I Test Every Dreamcast With My Most Scratched Disc

I Test Every Dreamcast With My Most Scratched Disc

When a Dreamcast comes in, I do not check it with a clean disc. I use the most scratched game in the shop. On another console that would be showing off. On this one it is the only honest test.

A GD-ROM is an ordinary CD-sized disc with the pits packed about twice as close together. Sega developed it with Yamaha so they would not have to pay for DVD. It was clever arithmetic, and it left nothing spare — the drive asks a normal laser to read twice the detail. A scratch a CD player would shrug off is a scratch this machine argues with. So if a Dreamcast will read my worst disc, it will read the customer’s.

When one will not read, I listen first. It is not the motor. It sounds like a gear, though I still could not tell you which one. Cleaning the lens is where the job ends on most machines; here it almost never is. A light adjustment of the laser does not hold either. By then I usually know. This is the console I most often fail to bring back.

Which is the strange part, because inside, it is the cleanest work Sega ever did — the Saturn line, finally put in order. Kenji Tosaki, who worked on its design, has said they held the shell back until the hardware was settled, and that internal layout came first. The neatest machine they built is the one I return least often. I take that harder than with other consoles, because its shelf is full of software nobody else was making. When a drive does come back, I leave that one on the bench a while before I pack it.