Anyone ever modded a Dreamcast for audio ?

[jaycee]

I've just aquired a used SEGA Dreamcast console for £13, no cables or anything, but I'm planning to convert it into a CD/HD/Network based player that will play MP3, Vorbis, FLAC and others.

For those who don't know much about them, they are based around an Hitachi SH3 CPU, 200MHz, and a custom Yamaha sound chip that is an ARM7 cpu also. Sounds pretty ideal for decoding

I'm just wondering if anyone has looked into getting I2S or S/PDIF out of the thing, as i'm planning to rebuild it into a seperate box, with a seperate DAC stage fed from a linear supply instead of the switchmode one currently inside it.

[jaycee]

In case anyones interested, i suspect not

I found the DAC on the PCB today, it is a TI/BB PCM1725 that takes in "Standard" 16-bit data in 3-wire format. Should be trivial to replace this with any DAC of my choosing

Planning to put this in a box with a new PSU (the one i bought for £13 had a dead switchmode supply), LCD screen, hard disk. Perhaps also make use of the well-made-looking Yamaha GDROM mechanism for a cd drive. The ultimate music storage device

[postpunk]

How do you plan to add a hdd to the dreamcast? There is no interface. There are a few homebrew mp3 players though. Check out www.dcemulation.com ,they also have a forum dedicated to hardware.

[jaycee]

How do you plan to add a hdd to the dreamcast? There is no interface

There is actually The modem port on the side is just a general 16-bit bus. Some guy called bITmASTER designed an interface a while ago

http://www.syncscroller.net/dc/dc-ide.pdf

I read a site where they have improved that interface a bit, the main change being they have discovered how to use a real interrupt to increase performance. A Japanese guy already has the interface working under NetBSD.

I plan to extend the interface logic so I can attach peripherals such as the LCD screen to the bus too.