Dreamcast-Talk.com

Hey guys,

VA-1 / PAL / Yamaha GD-ROM

I know this is a question that gets asked a lot, so I'll focus on the options... I have 7 scratched games, the scratches are light, but as we all know that's enough to throw the laser off and it does... The DC plays burned discs fine, all other titles around 40+ are good. So the question is could increasing the bias very slightly on the laser via the pot help it to read scratched discs? Would replacing caps be of any use here? (My gut says unlikely, as the other games are fine), or am I up the creek and going to need to buy them again?

I did try giving them a good clean with isopropyl, it helped some of them load further, even tried PlastX to try and buff out the scratches on one of the cheaper titles, no real benefit there, still wouldn't boot.

Thanks IA.

Depends on how handy you are with a soldering iron. Replacing caps on the GD-ROM drive wouldn’t be a very expensive thing to try. If any caps are going on the PSU that could impact the drive as well. If it were me, I’d probably just try replacing the caps on both.

Alternatively, have you considering going the GDEMU route? I know not everyone wants to because it takes away from the genuineness of the system. I have two consoles, one with GDEMU and one without so I can still experience that infamous GD-ROM drive noise.

worse case scenario is you could try having the discs resurfaced at a shop that does that. Often that works. But for as many proponents of this, there are equal amounts of detractors, but I would try that before replacing internal parts if everything else seems to work fine.

Thanks for the advice guys, I'm reasonably good with the soldering, I installed bios chip not to long ago. I'd likely go for a second DC to use GDEMU, but not just yet Caps are pretty simple to do and cheap, I'll think on it for a bit. Not sure if anywhere does resurfacing in store these days, I'll ask around.