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Sega DreamCast - The Country Mod
Background
A DreamCast cannot play all the new imports available from countrys out side your home
territory. The nice people at Sega have buit in some checking machanism that allows only
your original home territory disks to boot on your machine... so in otherwords you can
play only software that is licensed only for your country. Currently there are 3
territorys namely Japan,US, Europe. The machines are all basically the same the JAP and US
models are NTSC and use 110volts whilst the European models are the same PAL machine using
240volts. The territory lockout is all to do with politics of
people at Sega and the software houses, games prices differ between countrys and so do
release dates.
Recently, there are numbers of method to kick away the territory lockout FUNCTION. If you only want to make the things work, their instruction is enough !! Want to know how things work ? Sorry, they'll never tell you the secret.
Finding
DC Boot up Rom Location, photo take from my DC may be differents from yours
Pin Assignment of the ROM, Size 2M x 8 Bit
23 wires version mod chip pin assignment
Conclusion
Unlike PSX , DC check territory lockout code by software implemented in boot up
ROM. To disable the software from checking, you'll have to patch the ROM code. Since the
ROM can not be rewrite and replacment ROM is hard to find (don't know!! just guess you
can't buy a blank SEGA MPR21931). The smart guys found another way, use a pair of PLD to
intercept the ROM output. that's it. At first someone released a 23 wires version. now the
5 wires version is actually an optimized version, nothing new.
That's all, Finally please don't ask me for the PAL source, I'm not going to release anymore about this topic. Anyway with the information provided, simple vector test will do.
Alex Lau
Last modified : 11 Feb 2000