Trip Mercy wrote:what I would do if I was you, is totally mod the whole dreamcast. add a dvd drive into it somehow, replace the pins if need be. Or get some parts from a ps2 and find a new casing and create a system that plays Dreamcast and PS2 games and DVD's/CD's
I take it you don't know much about modding.
I, myself, am only semi-knowledgeable about modding. But I can tell you right now that the plan you just outlined won't work. Perhaps I could come up with a system that would use only one of the types of controllers (that would actually be pretty easy; there are PS2-to-Dreamcast adapters out there, so I could use one type of controller for both systems.)
Unfortunately, the Dreamcast uses a very special type of disc: the GD-ROM. It has a few differences from a regular CD or DVD. For one, a CD holds 700MB, a DVD holds 4.7 or 9GB, and a GD-ROM holds about 1.2GB. The data is spaced out differently on all three of those discs. On top of that, a GD-ROM drive uses a different technology than a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive. CDs and DVDs run at a "Constant Linear Velocity". As the rings towards the inner edge of the disc are shorter than the ones towards the outer edge, the drive motor slows down to keep the length of data that the laser traces on the disc the same. This causes data to be read from the disc at a constant rate. A GD-ROM runs at a "Constant Angular Velocity." In this system, the disc always spins at the same speed. As the laser gets closer to the outer edge of the disc, more data is read by the laser in a shorter amount of time, because the amount of disc that passes overhead is greater. This allows data to be read more quickly from the outer edges of the disc, making it a better place for video data and such.
Because of the fundamental differences between CD/DVD's and GD-ROMs, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to find a reader that is capable of dealing with both types of discs. The Dreamcast's drive is an obvious exception, because of its capability of reading CD's and GD-ROM discs. However, it was specially designed this way, while other drives are not designed to accept GD-ROMs. It could not be easily modified to read DVD-ROMs.
To create a modification like the one you suggested above, I'd have to have a system that contained both of the mainboards from both systems (as they have very different chipsets, and otherwise I'd have to develop emulation software which probably wouldn't work well... I rather doubt that the PS2 could emulate the Dreamcast quickly enough), I'd have to custom-design and build a drive that could be compatible with both the Dreamcast and the PS2, and figure out how to hook it into both of the boards.
There are other problems on top of that, but as you can see, it's no small engineering feat. While I can build circuits, I've never had to design one that complex before, and I
definitely don't have the resources or knowledge to develop a hybrid CD/GD/DVD-ROM drive. I did hear a report once of someone who managed to rip a GD-ROM using a specific model of DVD drive, but it would be almost as difficult to find that article, find that model of drive, and then find a way to modify it so that it could work in both a Dreamcast and a PS2. And that
still doesn't overcome the difficulty of the Dreamcast reading data more quickly at the outer edges of a disc.
I have my Saturns, I have some of my games, I have a RasPi. Gotta put all this stuff together!