I just have found this forum, and I'm in love. In all of my years of hacking up game consoles, I've never came across this site. Well, I had started a DCp back when the Treamcast was first released. I think that was around 2004 or so. I ran into problems with the voltage, but I had successfully installed a PSOne screen on the DC. Here is my current pics, with a temporary circuit on a bread board powering the DC with a 12 Laptop battery. I'll be happy to keep you guys informed at how this comes along if your interested.
Last edited by Nucklez on Tue Sep 26, 2006 7:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Thanks for the comments! How many of you guys have been successful at getting a DC to run off of batteries? Those pics were from my first test on that succesful circuit. The CPU fan is temporary, and hopefully I'll find a heatsink strong enough to power those Voltage Regulators. I have a smaller Pentium CPU fan that I may end up having to use if a heatsink alone wont run it. My current plans are to get this running on a heatsink, then work on the recharging circuit to allow the battery to be permanently installed in the DC so I don't have to actually have recharge the battery in my laptop every night. With that screen, the DC and the cpu fan, the 12V 5400mAh battery ran the whole rig on it's own for 1 hour and 40 minutes. I thought that was pretty sweet!
Currently there are only two portable Dreamcast. One was done by Dkap01, who redesigned the thing into a handheld system. Cennar, he made one simalar to the Treamcast (but using a PSone screen).
Further I do know that Dkap01 used the DC-DC coverter from the GameCube PSU. Rewired it to take 14.4v and output 12v, 5v, and 3.3v.
If you wanted to go a route that didn't involve much work go to the store at mini-itx.com. They sell power supplies for computers and if you look you should find one that would work with the Dreamcast. Most are very compact, the largest are the size of the Dreamcast's current power supply.
vskid wrote:Nerd = likes school, does all their homework, dies if they don't get 100% on every assignment
Geek = likes technology, dies if the power goes out and his UPS dies too
Alrighty, I have a smaller heatsink and I salvaged the fan out of my broken down DreamCast to attach to the heatsink. I'm powering that fan by my 5v circuit. With the smaller fan I might get 30 more seconds battery life out of my battery! lol I am now going to look into recharging circuits for Li-ION batteries to see if I have enough space to cram all of this permanently inside of the DreamCast.
I may look into that. I just read a tiny bit about this GC DC-DC converter for the first time yesterday. I do enjoy the fact that I've almost made my own PSU from scratch though.
Sparkfist wrote:Currently there are only two portable Dreamcast. One was done by Dkap01, who redesigned the thing into a handheld system. Cennar, he made one simalar to the Treamcast (but using a PSone screen).
Further I do know that Dkap01 used the DC-DC coverter from the GameCube PSU. Rewired it to take 14.4v and output 12v, 5v, and 3.3v.
If you wanted to go a route that didn't involve much work go to the store at mini-itx.com. They sell power supplies for computers and if you look you should find one that would work with the Dreamcast. Most are very compact, the largest are the size of the Dreamcast's current power supply.
YOU FORGOT ATKAFIGHTER!
I forgive you
This is what I like to SEE!
Someone who come in and is immediatly not a noob!
Good work and I hope you figure what DC-DC will be the best for you
I refuse to dignify myself with an intelligent and witty signature
I just need a pinout of where to hook up power, and composite.
If your really nice, I'll open it back up and get you the pinouts of everything. I've cut an original DC AV cord to just a few inches, and soildered it directly to the AV board inside of the screen. I actually did that part of the project about 2 years ago, so I'll have to freshen up a bit.
Have you modded the lightbox on the LCD w/ LED's?
No, but if it will help the quality of this screen I'll do it in a heartbeat! I'm not real impressed with this Interact screen. It's very washed out, and impossible to play RPGs on. I kind of expect blurry text on such a small screen anyways, but it is completely illegable.
Nucklez wrote:If your really nice, I'll open it back up and get you the pinouts of everything. I've cut an original DC AV cord to just a few inches, and soildered it directly to the AV board inside of the screen. I actually did that part of the project about 2 years ago, so I'll have to freshen up a bit.