I bought a DC today

Went to a swap-meet today and bought a DC, 1 controller, One memory thing (looks like little gameboy), cables, and 2 games. all for $5. got home. Wont read disk. How do i go about fixing this? any suggestions?

 

thank you for the info. i tried each of these methods and i got varying results none of which fixed my problem. i noticed that a couple of screws were missing from the bottom (never a good sign) and some plastic clips were broken off inside. so i'm going to chalk this up to an awesome paperweight.

 

Oh. BTW. PM sent to see if you had any $5 DCs left.

 

i think that you need to check if the laser is working. There's a visual method that involve looking from a side, you will see a red dot in the lens. YOU DON'T HAVE TO LOOK IT FROM THE TOP OF THE LENS!!!
If you succeed to see the red dot, it means that the laser is working, so you can tune the pot, use a multimeter to check the right value. If that DC was opened before, there's a chance that someone tried to calibrate the laser and the pot was moved before, so the multimeter will give you the right value. There's a lot of tutorials on the net with the right values for every laser model, just search for it.
I can tell by own experience that the DC's are HEAVY machines: mine came almost destroyed, dusty, all dissasembled and non working and now it works fine; i have fixed the laser, the power board, the lid switch and the power switch.
Of course, if you don't want to fix it...SEND IT TO ME (i'll give it a good home hehheheee).

 

Hah. How bout i send it to you as well as a few bucks and you send me a working one

but yeah. the lady i bought it from looked like a meth addict, A Tweaker, so i bet her or one of her tweaky friends opened it up and royally F*cked it.

 

I could fix your Dreamcast, but the shipping (to Argentina) will be too much expensive (i think). I was hoping that ASSEMBler could send me one of his five-bucks-dc, but no answer till now...

...so i will have to steal one from his house, where does he live?

Here all old videogame stuff are expensive (collectors stupidity), so if you want to buy a dc, with games, controllers and vmu's, is almost as expensive as buying a new Wii. I bought my dreamcast to a friend, in fact it was not a dreamcast, it was a supermarket bag with dreamcast stuff.

 

As well as the above you could also just try cleaning the laser with a cotton bud (q-tip) and some isopropyl alcohol.

 

:banghead:
you're right!!! i forgot that!

 

After just finishing a memoir of a former meth head a few days ago, this is completely possible. In the book the guy met another meth head who thought he could "fix" a computer and had it taken apart all over the floor. The guy didn't give many details on exactly what was going on due to not being technologically literate but from what the dude said the problem supposedly was the computer clearly wasn't going to be functional anytime soon.

Likely the Dreamcast is fine and just needs some TLC. If you want it fixed I can take a look at it as this sort of thing is my forte. Hell if you wanted I could even solder in a replacement bios chip as I still have one kicking about.

Though I heavily suggest checking to see if the laser is alive first and cleaning it with rubbing alcohol+q-tip. Fixes most problems right there. Though you won't get the laser to fire unless the contact switch telling the thing the lid is closed is still functional. Not sure I can get an exact replacement for this part but I can find approximations that should work just as well. I think the SegaCD used the same part iirc.

 

i've replaced the lid switch with a little on-off switch, it works pretty fine.

 

k. so i bought another DC today for $5 at a different swap-meet. this one too will not read disks. im going to take careful care and follow the instructions you guys layed out for me. (thanks) and we will see what happens. best case scenario, I'll have a broken DC. Worse case, I'll have two.

in any event. I'll have a spare broken one that i would be more than happy to part with.

 

I bought a DC for a similar price, wouldn't read discs.

A quick clean of the lens with some IPA and a q-tip (cotton bud) and it's running pretty well.

 

ive been trying to get this ting working for a while now and i got it to the point where it will play audio off the game disk but it refuses to load the game. i have tried 3 separate disks....

I wish there was a way for me to just BUY a working one. Jeez.

 

ok. so....
The DC i bought yesterday wouldnt work. i opened it up to reveal that some crackhead did a hack and smash job on "Fixing" this unit. so I followed assemblers instructions but only messed with it for about 10 mins. i chalked it up to a loss. today i bought another DC and this one did not work also. I spent the two hours messing with it but was unable to get it to do anything other than read music data off the game disks. I also noticed that it looks different inside. the only writing i could find that was different was on the outside. it says "Made in Japan" and has a number 1 in a circle, this is the one i bought today that doesnt work. and the one from yesterday says "Made in China" and has a number 2 in a circle. i dont understand. i couldnt find info on this on google.

so... i figured i didnt have anything to lose so i plugged the made in China DC back in and for some weird reason, it booted right up. It works!!

Can anyone give me the story about these two different DCs?

 

Ive been bitten by the Dreamcast bug now. Games don't cost too much either. Im not one for burning games i don't have, and from what i understand CD-Rs are what make these systems have problems in the first place. So I plan on going 100% legitimate on DC gaming. Can't wait to get one of these things to run properly.

 

Back in the day when the Dreamcast was still alive and we were all psyched about all the great games that were going to come out for the thing there was much debate over what the number meant and I don't think after all these years there really was a consensus about it. Most people thought it had to do with Mil-CD support but that has been disproven. I'd guess it indicates hardware revision to some extent but without having access to different Dreamcast revisions I cannot say. AFAIK there are only a handful of differences between the models

http://ntsc-uk.domino.org/showthread.php?t=66467

These guys have got various bits of the technical information on it. Not much in the way of solid evidence (such as pictures) but I wouldn't doubt most of it is true. Never heard of a HKT-5010 model Dreamcast though.

As well as there being many limited edition Dreamcasts put out in Japan:
http://segaretro.org/Special_Dreamcast_Models

Most of which are somewhat to extremely hard to find and usually cost a pretty penny or four dozen.

Yes CD-Rs likely will be the early end of the poor thing.

BTW:
http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=24880

You might find this to be of interest. I recently performed this mod myself and am quite pleased with the results. Just need to wire up a switch so I can change it between the stock BIOS and the piggybacked BIOS chip.

This as well:
http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26721

If the Dreamcast(s) you have don't have functional lasers this might help you out. Problem is that it is particularly hard to get ahold of such old CD-ROM drives that you might not be able to one. Though I'd be tempted to buy any extra DCs you end up with that work/don't work you don't want assuming the price is right.

 

Laser pick up shipped today.
For bomberhead.

 

The circled number under the case is the revision number of your console. Through the years I've seen all three revisions myself. Rev0 is the "metal heatsink and fan" cooled one; the Rev1 is the classical plastic fan cooled one and the Rev2 is the one with the gd-rom daughterboard incorporated in the motherboard itself (so only the gd-rom "block" is repalced by a simple laser assembly on spacers with a ribbon cable connected to the MotherBoard.)

Of course this is not strict descriptions, late model 0 might be like model 1 and early model 1 might be like model 0, I can't tell for sure! It's at least a good indication though!

Hope this clears it up!

FG

 

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