I’ve had this particular Dreamcast since September, beautiful condition, VA1, Yamaha GD Rom drive, runs like a champ and I’ve been rebuilding my collection. So far so good.
Last night I left VF3 running on its intro/demo loop for just under an hour. I popped my head out the kitchen and noticed that the Dreamcast was back on its boot screen, the blue swirl and the word “Dreamcast” and proceeded to load the game again ... it would get to the SEGA screen (the actual game one, not the first one you see when you boot a game up) and then reset and replay the blue swirl & word Dreamcast animation.
I decided to try another game and put in Crazy Taxi. The game would load fine, get to the title screen, and then seconds into the game demo, boom ... back to the swirl boot screen.
So, I turned the system off for 10 minutes, feeling pretty dejected at this point, and decided to give it another go. Put Crazy Taxi back in and ... no issues. Played it for 20 mins, ran as normal. Then played a full arcade play through of Soul Calibur, a few rounds on PowerStone and finished the evening off with a few races on Metropolis Street Racer.
My Dreamcast sits inside a TV unit, with enough head room to open the lid but there’s games to the left of the unit and the fan outlet on the right is an inch or two away from the inner wall of the unit.
Does this sound like overheating? Was it a glitch? Is it something that’s likely to return and get worse? I know you can clean the 6 pins on the motherboard which connect to the PSU, as well as bend them to the “north” a little if it’s a case of definitely being down to the PSU, but given that it started working as normal after 10 mins of shut down, I’m hoping it just ran too hot and needed a break!
Would really appreciate anyone’s input and advice.
Cheers!