Modded Dreamcast Greatness (and much more)

Sometimes I think I spend too much money on collecting Dreamcast stuff, but then I think of that guy you owned every single Japanese game sealed up and how much he must of spent to get that lot only to not even play any of them. Last week I splashed out quite a lot of cash on a Dreamcast bundle of stuff: £120 (+£10 postage) to be exact. It all arrived yesterday and i must say though, I think it was a great deal.

This orange logo on start up is going to take getting used to, I've had a blue one all these years up until now..

For starters the Dreamcast is a Japanese model with it's shiny triangle by the light and big metal fan, possibly one of those early 1998 ones as it has no phone cable socket in that modem attachment. Unlike my previous ventures with Japanese Dreamcasts' (which both turned out to be broken), this one has a step down converter and best of all..it's had a mod chip installed so it can play games of any region without the need of a boot disc.

One of those broken Japanese systems I had also had a modification: someone had replaced the Japanese power board in it with a British one, which simply means it now took British plugs with no need for a stepdown converter. So not long after this new one arrived yesterday I popped the two open and swapped the power boards around and wala! My new system now had two mods to it. Now all it needs is a direct VGA socket hack and it'd be perfection. I'll use the stepdown for whatever other Japanese electronics I get (like a Japanese Saturn one day) and sell off the broken systems.

Another reason this bundle was a great deal was the games. A mixed bunch from every region, the games that convinced me to make offers on the set were Gigawing 2, Radilgy and Trizeal. All three of these games would cost me quite a bit separately, possibly around £40-50 each. The guy who owned it clearly had good taste: just have a ganders above at the 12 games that came with it. There was also two light guns in the box, a controller and a black VMU. Not all the games were in great condition (Power Stone in particular was pretty wreaked), but it's still a fantastic lot.

The system is a real joy to use. When you start the console up with a PAL or American game in it, you can hear it stop and start the disc while on the Sega screen, which must be the how the mod works, recreating the disc swapping in a second. It's also very quiet, so it must of been looked well after. To make sure it stays that way I won't be sticking any CD-Rs into this one, I'll keep one of my PAL systems beside me to swap in when I want to play homebrew or emulators and as for CD-R copies of games..I have so many of the games I want now I'm barely going to need them.

The last couple months have been quite busy with spending: I've been buying Dreamcast stuff a plenty. The lot above came from a ebay shop that has tons of sealed stuff selling cheap. I got a total of six VMUs (two of each colour) as well as Heavy Metal Geomatrix, Kao the Kangeroo and Charge N' Blast.


These second hand ones (top row) came from someone in America and were unfortunately in pretty bad shape (I-Spy has it's back pages of the manual ripped out and a cut out hole in the back cover) but playable. The two in the bottom row were found at a boot sale, although those have completely dried up for the year now, what with the cold weather. Probably why I've been going so Ebay crazy.

Here's another load of Japanese games I got cheap. I'm going to be digging out some translation guides to play Rent-a-hero and Sakura wars 3 (always wanted to see what the fuss was about with that series) and both Cool Cool Toon and Tokyo Bus Guide are quite addictive. I also have a japanese copy of Shenmue with the Jukebox CD, which means I know own Shenmue on every region. Oops! Probably best if I got rid of the PAL one then, to save shelf space.

Finally there's these two little oddities. These demo discs called "Dreamcast Express" were apperently only availble if you joined a Sega club of some sort, and come with two discs each. One of the discs has a full on interactive video tour of Tokyo Game Show '99, which is rather neat.

Now I just need to wait for my Segagaga box set to show up! Oh dear, my poor bank account.