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Sega Dreamcast is not an example of a console that inbound describe as “built to last”. I had two and both of them died in the same way - the optical lens cracked from heat stress and stopped reading disks. There was never any warning it was about to happen, and no way to prevent it as far as I knew.
As unlucky as I was with the Dreamcast, I made up for is by only ever having to buy one Xbox 360. I still own my original console which was never refurbished and never red ringed on me.
But god forbid you unplug a controller while the console is switched on. Better know how to replace that fuse on the controller board!
(If you just bridge it with a wire, I won’t tell anyone).
Huh??
The CMOS battery of my PSP 3000 died years ago :(
“oh gee i sure hope no one cums in me”
Is anyone else’s Dreamcast yellow now?
I bought it in the year it was released and it was used quite a bit (euphemism) back then. But I dug it from the closet it was stored in and now is yellow. Remote control and all. All the consoles stored along with it still look the same. All the older ones looking the same as they always were, but Dreamcast decided to have that “we’re fucking old” moment with me. Haven’t tried turned it on out of fear of mortality being the next reminder it has in store for me.
Just as a quite warning- retrobright will make the plastic of the dreamcast white, but it will also make it more brittle, and it’s not a permanent solution. It WILL yellow again, and repeated applications of retrobright will make it more and more brittle.
Oh, thank you for the heads up. I got excited at the prospect of restoring it. I like to restore stuff when I can. Usually is more wood related items. Sad to hear this, but thank you for informing me though.
Maybe I’ll just have it like it is. I’ll call it a “sepia vintage” look as a cool spin to pretend I’m not jealous that others got better and more durable plastic for the same price as me.
Cheers and thanks again.
Let me be the one to introduce you to the rabbit hole that is retr0bright. There are numerous videos on youtube of various different methods of retro-brighting.
The most scientifically thorough treatment of the phenomenon that I’ve seen is this paper: https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/The-Retrobright-Mystery.pdf
Soak the plastic in hydrogen peroxide and oxy booster stain fighter
For the rest of you ADHD havers who don’t have the patience to get that write up to fit on your phone screen.
Wow. This has to be one of the most phenomenal hacks that someone has presented me in a long time.
I had no idea of this.
Thank you very much.
No problem, let me just say that I haven’t tried it myself but I’ve watched a lot of videos of other people trying it and the worst results that I’ve seen have been the ones using a gel that they paint onto the plastic and then cover in plastic wrap. This tends to leave a streaky effect because the substance is not equally thick in every area and so it has more whitening effect where it’s thicker.
The best results that I’ve seen have been the ones that have completely submerged the plastic in a liquid peroxide solution, or have suspended the plastic above the solution to immerse it in the vapors that evaporate off from the peroxide (pure oxygen). These methods give completely uniform coverage so they whiten the plastic equally in every place.
It seems that you also need strong UV, and people that live nearer the equator have better success using the sun. But in the absence of good UV lighting, heat also seems to have some effect.
Good luck!
Mine’s still white, but I’d always heard there were different types of plastic used in consoles (and computer cases) back then, some of which would become discolored, and others wouldn’t. Might be true, unless anyone in your house has been a smoker in the last 25 years.
No. No smokers. And the console was stored in the original box in a closet. Not in the corner collecting dust. So it must be the plastic it was used somehow. Sad. I always really liked the Dreamcast look. And it is still one of my favorite controllers after so many years.
You are correct, it’s the plastic. Or rather, the fire retardant mixed into the plastic.
Look up a cleaning solution called ‘RetroBright’. It’s designed to remove the yellowing from the ABS housings of old electronics. I’m pretty sure the recipe for it is available free online, or you can order pre-mixed bottles of it. You have to be a little careful with it because it’s mostly hydrogen peroxide, but I hear it works great.
My DC is still bright white, but my snes looks like it used to smoke.
that description is so on point
Remember when printers wouldn’t even warn you that the ink was out? They would just give you a weird magenta ghost of what you were trying to print.
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Okay, now I know why my Dreamcast keeps asking for the time and date every time I turn it on. Always wondered, but never checked because it worked regardless.
The battery is soldered in, but it’s dead simple to desolder and replace with a proper battery holder so you can easily replace it down the road. Just make sure 6ou remember to use a rechargeable.
Um…are there different models of dreamcast? I changed mine a decade ago. Just popped out. Popped new one in.
Probably gotta do it again if I were to play dreamcast again.
Yeah, if I ever did that, I’d rather take it to someone who knows what they’re doing. I have little experience soldering and I don’t want to destroy something in my Dreamcast by accident.
That’s fair. I’d consider myself fairly new to it all, I’m not passing judgment but it’s worth checking out a vid on how to do… If you’ve used a soldering iron once or twice you could probably handle it.
You may also want to (or have your person doing the work) replace the single-shot resistor fuse with a self-healing one while they’re in there. Both parts are on the controller board. The fuse is notorious for blowing, and that can make the whole system unable to detect your controllers.
If you’re wondering what this is about: The PS4 used to require its internal clock to be correct to play any game, even disc based ones, and the only way to do so is to connect to PSN, meaning that in a distant future when the PSN goes down (or Sony no longer allows PS4s to connect to it) all your games would become useless. And the worst part? They did all of this because of trophies.
Sony has fixed the issue on Update 9.0, but the fact that it was ever an issue and caused by a totally non-essential feature is baffling.
how would it know if the time wasn’t correct
If it can’t get an encrypted timestamp signed by a particular private key then it knows it doesn’t know what time it is
Oh? They fixed the cbomb?
no way that’s not related to drm lol
Excuse me what’s the ominous “71 days” on the Sonic Adventure game cover am I cursed now
You have 71 days to share this picture with someone else. If you don’t, Eggman will crawl out of this meme completely nude and covered in oil.
Can he be played by Danny DeVito in the movie?
Porn??
That’s a nude egg I won from my game!
That’s disgusting! Uncalled for! Truly despicable! How could they make me wait an entire 71 days for that?!
If anyone needs me I’ll be hedging my hog
You sure know how to make someone not want to share this picture.
the artist, keith stack, uses to do daily comics leading up to major releases, hiding a countdown in each comic
Game Boy cartridges not saving games due to dead battery is sad.
Setting the clock on each boot, after the rechargable CMOS battery died, sucks. I speak from experience with Dreamcast consoles. Best you solder in a battery holder and put in a new rechargable coin cell. … or add a diode and put in an ordinary non-rechargable.
Back in the Nintendo era we picked up a copy of Final Fantasy I when the local rental shop went out of business… The battery in it was 100% dead. So my brother would just leave the Nintendo on.
I don’t think I’ve had a console affected by this though.
Recently I had an Evercade cart die. It was the flash memory that gave up, though. Not the battery.
I remember I had NHL 95 on the Genesis brand new and could never figure out why it would never save my season. Years later I realized “damn battery was dead, why didn’t I just return it?” still played the hell out of the game though.
I did this around 2012 or so when I was working through some of the harder NES titles on cartridge and didn’t want to lose my progress at night if I was close. Ninja Gaiden, Contra, Castlevania, Mega Man.
Man, I remember when I used to play the Dreamcast and awesome games like Power Stone 2 and Super Magnetic Neo! The little cartridge inside the controller was awesome too.
When it came out, Dreamcast legit felt like it was from 5-10 years in the future.
Considering the Dreamcast had such a tiny library, it truly was 5-10 years in the future.
Nothing bad even happened to a Dreamcast… Right ?
this is how a buddy and I cheesed playing through seaman in a single afternoon, just kept bumping the clock forward
