This just in: Dreamcast console a piece of crap!

Despite the massive anti-Sony fanboyism that is often displayed when it comes to quality of hardware, I am going to rant on, in my opinion, the console with the crappiest build quality, the Dreamcast. In the 3 years that I've been a Dreamcast owner, I've had two of them die or start mysteriously going south on me. The first one day randomly stopped booting games, and wouldn't even start up a few days later. Now, my current model, is having problems related to the drive door - every now and then, it will stop a running disc because it senses that the door has opened. I've had this happened before on a Dreamcast, and it usually mean that the door switch has lost contact with one of the metal switchplates. This is rather odd on my current model, as I removed the internal door switch and soldered a toggle switch to the GD-ROM board that has been working flawlessly for over 6 months!! Plus when I tried to load my new copy of Dino Crisis which had arrived today from eBay, the machine refused to boot the game, giving a high-pitched whirring sound while frozen at the Sega logo. Using a boot disc failed to produce any meaningful results, but yet other games boot fine, although still exhibiting the door problem.

Has anyone else had similar problems with a Dreamcast or games, and have you any solutions that would help? They are such a pain in the ass to find around here and good ones are rather spendy on eBay, I really don't want to have to look for a new one...

 

Unlucky. I've only broken one, and even then it still worked... just took a while to load. The PS and PS2 both have worse track records. While we feel your pain and frustration, I doubt you're going to convert many people.... especially ones (like me) that have paid good $$ for Sony crap that worked. I bought a Hi8 deck, took it into the shop multiple times, and it never worked right. I finally gave up.

 

I'm on my second dreamcast myself, though the first one died two years ago because of my sister's irresponsibility.
She paid for a new one, though.
Haven't had troubles since. It boots perfectly and tolerates hours and hours of abuse. HOWEVER; it does freeze the soundtrack after a couple of hours playing certain games. Bangai-O, and Psychic Force 2012, especially .

Haven't used it a lot in the last months because of stressful graduation matters (and have played a lot of CDRs on it in the past. You know how HARD it is to get real dreamcast games in Mexico?). No problems yet.

My PS2 has not died yet, either. It's a bit older than my Dreamcast (PS2 bought December 2001, dc1 and 2 bought 2002 july) . I keep it on the floor in the vertical position, as the horizontal seems to make "scratchy" noises.

My good old boxy grey PSX, bought January 1997, is almost about to die (though it still boots CDR copies, thanks to an EXCELLENT mod-chip work at the mexican black market) .

I think the best built machine was the Snes, though. Mine is twelve, almost thirteen years old, modified to play SFC cartridges and has yet to give me any trouble (I had to replace the AC adapter unit a couple months ago, though). Nintendo makes great machines over all, actually. The only way I've seen N64s crap out is ... well... because most were originally owned by spoiled children.

My only mod-chipped CD console is the old grey PSX.
I own a NES, Game Gear, PSX, PS2, DC, PCE CoreGrafXII, a Mexican Commodore 64 and two VCS 2600s , and only the C64 and Ataris have oficially died.

 

un Commodore 64 mexicano? uh? nunca e escucha de eso :S

 

Commodore 64 sigma, brown unit with spanish documentation.

The 1541 disk drive also had spanish documentation. However, everything else was in english. The machine has NTSC output (since, after all, it was built in mexico), but I also have some software tapes in spanish somewhere around the house. Disk and cartridge software was generally in english, though. Also a bunch of computer programming books from Spain.

THIS machine seems identical , though the pic is somewhat... small.

http://www.oldsoftware.com/images/Comm2.gif

 

I got my Dreamcast when it first came out, and I have not had any problems with it. It has even been dropped, not by me, and it still works. Maybe you just have bad luck :smt030

 

Same here Alien workshop, at one point it was going out but it was due to the contacts on the power board being dirty, cleaned them and its still running strong, might be like the cube where the newer ones made were made out of cheaper parts, go figure.

 

Never had problems with my Dreamcast or have any of my friends except for one who had the famous controller PCB fuse problem.

 

The Dreamcast will never beat the PS2 when it come crappiest build quality. Sony is and forever will be the champion.

 

Alright... so instead of everyone lining up to correct my console track record with your experiences, does anyone have any actual suggestions as to what I can do to fix this? No offense to anyone, but my point wasn't to suggest that in some way the Sony hardware is more durable (although in my experience it is), but mainly to complain and see if anyone could offer some advice. For example, is this something that a cleaning of the power supply connectors could fix?

Sorry to sound cranky, but it's rather hard to get a hold of a Dreamcast where I live, and I don't really want to resort to getting one for $$ on eBay... :smt009

 

Try removing the ribbon cable that connects to the controller port and reconect it, that might fix it.

 

Reconnect anything related to the switch, trip it a few times and make sure the mechanism works properly. If it does, just clean the IC contacts and traces. Thats about all you can do..

 

Hmm, sounds like a bit of solder may have touched something on the door plats that it shouldn't have. Not much you could do I guess except take off the switch and try again.

Dreamcast's are extremely well built. I've dropped my December 1998 Dreamcast from 2 meters and it still works to this very day. The only problem I've had with Dreamcast is related to PAL software. EMI who printed the PAL discs have a shit factory. The only games that ever fail to load on my Dreamcasts are PAL games. Not because of protection but because of crappy made GDROMS. Worst contenders are REZ, Shenmue II disc 2, Evil Twin (This is a right bastard to get going) and Head Hunter has been known to freeze between loading.

 

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The only problems I've had with my DC's are random resets and blown controller boards.
The random resets were easy enough to fix(just clean the power pins and bend a little) but I found the blown controller board problem very annoying.
It's pathetic for an official peripheral(the fishing control) to blow out a controller board because of a weak resistor.
Easy enough to fix but still annoying.
In comparison I've only had 1 PS2 fuck out on me. Surprise it was the laser. It still works....just not very well(DVD's still work but you have to spend about hlaf an hour if you want to play a CD games). I lay the blame for this on the dodgy Neo4 chip I had put in. The DVD-R swap was just nasty for the drive(only way I could play US imports at the time). That and it was on pretty much 24/7. It was 2nd half of 2001 when a heap of awesome games came out(DMC, GTA3, GT3, FFX, MGS2 etc) and me and my mates pretty much just sat around playing non-stop.
Funnily enough, despite all the crap Gen1 PS2's get I find them to be the sturdiest of the lot. They just feel more well built. Niether of mine have had DRE yet *touch wood*

 

I only have one dreamcast that i bought at the pal launch and it still works fine, although games like headhunter really make the gd-drive make more noise then all my other consoles combined :smt009

The only thing i think you could do GSL is open up your dreamcast and check all cables and maybe the soldering of your door switch.

 

Yeah they are pretty junk, my release model is working quite well right now, though over the 5(?) years its had periods of reiculous resetting, non booting etc, even with all the "fix" methods.

As I said though, works fine now.

PS2 is a release version too, works better, mild disk read errors, hardly.

 

My DC from the JP launch (1998) still works but give me some headaches from times to times.


PD

 

The gd rom format makes the drive work especially hard, it's just a drawback of the format and it is why it has never been used again in home consoles.Some of the Dreamcast's that were built for the initial and second runs in the USA are of extremely crap build quality, the new cooling system and crap gd rom drives bing the culprit.

My advice is to get a jap machine, I have three, one from launch and they all work like new.I've spilt cola on them, dropped them and even threw one of them in a rage and they all work pefectly, maybe I'm just lucky but I think the quality of the machine build is down to it more than luck.

 

/me projects an anti-fanboy protection shield around GSL

The Dreamcast overall is a good platform, but they did cheapskate on a few things however unlike Sony's consoles, the Dreamcast is easily serviceable by a novice :smt023

I've personally had the reset problem on more than 1 DC and blown controller ports 2x in a row on the same dc :smt022

 

meh

i haven't used it much lately, but, i have an american first-gen launch day dreamcast or whatever, and after about 3yrs of use it had started either failing to boot entirely, or resetting after a few minutes of gaming.. some months back, i took a compressed-air can and blew the fan and the rest of the inside out, producting enough dustbunnies to make a felt hat. it now runs more or less without issue, on the rare occasions that i fire it up.