Which Dreamcast early japanese models are the best?

I'm looking for an early japanese Dreamcast model that will read CD-R disc.

From what I found on the internet there were many models, some had Yamaha drive and liquid cooling and other had GD-ROM drives made by another manufacturer and had fan cooling - it's so confusing that I decided to ask you guys for an expertise !

So, uhm... Which Dreamcast early japanese models are the best?

 

Arn't all dreamcasts able to read cd-r's? except for the supposed mythical v2 dreamcasts ( which I have yet to hear someone actually confrim its inability to read them.... )

 

Mine is PAL and reads CDRs.
Liquid cooling, in a dreamcast? Errr no, I highly doubt it.

 

The "liquid cooling" thing is a bit overblown - it's basically just a passive heatpipe system. From what I remember it's the early heatpipe DCs that have the noisiest (metal?) fan.

I'm sure Yakumo will be along presently to put us straight.

 

Just looked up pics of it. It's not liquid at all, for liquid you need an IN and OUT, plus the crunching of the metal at the other end of the chip would cause a liquid to leak out.

There would be no benefit to using water in the pipes and it'd cost much more to make/produce/design plus if there's a fault; that's a lot of fires and DC's to replace.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe

 

All Dreamcasts can read CD-R's (Dependant on the laser strength/disk reflectivity) However, the last produced Dreamcasts had MIL-CD support removed from the BIOS:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-CD

MIL-CD support was the 'back door' that originally allowed self-booting disks in the audio/data format, with MIL-CD support removed a lot of the original 'scene release' self-booting games wont work. However, the self-booting booting method was later changed to the data/data format and from what I have read this apparently does work on these non MIL-CD Dreamcasts.

The non MIL-CD Dreamcasts are quite rare, and the revised BIOS was definitely not used in European Dreamcasts. It is rumoured that it was used in some USA Dreamcasts (Although nobody has shown proof) but it was definitely used in some of the last produced Japanese Dreamcasts, such as the Sakura Taisen model.

If MIL-CD support has been removed from the BIOS then it will state "MIL-CD unsupported" on the front of the consoles box, see this Japanese page for help understanding Japanese Dreamcast serials and a picture of a Dreamcast box produced in 2001 which states it doesnt support MIL-CD:-
http://bbs.a9vg.com/read.php?tid=560239

T-chan's posts in this thread have some good info:-
http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23793#post371841

and this Wikipedia talk post is also useful:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ADreamcast/Archive_1#Compatibility

 

A heatpipe is a liquid cooling system - but it's no water cooling systems as we know it from PCs.

From my experience japanese launch Dreamcasts are the best units. There are the consoles in the orange boxes. They have a heatpipe cooling system and the GD-Rom drives are less noisy. I would say it is half as loud in action as a PAL Dreamcast.

 

My experience:

My white boxed (not a dreampassport 3 version) Japanese Dreamcast reading all discs. It's a ASAHI Electron model and have heat-pipe cooling.

 

It's probably freon or some other gas that exhibits a phase change. I doubt it's anything exotic like liquid sodium which tends to make fires upon contact with the air and water.

 

Heat pipe version I'd go with. Finally got round to finding one this year and I've had no problems touch wood! Unfortunately as amazing as the Dreamcast is the hardware can be very temperamental! Although laser problems are usually a lot more widespread than heat problems

 

Thank you very much for a lot of useful info guys !

I have one more question: can anyone confirm if NTSC-J Dreamcast model HKT-3000, BAR CODE: 050019094704, code under NTSC-J 670-14071E is the early heat pipe version?

Thanks in advance!

 

Nope... most probably a plastic fan version.
For the Jap models:
[FONT=&quot][/FONT]670-13748* = metal (heatpipe) fan
670-14071* = plastic fan

 

Then I'm glad I asked before i bought it !

Gonna look around for a while and eventually make a WTB thread at the marketplace if I won't find the heatpipe early japanese model DC console.