Dreamcast Backup Reading Problem?

[TAPFS]

Hi everyone! I'm new to the forum, so if this is in the wrong section or something to post this in just let me know.

I've dusted off my old Dreamcast after giving up on it about a year ago for having barely any luck playing backups, emulators, or homebrew of any kind on it. I never knew about backups or emulators on Dreamcast until then, and tried for about 3 days straight on my first attempt to get something working on it with no luck.

I have a November 2000 (Model 2) Dreamcast and after scouring the web and looking at dozens of pages the common consensus for this model seems to be a mystery, having half and half compatibility with Mil-CD or none at all. Some say it has no problems reading backups, while others say every version under this date has the patched rom that prevents Mil-CDs from loading. Some even say they have working November 2000 Dreamcast models that play backups while others say anything after October 2000 is screwed. There's a lot of misinformation out there and I've had trouble finding the truth.

I know most people are probably going to tell me to just "buy another Dreamcast", but before I resort to that I want to see if there's some other possible fix or workaround this problem. My Dreamcast actually has been able to play backups in the past, but only a few times.

I've burned VMU Tool before and that worked pretty well for a day or so, but after that my Dreamcast refused to read it. I then tried, out of desperation for not finding much help online, putting Sonic Adventure into my Dreamcast and having that load up first and rebooting the system with VMU Tool in the tray, and that actually worked for a while too. Loading Sonic Adventure first pushed the laser up to the top of its socket from what I could tell, and that seemed to help the loading probability. But even that eventually stopped.

It was also able to play another game I tried, no Sonic Adventure trick required. It was Tokyo Xtreme Racer, and I thought maybe I actually got the whole burning thing down that time. That was, until I reset the system, and it never worked again. I must have went through at least 15 discs that weekend I tried this last and it ended up in a lot of disappointment and frustration which is why I gave up on my Dreamcast until now.

Going off of the mistakes I made last time, I decided to buy a set of 10 CD-Rs at Wal-mart (HP CDs, which I heard are pretty good for DC games from a few other forums I looked at, last time I used old Memorex CDs and thought that could have caused problems). I also got a data/data .CDI file (or what I presume is one as it is labeled as a selfboot ISO which are supposed to work even on non Mil-CD compatible Dreamcasts, or at least I think so, could be another rumor) of Jeremy McGrath's Supercross 2000 from Iso Zone (unlike before where I tried running audio/data isos and failed and tried converting those same ones to data/data with BootDreams), and also grabbed ImgBurn with the CDI plugin.

I began burning at 1x speed, or at least I think I was, that's what ImgBurn showed the speed as when I was burning the .cdi file. I'm not sure if it's accurate or not, but if it burned at a higher speed than it showed there it could be part of my problem. I saw numerous YouTube videos saying "the lower speed you can go, the better burn it'll be" and last time I used 4x speeds so I thought 1x would be better.

After putting the burnt disc in my Dreamcast, the Dreamcast logo showed up as always, and just like before when my burnt games stopped working after a while or at all, the disc drive made no noise, didn't load the game, and asked me to insert a game disc at the home menu.

Is there something I'm doing wrong? I'm down to 9 discs now that this one is a dud, or at least, what I think is a dud, seeing as I could have burned it perfectly and have no clue. I'm not an expert at Dreamcast modding or anything, but I've really been trying to figure out what could be going wrong.

I doubt the lens or laser is the problem, as I've never had any problems loading retail games at all, and even got a few burnt discs to work like VMU Tool. The only exception was NFL Blitz 2000, but I heard some copies of early Dreamcast games were made on bad discs and could be refunded for free from the publishers of these games, but this one wasn't refunded I guess. However, it could explain why my burnt discs that used to work don't work anymore.

It could also be my lack of skill and confidence with burning, I tried this time around to look for only relevant and recent videos for for the sake of figuring out what to do without any problems like dated information. The video I found on how to burn with ImgBurn was from October 2014, it's not the newest video in the world but compared to some from 2007 or 2009 I saw it was pretty recent so I doubt doing this in a dated manner is the problem either. Maybe the speed was the issue? Or the program I used? So many possibilities, it's hard to think what all could be going wrong sometimes.

It could also just be the manufacture date of my system, but if that was the case, it would have no Mil-CD compatibility and never read any backups, so how would it have loaded up VMU Tool or Tokyo Xtreme Drift,the one time it actually worked, if that's the case?

I'm sure you guys get a lot of posts like this where people lazily throw out questions and expect solid answers with no thanks given, so I'm sorry for making my first forum post about this, I know this the Dreamcast is a complicated machine and all. But if anyone has recommendations on what I should do or could do to get burnt games working on my Dreamcast, let me know.

I've looked all over the web for any kind of help I could find and never found a lot that was helpful to my situation, so I figured I'd stop endlessly searching for answers in a search engine and just find a forum to explain my specific problem better. If nothing else, I could always go back to emulating the Dreamcast, but I own the real thing and so I figured why not try and work with it one more time. Thanks in advance for any help.

-TAPFS

(Also, sorry for the novel, I just wanted to make sure I covered everything in enough detail so everyone would understand my issue properly and no one would get frustrated trying to help me at a lack of information.)(Also, if I forgot anything or mistyped something I'll try to clear it or add it later, it's currently 3AM as I type this so my eyes are pretty tired and I might have looked over something lol.)

[TAPFS]

EDIT: I decided to take a look at a tutorial on how to adjust the Dreamcast's laser. While I know this isn't a permanent fix and will run the laser down faster, I decided to give it a shot to see what that would do.

I've broken almost everything I've ever opened up to try to repair. I'm a total novice when it comes to electronics.

But, after watching Adam Koralik's video on the procedure on how to do it, I carefully adjusted the little red-top screw under the laser about 1/5th of the way around and after putting the Dreamcast back together that did the trick!

I'm very excited to try out some homebrew or other games I've never played before on Dreamcast now that this works, if anyone has recommendations on games to try let me know.