 Thank you very much. So yeah, before we could start talking about the insides of the Dreamcast, we need to start talking about what is the Sega Dreamcast. So a Sega Dreamcast looks like this. It was released in 1998 in Japan and then a year later in the West. And famously in the US specifically, it was released on 9-9-99, which the advertising schedule maker made a big deal of. It was the first of the sixth generation of consoles, and for those of you looking for maybe a reference point that you're more familiar with, that generation also included the Nintendo GameCube, the original Xbox, and the PlayStation 2. But sadly for the Sega Dreamcast, not very long after it launched, Sega announced that it was being discontinued, and they ended up leaving the hardware business entirely in order to not go bankrupt essentially. But despite the fact that it was discontinued so early, a homebrew scene, you know, very early on in its lifespan came into being. And this has a bit of an inauspicious start compared to many homebrew scenes, because for the Dreamcast in particular, it started when the official SDK was stolen by a hacking group. They stole the SDK, the picture is just of the hardware side of the dev kit, which I always enjoy looking at as they look nothing like the consoles themselves. And then the homebrew scene, later on in 2000, the same hacking team released something called the Utopia Boot CD. And that meant that a completely unmodified Dreamcast was now able to run CDRs essentially that you just burned on your PC. And I'm sure it will not be a surprise knowing that it was released in 2000 that it looked like this when you put it in your Dreamcast. As a result, the common story told about the Dreamcast is that at this point piracy explodes because you can run backups on a completely unmodified Dreamcast. And it is claimed by many that this is why the Dreamcast had such a short lifespan. But frankly, that just isn't true. You still needed to buy a Dreamcast. And if you look at the attach rate for the Dreamcast, which is the number of games sold per Dreamcast sold, it was comparable to successful systems, fundamentally just not enough Dreamcasts were being sold on the hardware side. But yeah, this is often put around, which is why I put it in inverted commas. So yeah, but the good thing that came out of this was the homebrew scene on the software side, which as I say, unfortunately, they only had this stolen SDK to work with to begin with, which meant that while people were able to make stuff, they weren't really able to release it because it had been made with this stolen dev kit. That changed quite quickly. Something called LibDream was developed, followed very quickly by Callistios, most commonly known as Chaos, it's acronym, by someone called Dan Potter, who was responsible for both of those. And the latter, Chaos, is still under development today and used by the homebrew scene. And yeah, that free and legal SDK is what properly caused the homebrew scene to explode. And like many homebrew scenes, it started off with basic ports of simple games or emulators for consoles of generations past. But it has since evolved into commercial releases outside of the purview of Sega. And my evidence for this is this graph, which shows the number of indie Dreamcast releases made by other publishers to date per year, basically. And there are large error bars here, but it's clear that as the dev kits have become easier to use and engines have been made, development for the Dreamcast has become easier and more and more people have been releasing stuff with a commercial bend. So how do we keep the Dreamcasts alive? Like it's 25 years old, nearly at this point. And as is the case with any type of old hardware, there are issues. And broadly speaking, those can be put into two camps, I would argue. The first is simply that the world has moved on. And whatever hardware that was present is no longer fit for purpose due to, as I say, the world advancing and technology getting better. And then the second one is slightly more obvious. It's simply that the hardware is old and things are going to fail in a consumer level device, certainly these days after so long. And so I'm going to touch on what the hobbyist community has done on the hardware side for problems that fall into both of these categories. So I'm going to talk about the modem that came with the Dreamcast and the video output that the Dreamcast provides. And then also on the full replacement side, talk about the proprietary disk system that it came with as well. So starting with the modem, I'm definitely a bit of a Dreamcast fanboy and will say it's praises whenever I get the chance. But it was the first console to include internet connectivity out of the box. And this was a bit contentious while the console was in development. The powers that be at Sega were umming and aring over whether it was worthwhile including because it was going to drive up the cost of the console per unit. But ultimately they did choose to include it. And they even had the foresight to make the modem modular because when they decided they were going to include it, they realised that this type of technology was moving quite quickly. And so if the Dreamcast had the lifespan that it had been intended to have, then by the end of that perhaps people wouldn't be connecting to the internet in the same way. So if you have your Dreamcast today, it has a dial-up modem inside of it. This is obviously almost useless. Many people don't even have landlines and the few people that do, although presumably more EMF camp than perhaps elsewhere, they don't have a dial-up ISP that they can dial up to. So as I say, this module was, the modem is able to be removed and replaced. And something called the broadband adapter was able, what was ultimately released towards the end of the Dreamcast lifespan. And this is something that lets you plug a LAN cable into your Dreamcast. But unfortunately the support for this has to come from the games. It's not on the hardware level. And so because this was released at the end of Dreamcast's life cycle, very few games actually support it. And so if you're trying these days to get your old games that you remember playing online, very few actually support the broadband adapter. And so that's not really a solution for much of what we're trying to do. It's much better, however, to essentially run your own ISP. And this was something that I tried to do following arcane instructions on the internet, which have been around for a while. And they relied on a particular version of Windows 98 and maybe, you know, getting your Dreamcast to start dialing and then switching over the phone cable into the computer. And some people got it to work, but I personally never did. But this became much, much easier recently when something called DreamPie was released. This was written by Luke Benstead. And this is an image that you put on a Raspberry Pi. And it lets you run a Dreamcast-specific ISP, essentially. You plug a USB modem into your Raspberry Pi, and it just sits there, waiting for the Dreamcast to start dialing. And when the Dreamcast stops dialing, it simulates picking up the phone. And just forwards all relevant traffic over to your network and presumably the internet. And it's just man in the middle of it. And by virtue of the fact that this is essentially a plug and play solution, it actually comes with a lot of features that are useful when you're trying to do stuff like this. So some games have DNS servers hard-coded, and it forwards those requests onto IPs that are run by the community so that games can find games to connect to. And it also supports a service called Dreamcast Live, which clearly has taken some inspiration from Xbox Live. Where once you register for an account, it shows you who's online, what they're playing, and that type of thing, making it much easier to actually find games to play as. While I am a Dreamcast fanboy, the Dreamcast these days is certainly not putting Call of Duty numbers online or anything like that. So yeah, this is my DreamPi, basically as I described. There is this an extra, so the Raspberry Pi is at the top, the USB modem is to the right, and then there's this mysterious black box at the bottom, which is being powered from the Raspberry Pi, and that is simply providing voltage on the phone line, because the Dreamcast modem specifically is expecting to be plugged into a phone line, not another modem, and so it needs that voltage in order to go, basically. And I think this is why I was never able to get it running with the Windows 98 server and things, as all the instructions were written for a US audience, and the voltage required here to make this work is double what is required in the US, and so, yeah, I just never thought to check that, I was taking these instructions as gospel, but it was Luke Benstead who came up with DreamPi that realized that he had never seen anyone outside of the US actually get these instructions working and decided to delve deeper. So yeah, I'm now gonna talk about the GD ROM drive, which is inside a Dreamcast. This is a proprietary thing. The GD stands for Gigabyte Disk, and so as you might expect, it's slightly higher density than a CD ROM, but nowhere near the density of a DVD, and that choice was perhaps a cost choice on the Sega side, and that perhaps is the most meaningful contributing factor to why it ultimately failed as people were waiting for the PlayStation 2 before they bought a Dreamcast to see which was going to be better, and the PlayStation 2 was able to play DVDs, and so I'm sure a lot of people bought the PlayStation 2 instead of a Dreamcast plus a DVD player. So this is a proprietary disk drive, obviously there's nothing really, they're not being made anymore. If it fails, you can replace the whole thing, but that requires you to cannibalize an existing Dreamcast, which is heresy, frankly. So the solution that has been arrived at is to replace the entire GD ROM drive with something called an optical drive emulator, and the first one of these was actually developed in secret for a while. So the picture here is of a Dreamcast with the GD ROM unit installed, and this picture is with the optical disk emulator installed, and so this is an FPGA solution that allows you to plug in an SD card, and the Dreamcast still thinks it's talking to the GD ROM, the FPGA is handling all the communication and stuff, but it's reading from an SD card, and this means that you're, instead of if you want to change game, you can instead have multiple games on a single SD card that you're then able to switch between, so it makes it much more convenient as well as conveniently a solid state. So yeah, as I say, this was developed in secret for a while by Radislaw Balkowicz, and he announced it via live journal, showing off his prototype in 2011, which had no explanation, he just essentially put this photo up on live journal where you can see a Dreamcast without the GD ROM drive plugged into an FPGA dev board, but people very quickly figured out what was going on here and were excited for it. But despite the excitement, this was fundamentally a hobby for him, and the first production run wasn't until three years later, and that production run was done very much with the idea of, well, we'll see if people are interested, I don't know how popular this is going to be. It turns out people were very interested, the idea of being able to have essentially the entire Dreamcast library of homebrew or games on a single SD card was very attractive, and it's been sold in batches since, sporadically as he's able to make them, essentially. There are, and it's popular enough now that you can buy clones on eBay, although the clones in general have difficulties with the firmware upgrades that he provides, occasionally adding new functionality and things, and it was so well received there are now full-on alternatives available. The USB GD ROM is essentially exactly the same, but allows you to plug in a USB drive rather than an SD card, and the mode is, frankly, just a group showing off. The M there stands for multiple, and so you can buy a mode and you can either install it with this functionality in your Dreamcast, or it can also do exactly the same in the Sega Saturn, which, yeah, is impressive, but very unnecessary. And the last thing I should emphasise about the GDMU, that installation, removing the GD ROM drive and installing this homebrew thing, it's completely solderless. It uses the existing connectors, it's a plug-and-play solution, you need to do about 10 screws in order to do it, so it's incredibly accessible, and that I think is part of the reason why it was so popular. Yeah, so the last thing I'm gonna talk about is getting video out of the Dreamcast, and the Dreamcast came along at a time where it only supported analog out because that's what TVs had, and it at least supported a large variety of analog out, so I'll just run through them going from least good to best. So there's coax, there's composite, a little better with S-video, and then you had SCART and VGA, which was firing away the best way to get the highest quality picture out of your Dreamcast, plugged it into a monitor and, yeah, away you went. But particularly on cheaper displays these days, it's very plausible you want to plug your Dreamcast into a display that has none of these options, and so what are you as the Dreamcast enthusiast to do? So there are, you can buy cables that are essentially, they take the VGA signal and they turn it into an HDMI signal, but those aren't great. They introduce lag, which can be an issue for fighting games, which the Dreamcast has some of the best of, and it also means that you've converted this fundamentally analog signal into a digital signal, and so it's not as good as it could plausibly be, but perhaps the biggest strike against them for technical reasons that I'm not intending to get into. If you use one of those solutions, you almost inevitably end up with an image that is the wrong aspect ratio, it's been stretched, which some people are fine with, they just want to, you know, they can still see the game, they can still see their scores and what have you, but for people striving for perfection, you can definitely do better. And doing better involves using another FPGA solution that is called the DC Digital. This was formerly known as the DC HDMI, though, and then it had its name change in order to avoid any potential lawsuits from the cabal in control of that particular acronym. And so yeah, again, this is an FPGA solution and it puts a mini HDMI port on the Dreamcast, which you can see in the bottom right of the board here. And it's a collaboration between two people, one of whom is more of a hobbyist than the other. Citrus 3000 PSI, he runs Black Dog Technologies, and he sells this type of solution for other types of retro consoles as well as the Dreamcast. So he's got experience with the generic side. And then Christoph is the person responsible for the Dreamcast specific implementation who does it very much as a hobby, as I understand it. And so this gives you, this is a full digital to digital video and audio solution. So the question is, how is this possible? As I said, the Dreamcast only outputs analog signals. And it rests in the connector that is at the top of the picture, which is a connector for a ribbon cable. And that ribbon cable, the other end of it is soldered directly to the Dreamcast motherboard. So this is what an install looks like roughly. The green motherboard is the motherboard of the Dreamcast and the copper colored traces are the other end of this flex cable that is being connected to the DC HDMI. And it's being soldered directly to the pins. Not to the chips, you would think. One is audio, the GPU, it is not touching, it is at the bottom. The chip is connected to is the DAC, which is converting the digital signal into analog signals. And this is an incredibly professional piece of kit because it's responsible for its own outputs. It has its own GUI, where you can do firmware upgrades over the air. And it even knows about the GDMU, the disk emulator I was talking about earlier. And with an optional install, you can even use this menu to reset or change disks through the GDMU. So yeah, thanks very much. Hi, it's a lot.