Off topic, Dreamcasts were one of the first and only consoles that i made an extra effort to procure from pawm shops, repeatedly, as each one I obtained succumbed to hardware failure within very little time.
Should their hardware have been more resilient, as their security, the Dreamcasts would have been an amazing console, more than it already was.
einsteinx2•3mo ago
I’m curious what hardware failures you had. In my experience (I’ve had a Dreamcast since they were new and have been a part of the homebrew scene for years) they are absolutely rock solid hardware. Can take a ton of abuse without issue and I’ve never had a single console fail on me, nor have I heard of failures from my homebrew scene buddies…
To be clear I’m not implying you’re lying or anything, I was just extremely surprised to hear this as it goes against all of my experience with the console.
doublerabbit•3mo ago
The disc laser can become problematic and fail to read parts of the disc.
As well as the motor that spins the disc dreamcast has been known to fail on start up requiring you to spin the disk first.
einsteinx2•3mo ago
Ah ok that makes sense. I never had mine fail back in the day even though I was playing tons of CD-R’s, but that’s my n=1 experience.
More recently we’ve all been using GDEMU ODEs to replace our drives and also heavy use of the BBA (broadband adapter) for development, so very little use of actual disc drives.
FWIW I’ve found the rest of the system to be incredibly resilient, I’ve never seen a motherboard or CPU/GPU chip failure ever even after some pretty gnarly hack job mods and other dumb stuff haha. Same with the OG Xbox consoles.
Disc drive issues make more sense though. Thanks for the info.
klaussilveira•3mo ago
What's a good place to get a GDEMU and BBA?
einsteinx2•3mo ago
It’s unfortunately more or less impossible to get an original GDEMU because the creator makes (or made) such small batches and didn’t believe in preorders or wait lists, so the only way to get one is to buy a clone on AliExpress or eBay.
I would love to support the original creator and not buy clones, but after years of waiting I gave up and so did everyone else I know. Luckily the quality of the clones is great and they work just as well as the original (some early models had compatibility issues with a very small number of games but that’s long since been resolved).
For BBA’s the only way to get one is to buy used on eBay or from a Japanese auction site. They’re not cheap though, somewhere in the $100-200 range I think, but if you do a lot of DC homebrew dev they’re absolutely worth it if you can afford it.
Otherwise you can buy a serial adapter for much cheaper and use that, but the transfer speed is significantly slower.
x______________•3mo ago
As pointed out in a more eloquent reply, disc read failures. Games would take more and more time to load until complete failure or the console would just stop loading completely and would no longer boot up. I wasn't in a position to hack hardware back then :/
x______________•3mo ago
Should their hardware have been more resilient, as their security, the Dreamcasts would have been an amazing console, more than it already was.
einsteinx2•3mo ago
To be clear I’m not implying you’re lying or anything, I was just extremely surprised to hear this as it goes against all of my experience with the console.
doublerabbit•3mo ago
As well as the motor that spins the disc dreamcast has been known to fail on start up requiring you to spin the disk first.
einsteinx2•3mo ago
More recently we’ve all been using GDEMU ODEs to replace our drives and also heavy use of the BBA (broadband adapter) for development, so very little use of actual disc drives.
FWIW I’ve found the rest of the system to be incredibly resilient, I’ve never seen a motherboard or CPU/GPU chip failure ever even after some pretty gnarly hack job mods and other dumb stuff haha. Same with the OG Xbox consoles.
Disc drive issues make more sense though. Thanks for the info.
klaussilveira•3mo ago
einsteinx2•3mo ago
I would love to support the original creator and not buy clones, but after years of waiting I gave up and so did everyone else I know. Luckily the quality of the clones is great and they work just as well as the original (some early models had compatibility issues with a very small number of games but that’s long since been resolved).
For BBA’s the only way to get one is to buy used on eBay or from a Japanese auction site. They’re not cheap though, somewhere in the $100-200 range I think, but if you do a lot of DC homebrew dev they’re absolutely worth it if you can afford it.
Otherwise you can buy a serial adapter for much cheaper and use that, but the transfer speed is significantly slower.
x______________•3mo ago