MDPC (Mega Drive Personal Computer)
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Unidentified Assilant
- Senior Member
- Posts: 2531
- Joined: Thu Oct 21, 2004 12:26 pm
- Location: Yea I like machine head
You won't be able to easily (at all) run MacOS on a MegaDrive, without a psychotic amount of hacking it just won't happen. And even then you'd be hard pressed to be able to do anything useful with it. I considered combining an MD and a PC a while back though, here are my thoughts on it.
A more useful mod would be to combine a small PC and a MegaDrive-- install the board for the MD in the case with the PC and solder the audio and video outputs to a capture card and get the a/v input that way, in a window.
Mount 2 DB-9 ports on the front of the machine for controllers, install a power switch in the back with a switch drilled into a PCI blanking plate, power the MD by taking the power input daughterboard (on an MD1!) and cutting it off, then plugging the leads into a molex tap (4 pin connector). The red (or rarely, blue) wire to 12v (yellow on a molex) and white to black on the molex (if I remember correctly. Double check this!!!) ... Naturally, taking 12v and not 9v, the regulators may get a bit warm, though probably not overly so. Just make sure the heatsink is not burning up.
You could rig up a means to load ROMs from the PC side of things, but you'd need to do quite a bit of work to mimic what Devster did, and it would involve building a RAM based storage system to hold the game while you ran it and actually transfer it from the PC individually before execution-- you can't simply run it from the PC unfortunately. That'd be much too slow.
Good luck, let me know if you need help with something. It's a project I'd much like to see completed.
A more useful mod would be to combine a small PC and a MegaDrive-- install the board for the MD in the case with the PC and solder the audio and video outputs to a capture card and get the a/v input that way, in a window.
Mount 2 DB-9 ports on the front of the machine for controllers, install a power switch in the back with a switch drilled into a PCI blanking plate, power the MD by taking the power input daughterboard (on an MD1!) and cutting it off, then plugging the leads into a molex tap (4 pin connector). The red (or rarely, blue) wire to 12v (yellow on a molex) and white to black on the molex (if I remember correctly. Double check this!!!) ... Naturally, taking 12v and not 9v, the regulators may get a bit warm, though probably not overly so. Just make sure the heatsink is not burning up.You could rig up a means to load ROMs from the PC side of things, but you'd need to do quite a bit of work to mimic what Devster did, and it would involve building a RAM based storage system to hold the game while you ran it and actually transfer it from the PC individually before execution-- you can't simply run it from the PC unfortunately. That'd be much too slow.
Good luck, let me know if you need help with something. It's a project I'd much like to see completed.