Saturday, February 10, 2007
Convert the region of your Dreamcast!
Yes, you read that headline correctly. This is NOT a boot disc, this is a combination of hardware and software modifications that will actually let you convert a European Dreamcast into an American or Japanese one - or vice versa.
I need to point out that most of this information doesn't come from me, it's the result of other people that are detailed in this DCEmulation.com thread. The names to send thank-you letters appear to be "SWAT" and "Oyster". That thread doesn't use the *exact* same method that I did, though, so read on.
OK, so you have a European PAL Dreamcast, and you want to make it an American one. Collect the following things:
- Soldering iron
- Solder
- Screwdriver
- Piece of wire
- Blank CD-R disc, CD writer, and this Region Changing Program.
Open the Dreamcast up, and once you're inside, remove the power supply, GD-ROM drive, control port board, until you're down to the motherboard itself. Pull the motherboard out and flip it over. It will look like this (not my picture):
Strip the ends of the wire and look for the point (indicated in the picture above) labelled "R512". Solder one end of the wire to R512, then the other end to the part labelled "+12V" in the diagram. Once this is done, it will allow us to run the Region Switcher disc and the results to be made permanent.
Now, the next part dictates the colour system that will be output over the Composite and S-Video outputs - either NTSC or PAL60. (The colour system will be RGB if you're using an RGB SCART or VGA cable). If you close the Dreamcast up and do nothing extra, selecting NTSC video output will give you REAL NTSC output, as is used in America or Japan. If you want PAL-60 output instead, then heat up another blob of solder, find the "R422" point (in the bottom left of the picture) and bridge the two points.
Now close the Dreamcast up and place the Region Switcher disc you made with your CD burner in it, and turn the sucker on. You can now select between the following options:
COUNTRY:- USA
- Europe
- Japan
- NTSC
- PAL
- PAL_M (Brazil)
- PAL_N (Argentina)
Once you've made your selections using the analogue stick and the A button, you can press the Down Arrow icon (the second from the left) to save the settings. Turn the machine off and on again and admire your newly transformed machine!
The "Country" part affects the regional lockout system and also the colour of the Dreamcast logo shown in the bootup sequence, and is independent of the Broadcast Standard setting. For example, if you wanted to, you could create a Dreamcast that only played USA games and had a red swirl logo, but used PAL video (although the other Dreamcasts would laugh at it for being such a freak).
I've used this method on my mod-chipped PAL Dreamcast (it dates from a time 7 years ago when I was naive enough to buy PAL video game equipment, you see) and now it's the ultimate system - it'll play anything (bar some crap PAL-50hz only titles) in full screen, full speed - even some PAL games like Power Stone that were released in 50hz only. Before, since the default video standard was PAL, some US and Japanese NTSC games would play back in PAL, and didn't contain any code at the start to flip the video into 60hz. Now everything runs full-screen, full-speed, the way it should be.
Posted at 11:39 PM
