this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
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Excuse me what's the ominous "71 days" on the Sonic Adventure game cover am I cursed now
the artist, keith stack, uses to do daily comics leading up to major releases, hiding a countdown in each comic
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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.
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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
no way that's not related to drm lol
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.
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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.
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.
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