I Bought a RARE, Hello Kitty Sega Dreamcast - But It's Broken

I love the dreamcast

When a Dreamcast disc drive sounds like 800 year old gear grinding, you know hours of fun are ahead.

Great work! Alongside recapping the GD-ROM drive, I always add some lubrication to the rails of the disc drive as well before I go messing with the potentiometer, just since these things never really had appropriate lubrication, which is why it makes such gnarly noises. It still makes some noise post lube, but it's much improved over the stock noises.

i have restored a number of these and most all of them just needed the laser adjusted when it came to reading the discs. i would start there when it came to getting the drive up and functional before moving on to gd-rom drive replacement or repair. the dreamcast is a tough and very well built system. they hold up over time and rarely need major parts replaced except in obvious cases of broken controller ports and stuff like that. never had a single one out of nearly 200 worked on that needed a single thing on the board replaced except for an odd port or battery replacement. sega had these made exceptionally well.

Ahhh memories, I had the blue hello kitty dreamcast, I had a complete pal collection of games along with so many rare items collected over the years, sold the entire collection 10 years ago and always regretted it. Still have my store demo kiosk

Don't worry too much about the odd CD behaviour and noises .. the dream cast copy protection made the device do some weird things during boot up

As someone who owns and has repaired multiple DCs I must say this Hello Kitty edition looks mint. Love it. Great job on the repair! This form of BIOS mod was quite common back in the day and also leads to the main menu saying "1.031.00" in the upper right, which is missing on stock systems. Also the ML2032 battery is soldered directly to the board by default. It is a common mod in the DC community to install a battery holder as it makes future replacements very easy. Edit: DC disc drives are loud and sound a bit like a printer or an old fax maschine. Its normal. Yours does sound a bit too rattly for my liking but I can confirm this is pretty common wear and tear and usually doesnt effect functionally. Though you can try lubricating the drives rails to make it at least a bit less rattly. Thanks for the video!

You didn't swap the battery but when you do make sure it's a rechargeable one or it will go pop 😂

Still have my dream cast set up. Same with atari, turbografx 16, Nintendo, super Nintendo, Sega and some other classic consoles. Even the game gear and nomad. Kids love them just like I do.

I still have my Dreamcast and have the Saturn I bought in 1995 after my daughter was born. I have all games, controllers, paperwork etc. It has been in storage for years.

This breaks my heart. I remember owning a Japanese Dreamcast on release and loving it. Joined the military in 2001, came home a few years later to find all my old consoles binned by my parents. The day I put them both in an old folks home will be payback and that day is soon! 🇬🇧

The recap was worth it for sure. They looked ready to pop! Avoiding reflowing the region free mod makes sense... tempting to tidy it up though. :D

Those consoles are notorious for laser failures and out of alignment issues.

Oh man! Those disc drive sounds are bringing back memories. This thing always sounded terrible, but had some fantastic games with HOURS of fun. Loved my Dreamcast and sad I don’t have it anymore. I bought up SO much stuff when they discontinued it and everybody was liquidating DC stuff for dirt cheap.

this was my first ever console back in the days, loved it

I love how you could tell it had been modded the second the lid came off and the CMOS battery wasn't welded directly to the board

Recapping the GD board was the right call, I noticed at least two bulging caps as soon as you opened it, and capacitor plague was in full effect during this era. The drive noise is normal for Dreamcast. These consoles are just loud! I'd also recap the power supply since those are known to leak. Also clean the pins on the power supply molex Connector with deoxit (the long vertical pins where it connects to the main board).

Nice work Steve. I still have my Dreamcast. It’s got a cool looking clear smoke grey shell, and runs with an hdmi connection. Very curious about that region free mod though. 😃

2:16 your a tinkerer you just wanted to have a gander were all guilty of it 😂

I like seeing you repair a Sega Dreamcast that is one of my favorite gaming consoles. If you get another one can you do a modding video with everything from a Disc Drive emulator to a HDMI port to a new Shell for the console.