Hi again...
I have a quick (noob) question
Are there any parts of the Drreamcast main motherboard that can be cut off to help fit inside a case that's a bit too small? Like, unneded circuits or no curcuits at all?
I don't want to make any stupid mistakes
I cut it down a little bit. The picture doesn't show it too much, but I cut off the ground traces around the edges, and I took off the serial port as well as the modem port thing.
The parts you can be pretty sure are fine to trim is the grounding, as on the DC, there are pin-throughs, which means, if there are multi-layers to the board, the other layers will be grounding too at those places.
It seems that older DC boards have the separate drive boards (like mine do) whereas the more modern ones don't - therefore the older ones are more likely to be double layer, the modern ones some say are quad layer. It therefore means that if you want to make the board smaller, you are best to try with the older boards.
I'm going to grind horizontally down through parts of the board I want to remove, that way, after the copper layer, if I see any other copper before getting to the bottom of the board I shouldn't have done any permanent damage to the system; if no copper (until the bottom layer), the part can be cut away. I intend to do this to remove the board with the expansion cart area (not needed).
