Great news from the People's Republic! XCKDIY, a group of mainland-China hardware hackers, have come up with not one but two ways to play games on your Dreamcast through SD cards; that is, without the need to turn CDs. First up is this adapter that plugs in to the back of the Dreamcast, at 35 yuan — US$5. Second is this heavily modified Dreamcast, which, aside from the SD card port on the front, also has built-in VGA and RCA port output. 300 yuan — US$45.12, but you're going to need a PAL TV if you're in the US. If one of you brave souls can figure out how to actually order one, since the site is in Chinese only, please let the good guys at DCemu who broke the news of the adapter know! Thanks to grap3fruitman for linking these to us in IRC.
The inability to put the modded one to use makes me one sad panda... (Yea, I know you saw what I did there. So what? You want a trophy or something?)
http://ntsc-uk.domino.org/showthread.php?t=70904 That method should still work perfectly to change it to an NTSC-U console.
Oh crap, I'd buy this...but my snowy one doesnt powers up anymore D: ...I don't know what causes it yet :P...but I was kinda trying to fix my non-working lens thing. I believe I broke the thing that connects the lens with the main board xD
I'm a moderator on DCEmu, so you can inform me if you must. :P Taobao requires you to do transactions with the Bank of China, so you can't purchase it yourself. You can, however, get an agent to purchase one for you and ship it out. I bought something off of there once through Yoybuy.com. You pretty much order a product and an agent talks to you through e-mail. The product ships from wherever it's being sold to Yoybuy's offices in Beijing. From there, they ship it to you. Just one word of wisdom, though. Shipping's expensive. EDIT: You can also find some awesome video game stuff on there (japanese consoles, devkits, etc).
Interesting...looking forward to a reverse engineered version that can be produced outside of china one of these days. My poor DC's lens can't take much more of a battering from burnt cds.
Google Translated text from the description on Taobao: Hmm, they replaced the 56k modem with S-Video and Audio out. I wonder if it's still removable or not. It also sounds like they modded the BIOS to start with the cooler Katana boot. Dammit, I'm probably going to buy one now. EDIT (again!): Since these appear to be European Dreamcasts, could you swap out the power supply with an American one?
So I guess the PAL TV isn't necessary after all, assuming this means "no region lockout?" Though I wonder if the TV output will be borked or not...
Battering? what do you mean? Man, what awesome tech. I would totally buy one of those SD card slots but that whole "ask an agent to buy it" sounds shady.
Nah, dude. It's totally legit. I've done transactions with Yoybuy before so I can definitely vouch for them (though their English is a little broken at times).
I for one am very interesting in buying one of those modded Dreamcasts. Maybe we can band together and do one big order? I volunteer to receive the order as I do shipping and receiving all day and work and it would be relatively easy for me to just have them sen there and then mail them out to everyone. Also that Chinese site has some AWESOME shit. Did you guys see that xbox that's modded into a Saturn case? As if that's not badass enough they also included USB ports, which the original xbox didn't even have.
That would mean you would get the full 1GB of data to load right? rather than the 700MB limited to burnt CDs? That's freaking awesome. If I'm understanding this right, if I've already got a Dreamcast, I just need the $5 doohickey that plugs in the back? If we're doing a group order, sign me up for one.
oh god this is awesome, once I'm paid I may indeed get one of the modded DCs. It's not like dreamcast piracy was difficult in the first place, but I'd love one of these.
I missed outon the Dreamcast... I jumped from Mega Drive to PS1 to GameCube XD I wouldn't mind one of those modded DCs to be honest... I mean that's what.... about £25ish?
I remember the SD card business long ago on Assembler... is this stolen idea or its the result of creators work ?
I remember some ordeal about a device that plugged into the controller port(?) but no news of its completion was ever broken out (at least not here). Does anyone remember this?
I'm willing to jump in on a group order, but I'll need to be totally sure I can get that dreamcast working properly on my own. It is PAL, so doesn't that mean it has an alternate power supply? Also, no online? That's kinda' weak, but I still want it anyway.
The controller port thing was only theoretical stuff that never got anyhwere... But there was lot of stuff around reading SD cards off the serial port, and this chinese thing is exactly the same deal.
