Skies of Arcadia Dreamcast case mod

Here’s a one-of-a-kind Sega Dreamcast art piece based off the Blue Rogues’ flag from the awesome RPG Skies of Arcadia!

One day I received a message from a member of the Digital Press forums who was interested in having me create a custom Skies of Arcadia themed Dreamcast for his collection. We talked about different designs, and finally settled on the flag of the Blue Rogues – a skull with an eye patch, crossed cutlasses, and wings.

I had never done a Dreamcast art piece before, so it presented a fun challenge: very limited clearance inside the disc tray area, the edges of the lid are slightly curved, and there’s limited “canvas” space to work on.

After playing around with the limitations of my tools, I started drawing out my design on the dismantled system. I cut out all the negative space, and was then left with a pile of little pieces. I started to wonder if this was a good idea – arranging them back in their appropriate places and gluing them down was going to be difficult.

I spent an insane amount of time sanding all the faces/edges of all the little pieces, but it paid off. I was able to get everything pretty smooth and I was satisfied enough to move on.

For the paint job, I collaborated with the man, the legend, “Custom NES Guy”. The system itself was painted white with dark blue used for the power and open buttons and the controller port numbers. A healthy layer of clear coat protects and makes it shine like glass.

I installed a slide switch on the back of the system so if you want to turn the blue LEDs off, you can. I also swapped out the stock orange LED for a blue one to match the color scheme.

The final step was a major pain – gluing all the little pieces in place on a sheet of thin clear acrylic.

So far, this has been the only Sega Dreamcast project I’ve ever created, but perhaps one day I’ll make another…

I hope you enjoy!