by ArugulaZ Sat Mar 09, 2019 5:07 am
(Jacques Cousteau voice)
"Three weeks later."
The GDEMU arrived early in the week, with a tray arriving on Friday. This was not fun to set up, at least at first. My Dreamcast would only recognize the device half the time, and when it did work it would crash shortly after the game started. Eventually, it went straight into the Twilight Zone, playing half of the Dreamcast startup jingle. You know, the part where the wind blows, not the plinking of the orange ball. Turns out this is really creepy without hearing the ball bounce across the screen.
I thought the GDEMU was supremely messed up, but no, it was the Dreamcast that was having problems. So I unplugged the power supply, took it off the motherboard pins, and cleaned them briskly with a Q-tip drenched in rubbing alcohol. Boom, tough actin' Tinactin, it started working again. I had cleaned it once before a couple of months earlier, and didn't think it needed it again so soon, but feh, shows what I know.
Anyway, the GDEMU works now. I couldn't get it working while in the tray, but without it, the device functions as it should. If you installed GD-MENU on your SD card, you can select the other games with a handy menu. Then when you pick a game and start it, the system resets and plays it, just as if a disc was in the drive. Nifty. I gave it about two hours of testing, running attract modes and playing a few games too. It's pretty convenient, but fighting to get the GDEMU started left a bitter taste in my mouth that counterbalanced the thrill of using it. Still, the Dreamcast IS working, and it's as much as I could reasonably expect. Maybe I'll appreciate it more once the frustration subsides.