The utopia bootdisk, the second patched version that forced games into vga mode even if they didn’t support it, was the shit (when it worked and didn’t break the game haha)

Also just a crazy time where standards were much more oriented towards the consumer. I remember I wanted a vga box but they were $50-100 at the time and I couldn’t afford that. So I just made one. They were deadass simple to make. The only exotic parts were an octal buffer (at the time and still now like $1) and a connector for the Dreamcast av port. Otherwise it was just standard shit, a small handful of cheap and very easy to source resistors, caps, diodes, a basic switch, and a vga cable. You could also give it s-video out very easily with 2 caps and and the standard din connector for s-video, which was easy to source back then (radioshack would have most of this at the time)

https://gamesx.com/grafx/dricas.gif gamesx still has the schematic I used up (just in case you thought I remembered all that shit haha). Super simple.

Nowadays that kind of thing is impossible. You simply want to add a device between your console and tv to capture video or extract audio? It’s a goddamn nightmare because hdcp and drm are baked into everything. Prevents absolutely no piracy btw, every single streaming show, bluray, 4k uhd bluray, dvd, etc has been ripped and posted in full quality, but it’s absolutely necessary to have this even though it drives up complexity and costs