Should their hardware have been more resilient, as their security, the Dreamcasts would have been an amazing console, more than it already was.
To be clear I’m not implying you’re lying or anything, I was just extremely surprised to hear this as it goes against all of my experience with the console.
As well as the motor that spins the disc dreamcast has been known to fail on start up requiring you to spin the disk first.
More recently we’ve all been using GDEMU ODEs to replace our drives and also heavy use of the BBA (broadband adapter) for development, so very little use of actual disc drives.
FWIW I’ve found the rest of the system to be incredibly resilient, I’ve never seen a motherboard or CPU/GPU chip failure ever even after some pretty gnarly hack job mods and other dumb stuff haha. Same with the OG Xbox consoles.
Disc drive issues make more sense though. Thanks for the info.
I would love to support the original creator and not buy clones, but after years of waiting I gave up and so did everyone else I know. Luckily the quality of the clones is great and they work just as well as the original (some early models had compatibility issues with a very small number of games but that’s long since been resolved).
For BBA’s the only way to get one is to buy used on eBay or from a Japanese auction site. They’re not cheap though, somewhere in the $100-200 range I think, but if you do a lot of DC homebrew dev they’re absolutely worth it if you can afford it.
Otherwise you can buy a serial adapter for much cheaper and use that, but the transfer speed is significantly slower.