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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.
Wow. This has to be one of the most phenomenal hacks that someone has presented me in a long time.
I had no idea of this.
Thank you very much.
No problem, let me just say that I haven’t tried it myself but I’ve watched a lot of videos of other people trying it and the worst results that I’ve seen have been the ones using a gel that they paint onto the plastic and then cover in plastic wrap. This tends to leave a streaky effect because the substance is not equally thick in every area and so it has more whitening effect where it’s thicker.
The best results that I’ve seen have been the ones that have completely submerged the plastic in a liquid peroxide solution, or have suspended the plastic above the solution to immerse it in the vapors that evaporate off from the peroxide (pure oxygen). These methods give completely uniform coverage so they whiten the plastic equally in every place.
It seems that you also need strong UV, and people that live nearer the equator have better success using the sun. But in the absence of good UV lighting, heat also seems to have some effect.
Good luck!
I bought it 20 years ago it was already yellow lol
My Dreamcast is pretty normal, but good God my NES.
Mine’s still white, but I’d always heard there were different types of plastic used in consoles (and computer cases) back then, some of which would become discolored, and others wouldn’t. Might be true, unless anyone in your house has been a smoker in the last 25 years.
If I recall correctly it’s related to a fire retardant additive that oxidizes
No. No smokers. And the console was stored in the original box in a closet. Not in the corner collecting dust. So it must be the plastic it was used somehow. Sad. I always really liked the Dreamcast look. And it is still one of my favorite controllers after so many years.
You are correct, it’s the plastic. Or rather, the fire retardant mixed into the plastic.
Look up a cleaning solution called ‘RetroBright’. It’s designed to remove the yellowing from the ABS housings of old electronics. I’m pretty sure the recipe for it is available free online, or you can order pre-mixed bottles of it. You have to be a little careful with it because it’s mostly hydrogen peroxide, but I hear it works great.
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.
Oh, thank you for the heads up. I got excited at the prospect of restoring it. I like to restore stuff when I can. Usually is more wood related items. Sad to hear this, but thank you for informing me though.
Maybe I’ll just have it like it is. I’ll call it a “sepia vintage” look as a cool spin to pretend I’m not jealous that others got better and more durable plastic for the same price as me.
Cheers and thanks again.
Fair warning it will also continue yellowing and getting more and more brittle if you do nothing. Plastic doesn’t biodegrade, but it does undergo aging in a way that makes it less durable than traditional materials. Wood can be kept from biodegrading, metal can be kept from corroding, but aging plastic just gets more and more brittle and just really wants to become microplastics
My DC is still bright white, but my snes looks like it used to smoke.
that description is so on point
this is how a buddy and I cheesed playing through seaman in a single afternoon, just kept bumping the clock forward
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).
Huh??
Hi Zoomer! 👋 Believe it or not, those were all real words and some of us can still remember what they mean! Now excuse me, my back hurts and I need to lie down.
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. 😁
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.
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.
The CMOS battery of my PSP 3000 died years ago :(
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.
Nothing bad even happened to a Dreamcast… Right ?
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.
You sure know how to make someone not want to share this picture.
That’s disgusting! Uncalled for! Truly despicable! How could they make me wait an entire 71 days for that?!
If anyone needs me I’ll be hedging my hog
If anyone needs me, I’ll be hedging this guy’s hog, too.
Can he be played by Danny DeVito in the movie?
Porn??
That’s a nude egg I won from my game!
the artist, keith stack, uses to do daily comics leading up to major releases, hiding a countdown in each comic
Game Boy cartridges not saving games due to dead battery is sad.
Do those open easily with tools or am I recalling correctly that they used rivets to fasten them shut?
I think they had a triangle security screw
Correct; nothing you can’t solve with a cheap iFixIt-knockoff toolset from Aliexpress.
Man, I remember when I used to play the Dreamcast and awesome games like Power Stone 2 and Super Magnetic Neo! The little cartridge inside the controller was awesome too.
When it came out, Dreamcast legit felt like it was from 5-10 years in the future.
Considering the Dreamcast had such a tiny library, it truly was 5-10 years in the future.
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.
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.
no way that’s not related to drm lol
how would it know if the time wasn’t correct
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. 😅
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
Oh? They fixed the cbomb?
That’s strange, I have a friend with no internet and he used his ps4 for half a decade before ever connecting it to the network.
My guess would be that it shipped from the factory with a “correct enough” time for the system to not care.
Had it shipped with a dead CMOS battery, the date would have been reset to 1970 or something, then it would complain.
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.
Back in the Nintendo era we picked up a copy of Final Fantasy I when the local rental shop went out of business… The battery in it was 100% dead. So my brother would just leave the Nintendo on.
I don’t think I’ve had a console affected by this though.
Recently I had an Evercade cart die. It was the flash memory that gave up, though. Not the battery.
I remember I had NHL 95 on the Genesis brand new and could never figure out why it would never save my season. Years later I realized “damn battery was dead, why didn’t I just return it?” still played the hell out of the game though.
I did this around 2012 or so when I was working through some of the harder NES titles on cartridge and didn’t want to lose my progress at night if I was close. Ninja Gaiden, Contra, Castlevania, Mega Man.
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.
“oh gee i sure hope no one cums in me”
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