Dreamcast.rs: Rust environment for Dreamcast development

Off topic, Dreamcasts were one of the first and only consoles that i made an extra effort to procure from pawm shops, repeatedly, as each one I obtained succumbed to hardware failure within very little time.

Should their hardware have been more resilient, as their security, the Dreamcasts would have been an amazing console, more than it already was.

I’m curious what hardware failures you had. In my experience (I’ve had a Dreamcast since they were new and have been a part of the homebrew scene for years) they are absolutely rock solid hardware. Can take a ton of abuse without issue and I’ve never had a single console fail on me, nor have I heard of failures from my homebrew scene buddies…

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.

The disc laser can become problematic and fail to read parts of the disc.

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.

Ah ok that makes sense. I never had mine fail back in the day even though I was playing tons of CD-R’s, but that’s my n=1 experience.

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.