Above is the Dreamcast I dumped the BIOS from, along with the BIOS hardware involved.

I used httpd-ack-20080711.zip together with XDP.rar to retrieve my own BIOS image. The resulting archive was MPR-21871.zip.

The result was:

BIOS:    MPR-21871
Region:  PAL
Version: 1.01c
CRC32:   2f551bc5

That CRC32 matches the known value for the PAL MPR-21871 v1.01c BIOS, which is a useful sanity check that the dump matches the known revision. It also contains the well-known spelling oddity in the Dreamcast menu text.

Overall it wasn’t the world’s most exciting operation, but it was satisfying to dump the BIOS from my own Dreamcast. The last time I had attempted anything like this would have been about a decade earlier.

Glad to see it went considerably more smoothly this time.

Checking the dump

I also discovered that a crc32 utility was available in my Mac OS X terminal environment. Running crc32 followed by a file path produces the CRC-32 checksum for that file. It should not be assumed that every Mac installation includes that command. The utility I was using comes from the Perl Archive::Zip package.

CRC32 is very useful for recognising known ROM images and spotting accidental changes, but it is not a cryptographic integrity mechanism.

Just like that, checksum generated.

Free of charge! :)

Sources