Hi everyone,
I’m hoping some of the experts on this forum can assist me as I’m really at a loss with my Dreamcast. This is quite a story, but I hope the depth may help someone give me a definitive answer or at least prod me in the right direction.
My PAL VA1 console has been modded for over a year now. I’ve slowly added more to it, and at current standing it’s got GDEMU, Pico PSU (Chriz2600 design), Noctua fan, and modded port board with new battery, LED and fuse.
Around the August time, my 5.15 GDEMU started acting weird; the textures would vanish in Crazy Taxi after 20 minutes, the audio would garble and it would eventually freeze and reboot. Upon turning the machine off and back on, the boot animation would be slow, stutter, blink, and/or be accompanied by very slow, spooky almost audio.
Leave the console off for 5/10 minutes, it would boot fine but regardless of game chosen, the crashes were the same; 20/30 minutes, textures and/or audio, freeze and crash/reset.
Clean the pins! I must have the cleanest pins in any Dreamcast by this point. Ruled that out.
Tried another SD card, same deal.
I have also tried booting the console with the Pico and a GDRom drive and it booted as expected to the dashboard. I have no discs to try but I did read on the GDEMU site that the GDRom and motherboard does not have under voltage detection like GDEMU, so you can return to the drive config and believe everything is fine?
Now here’s the kicker. I blamed the GDEMU clone and binned it, bought a 5.15b clone with the metal SD slot in September, and for two months it’s been fine … until two weeks ago. The same issues are now rearing their heads once more.
A friend sent me a spare PAL Dreamcast, he botched a DCHDMI install, the sound chip is missing some pins, but the components are all there.
I tried his PSU with my fully modded console, I got crashes.
I tried my GDEMU and Pico in his console, no sound as expected, but same issues.
I then “built” a console which had my motherboard and GDEMU but with the stock fan, stock PSU, and stock controller port board.
It worked. It ran for over an hour, I had found the fix … undervoltage detection on the GDEMU was causing the crashes and the stock PSU was providing all that lovely constant flow of juice.
Until …
I was upstairs, one of the kids had been sick and between bathing them and cleaning up after them, I forget the Dreamcast was downstairs running away.
I came back downstairs, and it was off. Dead. No smoke or smell, just dead.
I took the top of the shell off, I hadn’t screwed it back together, and pressed the power button, which was greeted by a low but audible whine. Turned it off immediately.
On the PSU, the largest capacitor near the front of the PSU (35v 1000uf) was domed at one side and when viewing front on, slopes from left to right. All the caps were totally flat when I first powered it on. There’s also no leakage from this capacitor.
And while the 12v regulator wasn’t removed from the PSU, it should still have been ok to run for 2 hours without a cap popping? There’s no leakage or burn makes anywhere on the PSU.
Can I put the capacitor popping down to bad luck? Was that cap just ready to go?
The combo of GDEMU and Pico PSU has been tried on two different PAL motherboards and crashes on both.
The only time I got a flawless working Dreamcast was when I went back to the stock PSU, but 2 hours running seen a cap pop.
Was the first GDEMU I binned actually ok, or was something in the system “burning it out”, and the same has now happened to the two month old replacement?
I am totally lost and have tried every possible troubleshoot I can imagine.
Help! Please.