Home	Forums	What's new	Resources

Dc in car, replace laser ribbbon w\ wires

Agent21KGB - Jul 23, 2002

		Agent21KGB		Jul 23, 2002
			Ok I happen to have an extra dreamcast and a cassette tape holder below the cd player in my car, so I figure hell put the dc in the car. Problem here is that I can fit the mobo, power supply, and contoller ports along with the lcd below the cd player but not the gd rom assembly. Solution put a standard portable (gutted) cd player on the side of the center console and put the gd rom assembly in that. Now I notice that there are a total of 24 wire\laser ribbon contact points on the mobo (model year 2000) that i need to connect so i figure I will use a standard parallel cable for easy connect\disconnect. So what is the easiest way to solder the laser ribbon contact points to a parellel cable port? And will the voltage be way off due to the change from the laser ribbon traces to the 18 gauge wire? Any further tips and comments are welcome.

		opaque1234		Jul 23, 2002
			i personally haven't tried to do anything like this but if you're unsure about a parallel wire causing too much resistance you can always use kynar wire. I forget which guague it is but i have used it for installing territory switches in my saturn as well as my neo 4 for my ps2. You can get it at a local radio shack for under 5$. Comes on a neat little spool., the wire is essentially as thin (if not thinner) than dental floss. I'm pretty sure this would be perfect for this type of application however the one concern i would question is if the dc cd-rom drive requires a small 2 inch cable for a reason. It could be that the mobo/cd rom is engineered to run with a small cable but as i said i haven't tried it personally. I'd like to know if you get it to work.

		Agent21KGB		Jul 24, 2002
			Yeah that was my exact thoughts. The wire would be going from the like 1' ish (stock) to like 4' ish which is vastly more and I just don't know the actual votage formula needed here. I would think that the voltage amount would not be specific since the dc has so many models and sega wanted to keep costs down.

		Vic Viper		Jul 25, 2002
			Better than doing that, what about doing the extension on the BUS (using a 1999 model, which have the GD rom drive board separated and detachable) The conection of the laser unit to the drive is analogic, so it's very sensible to noise and long wires. In other hand, the GD rom bus is digital, so it should work fine with a 50 or 60 cm of wire (max size, I bet ...) and FCC bitting you also to be considered as a possibility ... It might sound weird to you, but the comunication betwheen the laser assembly and the GD rom board is fully analogic. Putting long cables will surely diminish the drive speed and raise the error rate, making it unstable. What about using the DC on it's original case, so you figure out somewhere to hide it, and using the space you said you have under your sound system for a customized controller to control the DC playback ? Also the powersuply might be a issue, as it need a relatively high current od 3.3v. But this idea seems very promissing to me. Good luck man !

		ExCyber		Jul 27, 2002
			I would be careful about your connection methods as well. Inappropriate connectors could possibly introduce more capacitance into the system than it can cope with. I don't have enough experience in analog electronics to be completely sure in recommending a connection method, but something like a high-speed SCSI or ATA cable would probably be fine.