permanently to the PCB. This leaves the Dreamcast incapable of remembering any settings once you power it down. So I replaced it with this holder that takes a standard replaceable watch battery. And now my Dreamcast will stop asking me for the date and time every time that I turn it on. All the mods we've done up to this point have been relatively easy to do, but this next one is where we stray into the more advanced side of things. I want to add an HDMI port to this Dreamcast beca

use originally it was limited to just RF, RCA and VGA outputs. Not only will this make the Dreamcast easier to use with water displays such as the one I have behind me here, but it should also provide a serious upgrade in terms of graphics. Installing it is going to be a bit tricky, but luckily I found a tool that makes it a lot easier. Enter my digital microscope. It's capable of over 1000 times magnification, which is going to be important because in order to add an HDMI port, we need to steal

the digital audio and digital video signals from very specific contacts on the motherboards. And those contacts are really small. But don't worry, it's honestly easier than you might think. The first step was lowering in the specially designed ribbon cable and then tacking it in place with a bit of tape with a lot of flux and some careful soldering. I was able to connect it to those aforementioned contacts. Soldering at this scale isn't so much a matter of robot precise movements as it is const

antly working the solder over and over again until you get the results that you're looking for and being able to clearly see what you're doing and what the solder is doing makes that a lot easier. And also just use a ton of flux. It'll help the solder flow more easily and stick to your contacts better. Back in the macro world, I made some quick modifications to the RF shielding and routed those stolen video and audio signals back to the brains of the operation. This is the DC Digital and it's jo

b is to reconfigure those signals so that they can be output via HDMI. This is all done without introducing any additional latency or losing any quality. And as we will explore later, it can also introduce a whole suite of graphical upgrades. So at this point I could just take all of these parts and cram them back inside of the original case and call it a life. But what would be the fun in that? Instead, I think I would like to redesign the case from the ground up in order to customize it and sl

im it down. Everything we've done so far has been laying the foundation for this part of the project because I removed so many components from the Dreamcast. I now have the opportunity to create something that history stole from us A Dreamcast Slim. I started by carefully measuring the locations of all the mounting points, ports and over the course of many iterations, designed a 3D model for a new case. With my design finalized, I fired up my 3D printer and printed everything in a carbon fiber r

einforced PLA. Not only is this plastic quite strong, but it's also very rigid, which will make some of the later steps a lot easier because there's a big problem with 3D printed parts, which we're going to fix over the shop. But first, let me tell you about the sponsor of today's video: DraftKings With over 300 real money games, it's easy to see why DraftKings is America's number one online casino. If you're over 21 and looking for an easy way to have some fun without leaving the house, they’ve

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ys tell if something has been 3D printed? Well, what if I told you that there's a way that you can fix that because of the way 3D printers work, where they're just laying down layer after layer of plastic, you end up with a number of different visual artifacts. The most obvious one is horizontal lines. But then you also have cross-hatching in areas of sparse infill and a number of other small things that just let you know at a glance that, yeah, this is a 3D printed part. You can tell it because

the way it is. So the next thing I want to do in this project is some post-processing that is going to turn a part like this into something that looks like it may as well come out of an injection mold. The first step in our post-processing journey is everybody's favorite activity sanding, but sanding plastic is not like sanding wood. First, I'd avoid using any power. sanders they can generate a lot of heat, and it's surprisingly easy to melt your plastic. **** Ask me how I know. I'd also invest

in some soft sanding sponges so that you can match the contours of your 3D prints. And then finally, unlike wood, you really need to give your parts a very rough sanding with, at most 120 grit sandpaper. You're just trying to knock down the high points and smooth out any large imperfections because in the next step, I'm going to borrow a product from the automotive world. This is two in one filler primer. It's essentially a very thick sandable primer that you can spray on to fill in all the mic

ro valleys on the surface of your 3D print. I applied three or four light coats to build up a good solid base and then gave the whole thing another thorough sanding. Then it's just rinse and repeat until you get your desired results. So after a lot of sanding and a lot of coats, we finally have a nice, smooth Dreamcast case. So now we are ready to put the final layer on it. And here is where the project went a bit off the rails for me. I ended up trying several different finishes. I started with

copper, then I tried Gloss Black, which turned out to be a fingerprint and scratch magnet. And eventually what I settled on was matte black because it reminded me of the limited edition Sega Sports Dreamcasts. I sprayed on three coats and sanded between each one with a very fine sandpaper and I think the final results look awesome. So no doubt some of you have noticed that there are some pretty large gaps in my 3D printed parts and that's because I wanted to leave some space for some accent pan

els. You guys know me. I cannot resist adding some wood to these retro game consoles, so I have my shapes loaded up here on the computer and we are going to cut them on the CNC while we wait for that paint to dry here I was making three main components. The first is a top cover that will serve as the face of the console, and we're going to do a little bit more work on it in a second. But first I had to cut two grilles that will serve as the exhaust and intake vents. All three of these I cut with

a normal straight edge bit. However, in order to do the next step, I had to switch to my V carve bit because that bit allows me to carve at a much higher resolution using its tapered sides. I was able to capture all the fine detail in that iconic Dreamcast logo. After a bit of sanding, I applied an oil rub finish to both seal the wood and to bring out its natural color. And here's a pro tip if you don't want your wood to warp or cup on you, it's always a good idea to apply your finish to both s

ides of the wood at the same time. Now that might sound funny considering though to sand off this finish and do it all over again, but trust me, it's all part of the plan. Before we talk about that, though, let's talk about some fun Dreamcast trivia. Just like in my PlayStation two video, I want to add a little bit of color back into this logo, but I've got myself a little bit of a conundrum. You see, Depending on where you grew up in the world, you might have a vastly different conception of wh

at the Dreamcast logo looks like Here in North America. It looks like this, but then in Europe it looked like this, and then in Japan it looked like this. So I've actually already made my choice as to what I want to do. But I'm sure no matter what I chose, it was going to be at least a little bit controversial, starting with a part that we can all agree on and mixed up a little bit of black metallic epoxy and filled out the Dreamcast typeface. Then in keeping with my Sega sports theme, I opted f

or a blue European spiral as you can see, it was pretty hard to avoid overfilling the engravings, and that's why I applied the finish before the epoxy. By sealing the pores of the wood you prevent the epoxy from bleeding into the grain, which makes removing all of that excess as easy as a quick sand and then another oil rub down. With all of that taken care of, I headed back home where another cool mod for the Dreamcast had just arrived in the mail. So you remember earlier how I removed this dis

k drive and then said we wouldn't be needing anymore? Well, that is because we are going to be replacing it with this, a GDEMu. And essentially what this does is replace your entire GD-Rom drive with an SD card and I can get my entire game collection onto a single SD card. So we'll just plug this right in here. And then this plugs into the same port that the GD-Rom drive used to plug into. In addition to adding convenience, it also makes load times quicker, decreases power usage, forces games to

run in a progressive scan mode and gives you a cool little launcher screen, which I will show you very shortly. Now that we've got that cleared up, let's install everything into our brand new case and here's where we put my 3D modeling skills to the test. First, I glued my wood panels in place using CA glue, which I bounds really well to both wood and 3D printed plastic. Plus it sets super quickly to keep the Dreamcast from sliding around and to provide a little bit of room for air circulation

under the console. I added these adhesive rubber feet and then it was time for some fun with magnets. I wanted to make the internals easy to access and service, so I opted for a completely tooless case design. This meant positioning a pair of magnets in all four corners and gives the lid a super satisfying thunk. The Noctua fan that we modified earlier screws in here and then the motherboard gets lowered into position and screwed in place as well because I remapped all the original mounting poin

ts into my new case. This part was a breeze. However, since there was no factory usb-c port, I had to create this little bracket that suspends it directly above the AV ports. A little bit of glue keeps it in place. And then just to be safe, I put a layer of insulating kapton tape over the exposed contacts. The daughter board for the controller ports goes here, the power switch goes here and the Wi-Fi antenna goes here. And then in order to keep the GDEMU from sagging, I designed this little supp

ort stage and screwed it in place. The last piece of the puzzle was the power switch extender, which slots into position and then pokes out through the top lid with the machine all buttoned up before we put it up and start testing it out. I have one last thing that I want to add to this project. Just like with my Nintendo 64 and my PS2, I want to give this console a wireless controller so that I don't have to deal with cords all the time. But there is a problem. See, there's a lot of adapters ou

t there that will let you use a Bluetooth controller with the Dreamcast, but then you lose support for the all important VMU. So I actually had to go on a preorder list for this, but I managed to get my hands on a Striker DC, which is made by the same company as the Brawler 64. This promises to be the ultimate wireless Dreamcast controller. So let's crack it open, see if it lives up to the hype. All right, so initial impressions are quite good. The face buttons are very clicky. The stick here is

a hall effect stick. So it's going to have great reliability and it also feels really nice. And then the d-pad is just nice and clicky as well. I like that. It's got a turbo button usb-c charging. You get a pairing button there and then oddly enough, you get shoulder triggers and shoulder buttons. So what the boot up the Dreamcast to see how those work. But first a mystery, because obviously looking at this thing, there's nowhere to put the VMU right. So let me show you what you do with that. T

his is the view dock. So basically the way it works is you plug your v IMU in there and then you plug this into the front of your Dreamcast, and then this acts as the transmitter receiver for the wireless controller and keeps your view connected to the system. Overall, I am very impressed with the striker. DC The only downside to it is that it doesn't come in a black color to match my console. But you know, maybe retro fighters can take care of that in a future revision. All right, let's set thi

s thing up and see how she plays. So right off the bat, we are greeted with the new open menu system. And this is a feature of the GDEMU. Here you can select any of the games that you have loaded onto your SD card. And as you can see, you get the cover art as well as a little blurb about each game, which is kind of cool. Now, if you'll permit me to take a trip down memory lane, I would like to load up Sonic Adventure because that was my favorite game back in the day. They did such a good job of

capturing the sense of speed in this game, even though I think it's only running at 30 FPS, it feels fast and fluid. look at that lens flare. That would have been very impressive back in 1999. yeah, here it is. I remember thinking that this scene was photo realistic of the day. I was like, There is no way the graphics are ever going to get better than this in this moment, which is laughable in retrospect, but that's how I legitimately felt at the time. So right away you can see that the graphics

are incredibly sharp and that's thanks to the DC Digital. If you remember the retro gem from my PS2 video, this chip is nearly identical in terms of functionality in the menus here we can scale the resolution all the way from 480p right up to 1440p Unlike with the PS2, we don't really have much use for the various de-interlacing algorithms as there only a handful of Dreamcast games that don't support progressive output. You can also play around with the aspect ratios, magnification, add fake sk

in lines and a whole slew of other features. But I want to show you one of my favorite features the ability to inject HDR into your image by toggling this switch right here. We now get brighter brights, deeper blacks and more vivid colors. Assuming that is that your display supports HDR. Now any time you take a fairly low resolution image and upscale it this much, you're bound to end up with some pretty bad aliasing. Thankfully, the DC Digital has a built in smoothing layer on it, which kind of

acts like a layer of anti-aliasing and to my eye it actually looks quite a bit more aggressive than what I was getting up to. Putting all of that together, Let's compare what the original RC would look like and I think you can see the differences are pretty night and day. This is a serious upgrade to the graphical power of Dreamcast and I was going to leave it there, but then I thought, Hey, wait a minute, they make cheap Dreamcast HDMI cables that are supposed to do a lot of the same stuff but

for a fraction of the price. So is the DC Digital worth the complex installation and the higher price tag? So let's compare them and find out. Okay. So yeah, the first thing I'm noticing is that this image isn't nearly as sharp. And also there's a lot more aliasing artifacts, and that's because now you're relying on your TV to do the upscaling and TVs have to be optimized for a wide variety of different content types, whereas the DC Digital uses algorithms that are specifically designed for gami

ng. The colors also aren't nearly as nice because you're losing your HDR support as well as that smoothing layer. Plus you're losing all the granular control over things like aspect ratio that you get with the DC Digital. For me, I think the DC visual is worth it, but if you're on a tighter budget, one of these cheap HDMI cables will definitely still get the job done. Thermally, the system seems to be running nice and cool with its new cooling system, except for this one chip on the PSU. So I ad

ded this little copper heatsink to it and that seemed to drop the temperature into a more comfortable range. And this controller man, I really like this controller maybe even more than the original. The rumble functionality on It's great. Feels good in the hand. The only real downside to using it is now the screen on the VMU is way over here next to the console. So you can't really see it unless you're sitting right next to the Dreamcast. and turns out that the trigger buttons and the shoulder b

uttons do the exact same thing. So it's just whichever you prefer to use. I also crunched the numbers and my new Dreamcast is approximately 30% smaller than the original. So yeah, that is my Dreamcast Pro or Dreamcast Slim, whatever you want to call it. And I am very happy with how it turned out. But let's talk about how I could have done it even better in the postmortem analysis. Now, I'm not normally an RGB guy, but I do think some interior lighting inside the case would have looked really coo

l, especially if it illuminated the logo on the top of the Dreamcast and the cool thing is there is actually an extra 12 volt and five volt header on the PSU, so doing it would be a relatively simple job. The VMU is also ripe for modding. They make replacement screens, rechargeable batteries and a few other cosmetic mods that can make these things look really cool. And then finally, this one is actually more of a process change, but I think in the future, instead of doing all of that sanding and

painting and filling, I might just take my design files and send them a way to be professionally 3D printed or hell, even milled out of a solid block aluminum by the time you account for all the time it took and all the supplies, honestly, I think that might end up being a cheaper option. All right, that's it for me. Let me know down in the comments if you'd like to see me modernize any other consoles. And I will see you guys in the next video peace.