UPDATE! I knew I couldn't be the first person who wanted to do this and sure enough after some more searching I found someone else who not only wanted to do it but actually achieved it! First I'll let the pics do the talking
There is no need to combine 5 Dreamcast processors to get to 1 GHz. You can actually upgrade the CPU to a 3.6 GHz quad core! From what I've seen of it this seems to be how you upgrade the Dreamcast. First you upgrade the main board to one from a Deskmini X300. Once that is installed you can upgrade from 16mb of ram to 16 TERABYTES OF RAM!
Then you upgrade the GD-Rom drive to something like a 1 TB WD Black and you are pretty much good to go! The main drawback seems to be that you need to use an adapter to connect the controllers to the Dreamcast but that isn't really too big of a deal.
With these upgrades in place the Dreamcast goes from Windows CE to Windows 10/11! The 56k modem is upgraded to an ethernet port for maximum speed. Firefox runs great, pretty much the same as it would on a PC but on the Dreamcast! Another thing some people might see as a negative is the lack of an optical drive. Although it seems most people have modded their Dreamcast to run on SD cards by now anyways. I already had my DC games ripped to an SD card. But with the 1TB of storage the Dreamcast now has I was able to copy all my games straight onto the WD Black 1TB!
One odd thing is that you have to boot into Windows before you can boot into Dreamcast mode. Maybe this can be fixed in a future update, but as of now you have to load into Windows and then load some kind of Dreamcast game launcher called redream. The incredible thing about this frontend is that it can actually harness the power of the new upgrades to make Dreamcast games look and run better! The games look far better with these upgrades than it did with the VGA box! Which reminds me, I forgot to mention that with these upgrades the Dreamcast now has an integrated VGA box, no more dongles!
It really is amazing what a system released in 1999 is capable of with just a few upgrades. If Sega had released the Dreamcast with these upgrades from the start the whole Dreamcast VS PS2 era might have gone very differently! You might not believe this but with these upgrades the Dreamcast can now play PS2,Gamecube and Wii games! It would be very interesting to see what kind of homebrew games are possible with these upgrades.
Imagine if we'd known about this back in the DCEmulation days! Back then SNES wasn't fullspeed and N64 seemed impossible. We would have never believed that the Dreamcast was capable of natively running PS2 and Gamecube with just a few small upgrades!
Has anyone here upgraded their Dreamcast in a similar fashion? I'd be interested in hearing your stories!
