One simple truth every retrogamer learns is that no hardware is eternal. In case of my Dreamcast, the PSU started acting lately. At first I thought it’s the discs, as sometimes it wouldn’t boot at all, or take a long time to boot, or load a game then reboot after a few seconds.
Luckily, there are a couple of solutions nowadays. The most popular is DreamPSU, which replaces the proprietary plug and a massive board with a tiny board compatible with standard 12V adapters. Then there’s CleanPower, which allows it to use USB-C, but twice as expensive. I decided to start with DreamPSU.
And since I’m going to disassemble Dreamcast anyway, I decided that replacing my CDROM (sorry, GDROM) with an GDEMU that reads games from a SD card would be appropriate to. Great thing about both mods is that you don’t need to solder anything. Dreamcast had a PC-like architecture, so you can just unplug your CDROM and PSU. And to get to them, you just remove 4 regular screws.
Expected benefit: now there’s no need to swap discs, or burn them. Also, the games boot much faster since there’s no seek time.
Unexpected benefit: console is 460g lighter. CDROM is 310g, and PSU is another 150g (I thought it’d be even heavier).
