50 Pin relocation

So an update on my tablet. As I said in my previous post I got the 50 pin relocation of the GD-Rom controller board working so I wanted to share my experiences with it.

So to start off I first needed to remove the original connectors. I have read how some have done it with a heat gun and melted the solder and then pulled the connectors off. I could not go this route because I don't have a heat gun. So I tried a slightly different method. On the Motherboard side you can see the pins come up off the board from the traces so I took a razor blade and just sat there cutting along the pins until they were cut through. Then I heated up each side of the connector with my soldering iron and lifted that side up. It came right off. Be careful when cutting through the pins though. Its best to apply moderate pressure and just do a lot of runs along it rather than trying to muscle through each one at a time. I did moderate pressure the first time and it came off in a breeze. Then I was dumb and accidentally broke one of the caps off doing something else and since I don't have a spare cap lying around I just got my other Dreamcast and cut off the connector again. Only problem was I was kind of mad about it so I tried to muscle my way through it and I ended up pulling up 3 traces. Good thing I had found the pin-out of the traces so I could solder on one of the points and all was good.

From Dreamcast Laptop

From Dreamcast Laptop

So since I cut it off I just had to take off the remaining end of the pins that was left over in the traces. I found the easiest way to do this was to heat up the trace and then drag to the side. The remainder of the pin should come up with your soldering iron, then wipe it off on a wet paper towel. I would not suggest using your sponge or whatever you use to tin your soldering Iron because then you get these REALLY annoying tiny pieces of metal that are a pain to get out because thy stick into it.

When preparing to solder onto the wires I highly suggest tinning the ends of the wire before trying to solder it to the trace. Connection goes much faster and less painless. Plus in the end you will get a stronger bond which is always good. I really thought that soldering the wires on would take a while but it took about 5 minutes to do 25 wires since I had already previously cut, stripped, and tinned all the wires.

From Dreamcast Laptop

So after finishing that I needed to figure out how to connect them to the GD-Rom controller. Only problem is that you can't see the the pins on this side so trying to cut the pins won't work. So this is the point when I decided to try and connecting the wires to the points that I had found that I described in my previous post. Well this failed because I ended up soldering wires to the wrong spot multiple times and in the end it didn't work. The LED on the controller turned on but that was it. No video or audio and obviously the GD-Rom didn't spin up. So I decided to try again but I did it a different way by trimming down the plastic on the connector and bending the pins out and soldering to the pins there. Got that all wired up and tried it out and the LED would blink and shut off. So as a last chance effort I'm going to try and Dremel off the connector and then doing direct trace to trace.

This proved to do the trick as I got the 50 pin relocation done and my Dreamcast is working. I ended up taking my dremel with a cutting disc to the connector on the GD-Rom board and just slowly cut a little bit off at a time until I got down to the traces. Then I just took my razor blade and pulled the remaining little pieces of plastic off. Then took the soldering Iron and removed all the remaining pins. I actually managed to only tear up one trace on this side but I just took a look at my pin-out and all was well.

In total I had 3 torn up traces on the Mobo and 1 on the GD-Rom board and with my pin-outs I got the Dreamcast to work.

Got some pics.

From Dreamcast Laptop

From Dreamcast Laptop

GD-Rom "Pin-outs"

*Disclaimer! I am not responsible for anything you do which may*
*result in injury or dea...d electronics. (you thought I*
*was going to say death didn't you?)*
*Perform these actions at your own risk!*

Well the title may be a little misleading but that's what I have essentially done. On both the GD-Rom controller board and the Mobo there is a point on the board that corresponds to each trace under the the connector for the GD-Rom. I know that some people have given up work on their Dreamcast portables because they have torn up a trace on the board. Well now hopefully those people can continue their projects again. I took a couple high-res scans of both areas on the boards where the pins are located. On the GD-Rom controller board they are on the same side as the connector and most points are near the connector and on the Mobo all the points are on the opposite side of the board directly under the connector.

I am 95% sure that the pin-out for the Mobo is correct as I tested each one with my multi-meter since I couldn't just follow the traces. The one on the GD-Rom connector should all be correct although I didn't use my multi-meter on every connection, just every 5 or so to make sure that I was still on track. But before you use any of this I would suggest that you test the trace and the point to make sure that you are doing the right one.

I want to add in though that I have done the 50 pin relocation using this information because I had 4 traces that were torn up and my dreamcast IS working. But regardless please keep in mind that this information is UNCOMFIRMED! I'm putting it up here so that others can have a bench mark and a starting place and something to compare their results to if they wish to help try and confirm my results.

Click on these two pictures to download the High Res. scans.

From Dreamcast Laptop

GD-Rom controller board side: 2708 x 2380, 4.38MB

From Dreamcast Laptop

Mobo side: 2576 x 1828, 2.88MB

So now onto the pin-outs. I would highly suggest that if you use these MAKE SURE TO TEST YOUR CONNECTION FIRST! Make sure that it is correct before you connect anything! I also would suggest to not try and do the relocation of the GD-Rom controller board using only these points! It would be very easy to mix up a point or accidentally solder your wire to the wrong point in which case you finish, plug it in and it doesn't work or worse you could fry your Dreamcast. Anyways here are the pin-outs.

From Dreamcast Laptop

From Dreamcast Laptop

Well those were my findings. Once again I want to say that this information is unconfirmed as I am the only one who has tested it. Hopefully another person or possibly even two people can try it out and then we can work together to try and get the confirmed results out.

Newest Project

Well I have started work on my next big project. I'm going to make a Sega Dreamcast Tablet. LED modded 15" screen, tray type disc drive, docking station, and some other things. I have already started work on this but the first thing that I did was to take pictures and then make 3d models in Google Sketch-up so that I could actually manipulate all the components to where I want them while coming up with a design. I got pictures of all the internals except for the mother board because the mother board was pretty easy to find in a google search but the other boards were a bit harder and you couldn't find a picture of just the specific board.

Click on any picture to have an enlarged picture.

First off is the Controller board:

From Dreamcast Laptop

56k Modem Top

From Dreamcast Laptop

56k Modem Bottom

From Dreamcast Laptop

GD-Rom controller board

From Dreamcast Laptop

GD-Rom top

From Dreamcast Laptop

GD-Rom bottom

From Dreamcast Laptop

Now onto the Sketch-Up models. They definitely aren't life like or anything, they were just all made quickly but are still almost exact. I estimated the height of all the caps and IC's but other than that the sizes should be accurate and the way I made all of the ICs and caps is by overlaying a picture onto the board in sketch-up and drew the caps and ICs on top of the board according to the pictures so they all should be pretty accurate. Also the motherboard is the most well known revision with the GD-Rom controller board if that wasn't obvious. Also I did not make a sketch-up model of the 56k modem.

Just a quick note about these files and where they are uploaded to. They are uploaded to a google site. Since I don't have my own server space or anything I had to use this free service to host my models for you guys to download. When you click the link it should bring up the download right away. I'm not sure if there is a bandwidth limit ut I'm sure there is or there is some kind of limitation to using this so if it doesn't work I'm sorry and try again a different day or something.

Controller Board

GD-Rom controller board

GD-Rom

Motherboard

If any of the links don't work try heading over to the site where the files are hosted to download the files. And if that doesn't work, sorry try again a different day.

Sega Dreamcast Portable

Well I did not really keep very good tabs on my first portable project so I don't really know how much i can say about it at this point. I will go over it real quick just so that people can know a little bit more than what I have previously posted. I don't really have many WIP pictures either but I will post what I can. And I would like to thank Family Guy on Benheck for his help and answering some questions I had.

When I first started this project I ordered a Dreamcast from ebay and I was looking for a cheap one (duh) and I found one that was broken, it was a typical controller board fuse problem so I snatched up that dreamcast and got it not too long later. I opened it up to replace the resistor which I had done a few times before and to my disbelief I found that I had gotten the second revision of the board. One without the GD-Rom controller board. At the time I didn't even know that there was one that came without the GD-Rom board but did a little research, and again thanks to Family Guy I learned up on these. Turns out that some people couldn't get homebrew or any boot up discs to work but Family Guy said that he knew a way so if you have one of these Dreamcasts and want to know how maybe get in contact with him.

Anyways here are a couple pics of the Dreamcast.

From 060826233152

From 060826233152

So after I got the board I ordered a Pico PSU as the means of powering everything in my portable. The one I got was the PicoPSU 120W I think that this was a bit overkill though as on the bottom of the Dreamcast it says that its power consumption is only 27 watts but any ways that power supply definitely works and it's very small and was way easy to fit into the case.

From 060826233152

So then came the screen. I used the standard 5" PSone screen. Actually I used the Zenith Xbox Screen but its the same internals. Except for one thing. The zenith screen actually comes with a voltage regulation board.

From 060826233152

I have heard that using this board you can use a 12v power supply but I tried hooking the screen up to the 12v line on the Pico Psu through the regulator board and I got interesting results but it never ended up with me being able to use 12v. I think that some people have used it though but I can't remember the parameters around its use for them.

So then I hooked everything up to make sure that everything was working and sure enough I had no problems.

From 060826233152

But after everything was working I set that all aside to start work on my case. I don't have many pictures of this part but how I made the case was I went to Home Depot and bought a sheet of acrylic. Took it home, traced out the pieces that I was going to need for the case on the protective sheet over the acrylic and then used a band saw to cut out the pieces. Many have mistaken my case for being CNC machined so I will take that as a compliment to how I did cutting out the pieces.

After this I traced on the front piece the viewing size of the screen. I drilled a hole in the middle of the area that needed cut out and then cut out the screen with a scroll saw. I took the blade off and then put it through the hole I had drilled and cut the screen out.

After I got all the pieces cut out for the case I put them together. I had originally planned on using epoxy to glue the pieces together and I bought some but was unhappy with the results. ie: yellow cured color, sloppy, mixing the two tubes. So I went a different route and went to the local hobby shop and picked myself up some InstaCure+ as well as some Insta-set. I liked the results much more and it was a more instantaneous setting so that I wouldn't have to wait overnight to continue work on my case. It also produced an extremely strong bond!

So got the case all made and then I needed to start putting the components into the case. I mounted pretty much everything using screws and made my own mounts for all the stuff. To make the mounts I made small squares (.25"x.25" approx.) and stacked them on top of each other until I got the desired height for the part I was mounting. Then I glued them together with the glue and accelerator, drilled a small whole (size depended on the screw), and then I would screw them onto the part I was mounting, throw some glue on the mounts, and placed it in my case so that I wouldn't have to worry about not lining one up properly.

From 060826233152

From 060826233152

So that was pretty much it. I got everything mounted and and put together, took it apart again, painted, put everything back in, put on the hinges, and it was done! So here are the results.

From 060826233152

From 060826233152

From 060826233152