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To get you up to speed:

I had bought two RasberryPi's 3 B and set them both up with DreamPi for use with Phantasy Star Online over the last 4 weeks, and they both worked fine to begin with. After 3 weeks one began not to connect to the servers. I used the other backup DreamPi setup for diagnoses, and it worked. I swapped out all the the ancillaries of the unworking setup, and still the backup functioned which suggested the problem was the RasperryPi unit itself.

Batteries on the line voltage inducer were replaced with new ones, even though the old batteries were tested to work on the backup Raspberry Pi setup as stated before.

All lights are on as normal.

I then used my backup for one week, and now it refuses to presumably "answer calls" from DC as the first RPi did. $80 down the drain...


PCwzrd says on the Troubleshooting webpage:
When I try and dial a connection on my Dreamcast, it says "No dial tone" or "No answer".
This means DreamPi isn't answering the call from the Dreamcast for some reason.

This is about as close of a diagnoses I can find, but his solutions have already been ruled out.

If the DreamPi isn't "answering the call", then a different version of DreamPi should work....If that doesn't change anything though...If different versions of DreamPi aren't fixing it, then does that mean the hardware on the RPi is failing after X hours of usage?

How can it possibly answer the calls for 3 weeks and then stop?

Back to present time....

I was last told to establish the ability to view the DreamPi log output....

I haven't yet setup myself to view what the DreamPi is doing in real time yet. I bought a third new Raspberry Pi.

It arrived in the mail, and I unplugged the not-working Raspberry Pi, I plugged in THE VERY SAME ancillaries: all the same line voltage inducer, DELL modem thing, same 9v battery, took the SD card directly out of the non-working RPi, and plugged everything into the brand new RPi.

I fired up XDP and it works like a charm!!! PSO goes online like nothing ever happened

I know I haven't given you view of my RPi command prompt, but is there anything you can think of that would cause an RPi so stop "answering a call" after a few weeks, but it does it RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX?

This is the second instance of this behavior, to the tee.

Keep everything on this thread as other people may have suggestions

I'm setting up Putty tomorrow morning, but I really dont understand how, so I emailed the website. I really want to nip this in the bud so other people don't spend weeks and $$$ on something that might end up failing.

If I can't figure out Putty in 24 hours, I'm just going to buy a cheap HDMI monitor, already have a cable. Get another Keyboard too.


Again, thank you Kazade and PCwzrd for any input and patience.

Ok, once I had this problem once where PSO was my only problem connecting. The solution that worked was using a Dreamcast utility called Flash Eraser. Once I did that, I had to reset the modem/LAN settings in the Dreamcast again via XDP, then Q3, then PSO (with VMU save file) in that order. All worked after that.

Before you do this (if you choose to do so), see if Q3 can connect being XDP already connects and also Max Pool being these are connection friendly games. Once you establish that other games work but PSO, this is where I decided to used the Flash Eraser utility and reset the DC settings.

I'm not saying this is your problem, but this does sounds like the problem I had.

Bob Dobbs wrote:Ok, once I had this problem once where PSO was my only problem connecting. The solution that worked was using a Dreamcast utility called Flash Eraser. Once I did that, I had to reset the modem/LAN settings in the Dreamcast again via XDP, then Q3, then PSO (with VMU save file) in that order. All worked after that.

Before you do this (if you choose to do so), see if Q3 can connect being XDP already connects and also Max Pool being these are connection friendly games. Once you establish that other games work but PSO, this is where I decided to used the Flash Eraser utility and reset the DC settings.

I'm not saying this is your problem, but this does sounds like the problem I had.

it makes sense. once i did tweakering with my modem strings on my dc and broke something so when my dc called pc-dc it sent wrong password and login, actually login was right but with extra symbols (login is dream and it sent dream##$@#@!) in login, even with default INIT STRING, so i had to erase DC flash memory and that worked.

I'm not sure why you keep buying new Raspberry Pis. If the Pi wasn't working then it simply wouldn't turn on or boot up. When DreamPi just stops answering calls randomly then 99% of the time, the line voltage inducer is at fault. It has nothing to do with using one Pi or another. It's very likely a coincidence that it started working when you swapped out the Pi. The line voltage inducer probably has a loose connection which causes the cable to work/not work when the cable is moved around.

First off, I don't have any other online connectable DC games, not interested anyway. I only want to play PSO.

Bob Dobbs wrote:see if Q3 can connect being XDP already connects and also Max Pool being these are connection friendly games.

But XDP doesn't/didn't work....???

If I went back into XDP after PSO failed to connect, the little phone would merely turn green, however the characteristic tale-tale was that as soon as it stopped connecting me to PSO servers, I could then go back to XDP and if I pressed the "google" search button, the load bar would not move and a popup would say, "could not contact host, couldn't find hosts name".

Summary:
If PSO connects to servers, then XDP allows me to do internet searches(google button).

If PSO stops allowing connection to server, XDP phone still turns green but XDP WILL NOT browse internet(google button will not load page).

pcwzrd13 wrote:I'm not sure why you keep buying new Raspberry Pis.

One for me(#1), one for my brother(#2)(that he never uses, so I call it my "backup"), and one free replacement for broken #1 through refund/replacement on Amazon(#3).

pcwzrd13 wrote: If the Pi wasn't working then it simply wouldn't turn on or boot up. When DreamPi just stops answering calls randomly then 99% of the time, the line voltage inducer is at fault.It's very likely a coincidence that it started working when you swapped out the Pi.

So I had two Pi's sitting in front of me. One failed to connect, the other worked flawlessly. Both had allegedly working line voltage inducers.

Both LVI's were then tested with working Pi and both got me on servers/google search XDP.

Of the two failures I've had(#1 & 2), both of them were in-game where there was no movement in my room or specifically to the LVI.

The third Pi I tested last night is using the SAME LVI/battery from the very first Pi that failed. I plugged it into Pi #3 and worked flawlessly--just 2 minutes after taking Pi #3 out of its box... After reading your reply, I plugged the original LVI back into old failed Pi right now, and the Pi refuses any google XDP search or PSO server connection.

Just after that(5 minutes ago), I plugged everything.......again....back to the Pi #3, and it gets me online no problem.

In addition, remember that the other LVI that I have sitting around for my brother? It works with Pi #3 as well. But failed Pi #2? Nope, still no XDP google search, didn't waste my time with PSO test.

Hows that for conclusive testing?



I'm going to try to get a log output today to get a final view of whats going on: one view of a working Pi, and a view of my non-working Pi. But man I suck with PuTTY...

Kazade, is this what you want? I think I did it! I've never done anything like this before, really weird for me.

This is the log for the FAILED RPi/DreamPi I'm using. This is as it looks after I have simply plugged in the RPi, no DC or anything.

This is after I have pressed the Red phone in XDP browser and it has turned green. If I press the "google" button after the phone turns green, the loding bar will not move and it will say it can't find host name. And as stated earlier, it therefore also won't connect to PSO servers.

This is the log window of the GOOD WORKING RPi #3 I just got last night. This is after turning it on, have not pressed the Red phone in XDP yet.