Putting it all together

All of the parts now set-up and working, the final part was to put it all together. This revealed one snag. The back panel could not be fitted as intended due to the motherboard being placed at an angle. Again, to resolve this, a couple of metal spacers were placed in and all parts sprayed black:

The final part of assembly was to replace the DVD-ROM front with the original from the MEGA-CD case. The DVD-ROM front was first removed (see figure 15). The next problem was that the new front was such a distance from the eject button that the eject button could not be used. I had to replace the original button with a new mini push switch from Maplin that brought the button right up to the front panel again and the original button fascia used:

Finishing it off

To finish it all of, a real OS was loaded, Linux (Fedora Core 2), straight from a bootable DVD-ROM. This required another boot up disk as this version of Linux has some minor bugs that will not allow it to be loaded from the DVD. However it is now all installed and set-up with a RETRO-PC, the MEGA-CD sitting on my desk. I am using a Netgear MA311 to connect to my wireless network. After many hours I finally got the device working using the NDIS Wrapper project.

Mega-Gallery

Conclusion

This has been a fantastic project to make. However, there have been several problems which I hope you will learn from as I have. That is plan your project, check sizes and check compatibility between parts. All sensible points - make sure you learn from my mistakes…