Then there's the og Xbox and it's clock capacitor. Nothing like grabbing your console out of storage to find out it blew a cap and dissolved some of the traces on the PCB.
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
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To be fair, there are tio many arcade boards from that exact era that have draconian DRM measures where if the CMOS dies, the decryption key is irreversibly lost, and it becomes ewaste
Exactly. It's not as if companies were being intentionally pro-consumer then any more than they are now, they just seemed that way as they hadn't figured out how to tighten the screws as much, and especially how to do it cost-effectively in the consumer segment.
Sega Dreamcast is not an example of a console that I would describe as "built to last". I had two and both of them died in the same way - the optical lens cracked from heat stress and stopped reading disks. There was never any warning it was about to happen, and no way to prevent it as far as I knew.
As unlucky as I was with the Dreamcast, I made up for it by only ever having to buy one Xbox 360. I still own my original console which was never refurbished and never red ringed on me.
This is why SD card mods are important for optical disc consoles. The OG hardware just isn't going to last.
They should've picked Playstation. Those things are near indestructable.
I'm not sure where this idea comes from, the PlayStation had a bad reputation even when it was new.
The optical drive would often fail and need replacement. There was a whole meme about people using the console upside down to combat this.
I got this idea by actually owning one. I abused the fuck out of that thing, and it lasted half of my childhood.
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The lasers can also weaken over time leading to issues reading discs. There is a small trim pot that can be adjusted to recalibrate it. You do want to be careful and only make very very small adjustments though.
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If you're wondering what this is about: The PS4 used to require its internal clock to be correct to play any game, even disc based ones, and the only way to do so is to connect to PSN, meaning that in a distant future when the PSN goes down (or Sony no longer allows PS4s to connect to it) all your games would become useless. And the worst part? They did all of this because of trophies.
Sony has fixed the issue on Update 9.0, but the fact that it was ever an issue and caused by a totally non-essential feature is baffling.
Oh? They fixed the cbomb?
no way that's not related to drm lol
how would it know if the time wasn't correct
Probably it's like the Nintendo 3DS, the user facing clock is just an offset to the official internal timer, so when the user changes time, it's just an aesthetic change and has no effect to time/date game unlock mechanics (mostly lPokemon games). When CMOS dies, internal clock resets to 1970, a clearly invalid date where all the signing certificates are invalid, and the user can't set internal clock without hacking the console
If it can't get an encrypted timestamp signed by a particular private key then it knows it doesn't know what time it is
Getting some strong the missile knows where it is vibes here. 😅
The timestamp knows when is it’s because it knows when it isn’t.
Remember when printers wouldn’t even warn you that the ink was out? They would just give you a weird magenta ghost of what you were trying to print.
I read printers use that ink to print nigh invisible text of the printer serial id for anti forgery, and tracking purposes
That’s why I only email photos of bank notes from my personal Gmail to the library printer & drive past two hundred Flock Safety cameras in my Tesla using Waze turn-by-turn to pick up the printouts
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
But god forbid you unplug a controller while the console is switched on. Better know how to replace that fuse on the controller board!
(If you just bridge it with a wire, I won't tell anyone).
I was young and did not have access to soldering irons. So I bridged the two pins with aluminium foil and sticky tape.
It would slowly peel off and my controller would suddenly stop working mid game. I couldn't reboot the console because I couldn't save (no VMUs). So I'd fix it live -- I'd leave the screws out of the case, jiggle my fingers in there and fix it.
This was fine, worked for most of a year. Until I killed the console by accidentally touching the controller PCB to another PCB whilst doing this fix. I still have the corpse somewhere, to this day I still feel awful about it.
Live modding, huh? 😂 Takes me right back to my first PC, whose loudspeaker prevented me from covertly playing games when I was supposed to be sleeping. 😇
So I opened up the case and figured out that the PC speaker lead had a detachable connector. And the case was flexible enough that if I didn't put all the the screws back in, I could just reach in and plug or unplug the speaker. 👌
Worked great, except for that one time I got shocked while blindly trying to finagle in the connector⚡🤯 (probably by the CRT assembly; this was one of those PCs that had everything incorporated in the case).
Thankfully, it must have been all volts and no amps so I was OK, even though I let out quite the yelp. 😁
Thankfully, it must have been all volts and no amps so I was OK, even though I let out quite the yelp. 😁
Complete myth. Please don't repeat this. It's not even remotely close to a generalisation, it's completely wrong and dangerous.
(Sorry, pet peeve of mine. Have had family members happy to play with mains wires but terrified to touch car batteries for fear of death)
100mA through someone can be harmless. 1mA through someone can be fatal. Lethal conditions occur under certain complex circumstances involving not just voltage/current, but frequency, exact waveforms, duration, contact points and the individual's physical parameters (human skin resistance varies a LOT, it's not an insignificant factor).
The most commonly encountered electrical hazards involve 50/60Hz 120/230V mains and hand/foot dermal contacts. This is a lethal combination that can cause heart fibrillation. Even 5mA or 100VAC can cause this (sometimes you will see lower numbers cited, "it depends"). Death can occur a day later, see immediate medical attention if you believe you have been shocked by mains wiring.
At very high frequencies our nervous system is not sensitive, so we can pass larger amounts of current or deal with higher voltages without much harm. I'll still hedge this with "it depends", you can get thermal burns (which if on the eyes includes blindness) and pathways through the body vary with contact points, changing the risks.
Static electricity discharges can be crazily high voltages and currents (many amps, sometimes hundreds of amps). Yet they are not a hazard.
The high voltages in your CRT will supply very high currents when applied to dermal contact points on the human body. This will likely induce involuntary muscle contraction. Prolonged contact could cause burns and unwanted chemical reactions to occur internally, but is unlikely to cause heart fibrillation because of the non-repeating DC nature.
Thanks for the warning.
From memory, it felt like the electrostatic discharge that used to happen whenever I was touching my car. Annoying but harmless. The CRT part was speculation as I was reaching around blindly and don't ultimately know which exposed contact shocked me.
Interestingly, the PC suffered no damage at all and didn't blow its internal fuse, either.
Ty. Sorry it was a grumpy warning :(
From memory, it felt like the electrostatic discharge that used to happen whenever I was touching my car.
That's likely a valid comparison. Some parts of the tube might give you the same style of event as static electricity discharge when you touch them. Other parts would give you something more though :D so please don't take this as a generalisation.
Interestingly, the PC suffered no damage at all and didn’t blow its internal fuse, either.
Fuses are OK as fire prevention devices, but mostly useless as electrocution prevention. They blow based off power draw and time. Many human-electric interactions don't actually draw that much power or last that long when compared to normal circuit power draws & timescales.
I did not know, that you could turn off the sound of a PC. But I needed Sim Tower to run overnight, to have enough money for the next floor the next day. That were some bad weeks without sleep as a ~11yo 😅
That "bing, bing" and the sound of the elevators the whole night.
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Excuse me what's the ominous "71 days" on the Sonic Adventure game cover am I cursed now
You have 71 days to share this picture with someone else. If you don't, Eggman will crawl out of this meme completely nude and covered in oil.
That's disgusting! Uncalled for! Truly despicable! How could they make me wait an entire 71 days for that?!
You sure know how to make someone not want to share this picture.
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the artist, keith stack, uses to do daily comics leading up to major releases, hiding a countdown in each comic
Okay, now I know why my Dreamcast keeps asking for the time and date every time I turn it on. Always wondered, but never checked because it worked regardless.
The battery is soldered in, but it's dead simple to desolder and replace with a proper battery holder so you can easily replace it down the road. Just make sure 6ou remember to use a rechargeable.
Yeah, if I ever did that, I'd rather take it to someone who knows what they're doing. I have little experience soldering and I don't want to destroy something in my Dreamcast by accident.
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Is anyone else's Dreamcast yellow now?
I bought it in the year it was released and it was used quite a bit (euphemism) back then. But I dug it from the closet it was stored in and now is yellow. Remote control and all. All the consoles stored along with it still look the same. All the older ones looking the same as they always were, but Dreamcast decided to have that "we're fucking old" moment with me. Haven't tried turned it on out of fear of mortality being the next reminder it has in store for me.
Let me be the one to introduce you to the rabbit hole that is retr0bright. There are numerous videos on youtube of various different methods of retro-brighting.
The most scientifically thorough treatment of the phenomenon that I've seen is this paper: https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/The-Retrobright-Mystery.pdf
Soak the plastic in hydrogen peroxide and oxy booster stain fighter
For the rest of you ADHD havers who don't have the patience to get that write up to fit on your phone screen.
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Just as a quite warning- retrobright will make the plastic of the dreamcast white, but it will also make it more brittle, and it's not a permanent solution. It WILL yellow again, and repeated applications of retrobright will make it more and more brittle.
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Setting the clock on each boot, after the rechargable CMOS battery died, sucks. I speak from experience with Dreamcast consoles. Best you solder in a battery holder and put in a new rechargable coin cell. ... or add a diode and put in an ordinary non-rechargable.
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