Weird Dreamcast problem turning off and not reading games

[KenaiPhoenix]

Hello! I recently bought my first Dreamcast. This one was supposed to be "chipped" and it came with a burned back up of Street fighter Alpha 3. As soon as it arrived I burned some indie port of DooM on a Verbatin CD-R and try to run it, to do this I used ImgBurn with its plugins at 4x and 8x, I also used Alcohol 120% at 4x and 8x (I wasted a lot of CDs). I only managed to boot on the "CD Player". I tried other games back up games and ordered and no luck, I will only read Street fighter alpha 3 (a disk that is in a really bad state and even sometimes dont launch btw). In all this mess I realize the battery was probably dying because after shutting down for a while I would have to put the date again.

By some suggestions I put a music CD and it launched and played perfectly. Then my NTSC/J games arrived but it couldnt be read. I order a NTSC/U, and it read that game with no issue. So, now I change my object to the CD brand and order some Sony CD-R (Same brand as the Street Fighter Alpha 3 that came with the console and works) and started to burn some games for testing, specially Utopia so I could test my Japanese games. After I great while I managed to get Utopia 1.1 to work and test Dead or Alive 2. It worked fine... but then I realize it had problem with anything related to load stuff: the menu and matches played fine, but music would get stuck and after a while it would just normalize it; when the match ended I would stare at a white screen and have to wait several minutes to show the next screen.

I give it a couple of minutes and then the Dreamcast shut down, and wont power up again. I give it more time, thinking the worse scenario, but then it turned on, only to be turned off some minutes later. I though it could be the Utopia disk so I give it some 20 minute rest and then load the NFL 2k legit that worked perfectly, and It booted like nothing ever happened... UNTIL like 10-15 minutes when it shut down again.

Any suggestion on what could it be? Is it fixable? I have been told I could be the PSU, and I plan to open the console today

[mistamontiel]

There's a lot of obsoleted shit there no one wants Utopia bootdisc you want selfbooting CDIs from DCRes and newer all optimized filesorts to not cook no laser

A modchipped Dreamcast I don't know even exists. 1% of the run (will be revision 2s with a circled 2 on the bottom label) omitted the MIL-CD exploit

Someone chime in interesting not the common reset problem it is turning right off

[KenaiPhoenix]

Then Im at a lost right now:

When I said I had it "chipped" that was what the guy selling it to me told me. I got the Utopia disk burned so I could play my Japanese games without making a backup of them first, and then self booting them.

So, as an update, and what really have me scratching my head, I opened it and disarm the PSU to then put it back in again.I also checked and there is no chip at sight. I put it back in, make sure the contacts between the PSU and the mother board are correct and then turned it on. So far so good, I had to put the date and then have to restart it so I could make NFL 2k run. I leave it be for like 30 minutes and everything keep working.

I tried a home-brew game, DooM (I assume it is self boot) and it launched on the CD player. So, I tried Utopia, it worked the second time, but when I put Dead or Alive 2 (its CD is crystal clear) and it stopped working, it didn't want to load. Then I used Utopia to load Guilty Gear X, it load it, but then the Dreamcast kind of remembers it shouldn't be reading a Japanese game and it starts to get stuck on loading, My first thought was that the reader could be bad, but NFL 2K worked Perfectly. Then I tried to load the DooM port again, and it worked! I managed to play a while and then switched to other game.

I honestly don't know what to do, it is like the Dreamcast kind of remembers it shouldn't read some disks (it is a VA1 btw) and then give up on reading the disk. I have clean the lens, open it up, I don't know.. it doesn't make sense either: the burned disk of Street Fighter Alpha 3, works on first try, the legit game of NFL 2k works perfectly too. But everything else doesnt work. I thought I might be my optical drive, but I have used it recently to burn PSX games and there is no problem with them.

EDIT: I was testing some disks on the Utopia launcher, and the Dreamcast turned itself off again. Looks like it wasn't the connection to the motherboard

[mistamontiel]

https://mega.nz/file/CsUQCLII#5ApnWTgvn ... J_0fBWCQOE

Ought to use Codebreaker, triple purpose

This allows for both genuine GD and CDs, bypass region+video signal checks. Not that you need cheats either jus hit Start

[SMiTH]

if you have a modchipped dreamcast i'd harvest the chip.
they used to make modchips for dc and i think it was for allowing japanese games on usa consoles?
they are rare but i could swear lik sang sold them?
mistamontiel is right codebreaker is damn good.

[KenaiPhoenix]

Ok, so thanks to everyone!

I managed to fix the issue and put a "summary" post in case someone google this kind of problem in the future (God knows I read a lot of old post during my fix hunting weekend).

So, the issues where:

- The Dreamcast had difficult reading burned CDs
- The Dreamcast would turn off after a while (in my case between 40 min - 1 hour and a half). After that It refuses to turn on, so I have to wait, other times it would turn in but shut down after some minutes.

The problem was the AC transformer: in my country we had 220v so we have to transform them to 110v to any international console. The Dreamcast was really well maintained when I bought it, but nothing was changed or modified (there was no chip, idk why the seller told me that, he probably wasn't the first owner). So I got a new transformer and made a test the whole day: swap between burned CDs, "legit ones" and Japanese games with Utopia as boot. I keep it running non-stop for a great while and the Dreamcast never shutdown. Even better, it even started to read the disk better so I could just put a burned CDs and would run on first try.

Now, another information that might be relevant to someone down the line: I have read a lot that using Verbatim disk for backup games Is good, but in my case, my Dreamcast despited Verbatin CDs, not a single one worked (I burned like 15). But the Sony 700 mb worked fine.

So that, thanks!

[mistamontiel]

Cheers bud

I'm 120 volt and others here swear by "it's too much" for NTSC-J's 110 some fucking how.. now you fed it 220 plenty o times and no loss