The GDROM drive in the Dreamcast in my arcade cabinet is sometimes making unhealthy squeaking noises. That made me think about that when the GDROM eventually dies the Dreamcast is pretty much useless – and getting spare parts will continue getting harder.
Recently I got a new found interest in electronics after realizing what you can do nowadays with FPGAs and microcontrollers. I think it all started when I read about the Minimig – awesome project!
So I started toying around with the idea of replacing the GDROM drive with something else – a hard drive, connection to a PC or maybe a flash card. I did some googling and realized I wasn’t alone with that idea. A good thing is that the gdrom electronics are on a separate board which connects to the Dreamcast motherboard. Therefore it should be easy to replace at least physically.
