Dreamcast-Talk.com

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

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