I had previously used the common 29LV160TMC chip and simply wired the power differently.

The VA0 motherboard is immediately recognisable because of the heat-pipes and massive cooling block by the metal fan that it uses for cooling, it uses a different BIOS chip to later model Dreamcast console – the chip is runs at 5V. I previously mentioned that if doing a complete replacement then you still had to lift legs 1 and 44 – I have since found it that this isn’t true, the pads for these legs aren’t connected to anything so you may as well just solder the legs to the pads anyway to keep them secure. You can remove the existing BIOS chip, and replace it with a pre-programmed chip (looking for a cheap reliable source for this chip, I’ve bought some from Bad_Ad84, he even offers a flashing service) Once you have the programmed chip, then you can simply remove the old BIOS and fit the new one. There are a couple of different ways to fit this BIOS, originally this page was showing you how to do the piggyback install, then I added some photos showing how the BIOS installed after removing the existing BIOS chip. Why perform this mod? Well you’ll end up with a Dreamcast which is different to most others, plus it will be truly region free, the current 4 wire modchips need you to switch the console off and back on again if swapping between different region discs. Here’s the developers site, the BIOS is still being developed too! UPDATE – this is the site now being updated. Thank you to the people over at RetroMods, I saw this new regionfree DC BIOS, which removes the VGA check along with some other features.

Have a look at the startup animation which has been hacked into the BIOS, it’s from a DC Development Kit. Not only did he make it regionfree, he also inserted the 3D bootup animation from the Dreamcast Development Unit BIOS. A while back, link83 hacked up the Dreamcast BIOS.

Dreamcast bios all regions download