The fun begins...

Now the fun begins, fitting the hard disk and DVD-ROM. The hard disk used was a 40GB 2.5" laptop, so was more than small enough to fit in the case, but where. Lets just side step a minute. I am using a laptop hard disk as they are virtually silent, draw less power and are smaller. I am also using a slim-line (laptop) DVD-ROM drive. Again this is because a full sized drive simply would not fit in the case. If I had used a 3.5" or full CD/DVD drive I would also have required a larger PSU, which would then mean a larger case and more noise, in turn making the objective of this project unreachable. Anyway, to mount the hard disk and DVD-ROM drive I employed the help of my father to make me a bracket out of stainless steel. This allowed the DVD-ROM drive to be attached by screws on one side and a shelf on the other. The hard disk is attached via four screws from underneath. Note the tape is only there temporarily whilst some glue dries.

Now the power and reset switches are required. Since the original MEGA-CD was controlled via an attached MEGA-DRIVE, it did not have any switches. Not wanting to damage the look of the front, I mounted two switches, donated by my brother, on the rear of the machine:

Next is the LED’s to indicate power and hard drive activity. The front bezel has a position for two LED’s to be attached. To keep to the original colour scheme, the power LED is green and the hard disk / DVD-ROM activity LED is red. These are then connected to the motherboard in the usual way.

Almost there. Most of my work is now sent either via email or on a pen drive. I did not want too keep fiddling around at the back of the machine to find USB ports, so I decided to mount two extra USB ports of the part of the case that rises on one side. This originally was used to connect to the MEGA-DRIVE. I required a special cable to convert the mini header to a normal USB (0.1") connector. The USB connectors themselves required significant modification, trimming, etc. to get them to fit, which was accomplished with a trusty pen knife.