Well I finally got my replacement Dreamcast today to replace my original one that I broke. Got it for a great deal, $10 for a DC, hookups, VMU, 2 controllers, 1 game, and best of all, a fishing controller! Works great on all my originals, but as soon as I popped in a burned disc (Border Down, awesome shooter) it wouldn't play, just acted like it was a regular music cd. Now I know that the later Dreamcasts wouldn't play burned games, but my question is this. Is this revision in the motherboard or in the GD drive itself? I've got 2 spare GD drives laying around here both from old Dreamcasts that would play burned discs. I was just curious as to if swapping the drive out would make a difference or if the problem stems from revisions to the motherboard itself.
The Dreamcasts that had the mil-CD exploit removed did it in BIOS, they simply didn't support the mil-CD format. I don't know this from first-hand experience since I've never come across such a Dreamcast. I think they're somewhat rare. It's definitely not a matter of all Dreamcast made after November or December 2000 not supporting mil-CD, some or maybe even most definitely definitely do. Also, there's another boot exploit that people worked out that'd different from mil-CD, called bin2boot or data/data, and some people claim that the later non-mil-CD Dreamcasts will work with the data/data method. It seems like they would if all Sega did was remove the mil-CD support. However there's just not enough good information out there to know for sure. This is confused by the fact that some Dreamcasts regardless of when they were manufactured seem to be picky about booting CDRs. I have come across at least one Dreamcast--manufactured in 1999--that wouldn't play two thirds of the burned discs I tried on it. It wasn't my DC, so I wasn't able to really test out all my theories, but I'm pretty sure that it was a GD-drive problem and the discs it liked were probably burned at a lower speed or may have been better quality media. Replacing the GD-drive in a Dreamcast is really pretty trivial, so if you have extras lyig around that you know work, you might as well try it. ...word is bondage...
Well I cracked it open just to try swapping GD drives, but whats this? The inside of the December 2000 Dreamcast is different! The drives aren't interchangable! Here's a pic of my Dreamcasts side by side: The one on the left is the December 2000 DC, the one on the right is my old March 2000 DC. Notice how on the December one (left), the drive connects to the main board with a flat cable, while the March one (right) connects to the board through a connector on the bottom of the GD drive (See below the DC on the right for an original GD drive turned over to show the connector). Well I shall have to look into the non-mil-cd expolit and see if that will work for me, otherwise I'll probably end up buying another Dreamcast here. Anyone have one that is confirmed to work w/ burns that they want to sell?
I have a March 2k DC and it boots CDRs just fine. I forget which month exactly that the DCs had this exploit fixed. Assembler might have some regular DCs from acclaim, shoot him a PM.
I remember reading somewhere that Dreamcasts with a "0" or "1" on the bottom read CD-Rs fine, and that it was the "2"s that had difficulty. Can anyone confirm this, or is it just a myth?
The December 2000 Dreamcast (one that won't boot burned discs) has a 2 on the bottom. The March 2000 one has a 1 on the bottom and used to play burns fine until I broke it.
Same here, the one on the right is a March 2000 one and I never had problems with booting CDR's, that is until I messed up doing some hardware mods on it one day and ended up burning off some tracings on the main board. Tried patching it up with wire but didn't have any luck. It actually still works (sound anyways), but won't display video anymore, you just get wavy lines.
Yeah, something like that is what I've heard, too. There's also something about a circle or a square around the number or something. I'm pretty vague on the details, but I think that's supposed to be the actual way of telling rather than the manufacture date. kingofthelobster, if you try the data/data method, please post here with the results because I'm interested to know just for future knowledge. Unfortunately I'm far away from all my DC stuff at the moment and for the forseeable future or else I would offer to send you a disc burned with that method for free. Very few burnable images for the DC are in data/data format, so you'll have to make your own using a selfboot kit. Go to http://www.consolevision.com/members/sbiffy/ and get Sbindcv4.exe from the root of the files section and then a couple games or demos from the appropriate subfolders and try it out. In the Selfboot Inducer program, either the DiscJuggler or Nero DAO or TAO options will use data/data, while the CD Record method uses mil-CD (audio/data). If you're not familiar with Dreamcast homebrew, the games I suggest trying first are Alice Dreams, dRxLax, Amanda, DCastle, Joggle, Super Mario War and Noiz2sa Over Dreamcast. There's other good homebrews, but those are the most immediately enjoyable, I think. Be sure to get the most recent versions of those games, too, since Sbiffy! still has old versions for some of them. (Actually, when I get the chance, I should make the same offer here that I made on a few other boards: to send out free of charge Dreamcast discs with complete collections of all the homebrew games and demos available complete with my own custom (and impressive!) menu to all interested parties. It's not really expensive to do and I always like to get people interested in the DC homebrew scene. Unfortunately I can't do that right now.) ...word is bondage...
