DVD on Dreamcast

Unidentified Assilant · Tue Feb 15, 2005 10:10 am

Would a DVD drive in the Dreamcast work? I put a GD Disc in my PC (which has a DVD drive) and it read it as a DVD! Could i put a DVD Drive in my Dreamcast and be able to play DVD's on it too? And would it still play games? Because my Dreamcast GD Drive is playing terrible lately

Dave · Post by **Dave** » Tue Feb 15, 2005 4:52 pm

i'm pretty sure th dream cast uses a cd drive

HK-47 · Post by **HK-47** » Tue Feb 15, 2005 4:54 pm

Im pretty sure it is too.

Post by **SpongeBuell** » Tue Feb 15, 2005 4:57 pm

but it reads proprietary 1GB GD-ROMs.

HK-47 · Post by **HK-47** » Tue Feb 15, 2005 4:58 pm

Thats probably why the pc is picking it up as a dvd...

Post by **Sparkfist** » Tue Feb 15, 2005 8:08 pm

We know you can mod a Dreamcast to use a standard CD-rom, a DVD-rom I'm not sure would work. You might get all the cables connected to it but I dont thing it would be able to recognize it.

makuraken · Post by **makuraken** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 7:23 am

I think in order to get the DC to read the DVD drive as a actual drive, you would have to change the bios and maybe even write your own driver program to get it to work. If you know that stuff, good luck.

Dave · Post by **Dave** » Sat Feb 26, 2005 10:20 pm

SpongeBuell wrote:but it reads proprietary 1GB GD-ROMs.

Interesting I didn't know that.

gamer2 · Post by **gamer2** » Fri Mar 04, 2005 4:48 pm

i thought the Dreamcast did have games on DVDs but they had multidisk games to save memory for graphics and music

JackFrost22 · Post by **JackFrost22** » Fri Mar 04, 2005 7:56 pm

to it has a "modded" cd laser

ninjai · Post by **ninjai** » Tue Apr 12, 2005 1:00 pm

I am having troubles beliving none of you know about the Dreamcast that plays DVD's from Japan. I dunno if it was ever released but I recall a site selling one.

I don't have time to look it up but here is a link with some mention of it.

http://www.megagames.com/news/html/cons ... cast.shtml

Another item that was halted durring production was the Treamcast, but that apears to be for sale as well.
http://www.lan-kwei.com/treamcastE/

well got to run out now so bye for now.

tom61 · Post by **tom61** » Tue Apr 12, 2005 3:32 pm

Unidentified Assilant wrote:Would a DVD drive in the Dreamcast work? I put a GD Disc in my PC (which has a DVD drive) and it read it as a DVD! Could i put a DVD Drive in my Dreamcast and be able to play DVD's on it too? And would it still play games? Because my Dreamcast GD Drive is playing terrible lately

It's not reading the full disc, only the section that is in ISO-9660 format. A very common mistake. You can't access the game data itself (which is why you have to rip games on a Dreamcast to use them in an emulator). Sometimes the developers or publisher hides something interesting in that space. DOA 2 has wall-paper on that portion of the disc.

ninjai wrote:I am having troubles beliving none of you know about the Dreamcast that plays DVD's from Japan. I dunno if it was ever released but I recall a site selling one.

From what I heard, the games would have to be re-released on DVD-rom to be playable on it. Pretty much all rumors, as the system was never released.

Sparkfist wrote:We know you can mod a Dreamcast to use a standard CD-rom, a DVD-rom I'm not sure would work. You might get all the cables connected to it but I dont thing it would be able to recognize it.

Never heard of the DC using a standard CD-Rom, except via the homebrew IDE/ISA adapter (which couldn't play GD-Rom games on the drive, which is implied that the mod you mentioned can do), do you have a link to more info about this mod?

Edit: nm, found one of your other posts: "Its been mentioned that it is possible, however the person that said you can never told of the site where they supposidly have the directions."

One final note:
The Dreamcast is not powerfull enough to decode MPEG2 video at the bitrates and resolutions encoded for DVDs. So, if you intended to use it play DVD videos, you'd have to add a dedicated decoder chip.

Alchemist · Post by **Alchemist** » Wed Apr 13, 2005 2:58 pm

Agreed. Let's clear this up: the DC does not have the capacity to read DVDs, nor is there the possibility that you could swap out any other drive for the DC's disc drive and things "just work" as you'd like them too. DC contains standard CD-ROM hardware with a few extra chips in to deal with the increase in data density from a normal CD-ROM (done by packing the data tighter and reducing error checking, which explains the high failure rate of rental GD-ROMs).

The Treamcast is a Dreamcast. Open it up and it's got a stock DC inside. It's not licensed and is of dubious legality.

Post by **Sparkfist** » Thu Apr 14, 2005 7:52 am

I have read that Sega had planned to made a modified Dreamcast that supported DVDs, However they dumbed the idea as it would add like $100 to the price list and also could offer region code. I'm sure you'd have to do some rerpogramming on the systems core to make a DVD player work. I'm still unsure if it would work as on a Pentium system you need like 300mHz+, but the SH-4 is a 64 so it might work at only 200mHz.

P.S. I will look to find that source and post it here.

Alchemist · Post by **Alchemist** » Sat Apr 16, 2005 8:03 am

It's certainly true that Sega were thinking of a DC/DVD combo - they even showed it at E3/some trade show one year, as I recall it was just a mock-up though, no hardware. I'd imagine they'd add a decoder chip rather than try and get the SH4/PowerVR to decode in software.

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