The Light Fantastic

Today's post is a bit of a cop out, as it has required minimal creative input from me. Other than, y'know, browsing Youtube, watching people fire M&Ms out of their belly buttons into cups, realising what the hell I'm doing and then looking for proper stuff...like this:



Yeah, a guy with a blatantly obvious talent for electronics (and a truckload of patience, I'm guessing!) modded a VMU so that it has a cool backlit screen. Reminds me of the Game Boy Light...only smaller, and I would probably buy one if he was making them to order as it looks fantastic when plugged into the controller. I was actually planning on doing a post about this:

Please ignore the dust on the TV. The butler hasn't been in yet.
It's a Dreamcast SD card reader I managed to acquire through a very odd series of events that I won't go into here, but after wasting a shit-load of CD-Rs and trawling various forums I still can't actually work out a) how to use it; and b) what the point of it is if you've already got 90% of the DC's game library and enough VMUs to fill a quarry. I understand it can be used to run other operating systems and games from, but to be honest I'm not really overly interested in that kind of thing...so it shall remain in my box of Dreamcast-related paraphernalia as an odd little curio, alongside the tissue holder and the jar of pickled eyeballs.

6 comments:

typicalgeek said...

I have the same issue with my SD card reader. I actually thought it was busted, but I wonder if it's okay now that I see you're having the same problem. Maybe we're just missing something about how to use it?

I only got it because Sturmwind was supposedly going to use it for expansion content. We'll see if that ever happens.

Unknown said...

i use DreamShell to make use of the SD Card. i use the Dreamcast in a halfbaked arcade cabinet mod. i find it very convenient to boot directly into the DreamShell Iso Loader to launch emulators with cusotm rom sets! yes...that's a niche ^^

typicalgeek said...

I find the original Xbox to be vastly superior to Dreamcast for emulation purposes. But I guess you use what you have...

Unknown said...

@typicalgeek it's kinda 'use what you have'. but i think it's more 'use what you love'. and i just love the dreamcast arcade sticks for some reason and i love the dreamcasts limits for some other (weird) reasons.

Tom Charnock said...

Hey, thanks for the comments. I kinda got the SD card reader by accident - I spotted a black Dreamcast on Gumtree and thought it might be a Sega Sports imported one so went to have a look at it, but it turned out to be a PAL system that the guy had coloured black with a permanent marker (?!). Naturally I didn't buy it, but the guy had the SD reader there too, so I offered him a few quid for it and he let me have it. I can totally see the point of the reader, and as Karsten points out, it does have it's uses...it's just that whenever I've tried to burn a disc to boot it or whatever, it doesn't do anything when I put it in the console. And to be fair, I have documented my total ham-fistedness when it comes to burning anything remotely DC-based (although I have no problems burning 3DO games!).

SirTea said...

That light on the VMU is an excellent mod! Resident Evil 2 would be excellent if I had a VMU like that. Being alone in the dark room as the health meter would be on the VMU. I was looking for reasons to make Resident Evil 2 alot more better experience when the Playstation version other then graphics and that blacklight mod is the best solution for it.