Dreamcat Disc Tray Mod

October 1st, 2007, 04:50 Posted By: Hesei

I've been trying this on and off for a few months now. The idea bing to have a standard 5.25" CD/DVD-ROM tray, lens (possible?), and spindle to load DC discs. This is the only site I know of with much on the topic, and most comes from the intuitive ptr.exe.

Since this topic hasn't been pressed in some time, I thought I might give it a shot, even with my minimal DC hardware knowledge.

First, what I have done... very little.
I've been operating under the idea that any laser diode will read the GD-ROM as long as the GD-ROM board is controlling it since the DC assembly is basically the same as a CD-ROM. Am I right, or seriously wrong? Would it be necessary to transplant the diode from the actual DC unit into the 5.25" unit to read anything?
I seem to remember an old DC ripping guide that specifically mentioned 2 drives that would read GD-ROM discs, but I can't remember if that was for a firmware hack or just native support.

So what I did manage to get done was get a CD-ROM drive hooked onto the GD-ROM board and move the lens around a bit. The only thing not working was the spindle... the most important and fundamental part. I could go try getting that running again, I have some legitimate ideas, but wanted to hear from anyone on the forum before I pull everything out again and make a mess.

An alternative was presented in one of the threads on this topic. It was to build the unit in the same manner as the dev kit, having the whole assembly slide out. (Pic)
That's actually the way I was going for a while, but I really would like to exhaust this method first.

So I hope someone out there has some ideas. I'll try to get back on the horse this week and figure out a few things about getting the spindle running, at least.

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