I recently acquired a PC-9801RA2 and have been gradually upgrading it with new C-Bus cards, external drives, CPU accelerators, and anything else I can find to make it as flexible a package as I possible can. In a perfect world, perhaps I’d even be able to avoid buying a PC-9821 for later games of the era, but I’m not sure how far I can push with CPU and memory upgrades.
One key part of this involves adding an internal HDD to run my OS of choice (MS-DOS 6.2) and host all the dumps I make of games. While the RA series comes with a slot for an internal drive (and the RA5/51 both come with a drive included), on the RA2/RA5 this is largely limited by hardware to 40MB SASI drives—barely enough for the MS-DOS 6.2 installation by itself!
Since SCSI C-Bus boards are pretty easy to come by and perhaps there could be some way to integrate with a card that fits in the pre-existing internal drive slot, I chose to give BlueSCSI a shot!
There are many great visual guides out there for installing a single switch region mod for the original Mega Drive, but in my searches to find one for the Mega Drive II (specifically a MD2 VA1 PAL in this case), I found mostly ancient guides and forum posts often missing images or including instructions on how to perform the more complex process of replacing the DFO as part of the mod. Since I use SCART for RGB anyway, I didn’t much care about dealing with replacing the DFO and wanted to perform the simplest possible mod to render my Mega Drive II region free.
In this post, I’ll detail the process with images for illustration, though I would like to preface this with a disclaimer that any modifications made based on what’s written here are performed entirely at the reader’s risk. I do not claim to be an expert and this modification may not work if the board differs from the one specifically mentioned.
