from rags to riches?

[ninjanars]

or from.... cardboard to electronics... catch my drift?

i wanna know if anyone out here... STARTED on the dreamcast from not knowing ANYTHING at all about it... to just taking it to another level and messing with it more more...

or if there are people out there who came from experience that just happened to have a dreamcast and ended up messing with it that way?

how long have you guys been doing it for. whats the most simplest thing you've done and whats the most difficult mod that you're trying to do ... or have already accomplished?


im just curious.

cus i know nothing about electronics. so i wanna see if anyone out there started like i did

[assesoffire]

The first mod (if you can call it that) was painting my Guitar hero controller. After that, I painted my Dreamcast, then started adding LEDs and stuff.
Since then I've painted my PS2, Wii and Gamecube and I've put windows in my PS2 and Gamecube.
The hardest mod I've done is probably my the PS2 window as it took precise cutting.

Soldering SMD LEDs into the Wii's lightbar is pretty hard too...

[ninjanars]

i hope i didn't post this in the wrong thread.

because no one is replying to it. =/
thanks to who did though.

did you learn everything from self experience and trial and error? @ accessoffire.

or did you have a friend that was also into it

i don't have anyone to practice with or to even talk about dreamcast with because theyre all into the new gen stuff and it kinda sucks.. haha.

i want a ps3 but i just cant afford one right now. plus the dreamcast has all the fighting games i need

[assesoffire]

I just usually read tutorials for stuff on the internet, but I understand how most of this stuff works. I myself don't know anyone who's really into console modding, or even the Dreamcast. I've only been modding for like a year, and I'm only 15. Once I started messing with my Dreamcast, I couldn't help myself messing with others.

[FamilyGuy]

I got my 1st Dreamcast in 1999, I played a thousands of billions of hours on it, then moved to another city and lost it.

2 years later, I've came back to my old town and found it in the boxes, even though I didn't wanted that much to play THPS2 since I had THUG2 on my gamecube, I wanted to do saomething special to this great console I love !

So I started by overclocking it, It worked fine and I had became a solder-fume junky (addicted modder)
That was my first mod EVER, and the reason why I bought a solering Iron.


Sometime after that, I started reading about gd-rom and colleting informations from Yursoft and STC-Fan, and finally managed to rip a gd-rom via my pc dvd-drive (Lite-On LTD-165H).


I also managed to show its filesystem on isobuster:


Once I learned how to rip games, I also learned how to fit them on cd and to do data/data audio/data data+cdda/data audio+cdda/data backups using cdrecord mkisofs and randoms hacks on binaries. I also amde a cd-rw/cd-r switch to my dc.


Once I did that, and wrote a tutorial in french (sorry for my bad english), I started thinking about doing something really hard, only to test my skillz, and not-to-get-too-much-bored-about-dc so I found benheck.com and their amazing portables and told myself: I'MA DO ONE !!
so after 6 months of somes minutes/weeks labour (School makes me busy) and 2.5 extra DC bought, here's what it looks like :


It runs from a 11.1v 2600 mAh battery for 70 min (or from a gamecube adapter from the wall) it got a psone screen, a splitted controller for the case and a metal heatsink from the early DCs. The case is being done but I don't have any pics.

In the meanwhile of doing my DCp, I got bored, and played a bit of nesterDC, so I thought, why not to take 2 hours of my time a do a nes controller that attach to a rumble pack that plug in a DC controller to play nesterDC ? The 2de vmu port is ruined, but who use it anyway ... so it ended up like this :



Works well !

Recently, me and Dot50Cal from assemblergames found a way, using a cd with hacked toc (called trap disc) and swapping, to rip GD-R BETA (BETA GD-ROMS) Games, wich can't be ripped with a normal dc +BBA (you have to get a devkit or a gd-rom duplicator to rip them usually.) We've been the first one ever (as far as we know) to rip a GD-R BETA using a retail DC. |darc| from this site, is curently working on a way to do it with HTTP-ACK (another way to rip via bba) based on the same technique as us but using 2 trap cds for everygames, rather than one per disc, thus saving cd-r spindles.

I also worked a bit with the RegionChanger guys, doing testing mainly.

So this is how I've started as a D4MN3D N00B and ended up as a fairly experienced modder in 2 years.

For non-DC related stuff, I've done 2 potato guns so far:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j95tHbIy8s8 My first one shooting an orange to my buddy at 144km/h
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duiGDe6f1UQ My 2de sone shooting a golf ball throught 4/3 inch of plywood at aprox. 260mph

Thank you and sorry for the not-that-good english I can write !


-=FamilyGuy=-