Dreamcast Laser Calibration Trick
I’ve been browsing through my hit logs and noticed quite a few search requests for calibrating the Dreamcast laser. I decided to post a quick, small tutorial to reviving a dead Dreamcast. Within the past couple of weeks, we had a total of 6 Dreamcasts in the house.
First we bought a complete system for my mom, yes, she loves video games. We had given her our old NES but it wasn’t working very well so we bought her a Dreamcast and I made her a disk full of her favorite NES roms. Anyway, the other 3 dreamcasts I picked up for $5.00 a piece because they were broken. One thing I’ve learned with taken apart my first Dreamcast is that the setup is very basic and with most Dreamcast problems you can fix them quite easily. Which is what I did with all three of the broken Dreamcasts. So technically I got 3 Dreamcasts for $15 and I know some of my friends aren’t complaining because I’ve been passing them out.
Here’s a quick trick for those of you that have a Dreamcast that has suddenly stopped spinning disks:
Open up your Dreamcast by removing all of the screws.
Push the laser to the back and lift it’s casing out towards the back.
Unfortunately my picture is a little blurry, but there’s a little knob-type things that I’m gripping with pliers, all you have to do is turn it clockwise just slightly. What I do is turn it, test it, repeat.
Here is a clearer image submitted by eniacpx. (Thank you!)
It’s so easy I taught my ferret to do the work for me:
That should do it. You might have to turn it a few times or just once but it’s been flawless for me.
12/29/2007 Update:Thank you dreamcast-scene.com for caching my post and saving the images for me!
10 Comments, Comment or Ping
that last picture is adorable! your brains have now passed down to your ferrets!
Apr 23rd, 2004
I knew ferrets were clever, but that ferret takes the cake! And here I thought they needed to grow opposable thumbs before they could do anything productive other than dig the soil out of flower pots.
Apr 24th, 2004
He is officially in charge of repairing and rebuilding now.
Apr 24th, 2004
There’s no end to these two’s shenanigans, that’s for sure. Forget about taking anything apart with big Murphy lurking around, he loves tools & motherboards :-P.
The words ferret and flower pot brings back terrible, terrible, flashbacks of heaps of soil strewn into the carpet!
Apr 24th, 2004
i miss you
Apr 24th, 2004
Thanks for the write-up. I was afraid my Dreamcast was lost forever…
Aug 9th, 2004
Glad it worked for you. It’s saved quite a few of my dreamcasts.
Aug 12th, 2004
Now I know what to teach my ferret next, now that he’s done refinishing my cabinets and solving my rubik’s cube…
Apr 10th, 2008
I tried this and the knob is warping every time I try to turn it. Is that a problem?
Apr 17th, 2008
i just did this and i can verify that it does work. i turned the “screw” very slightly and it worked on the first try with all my games again…thank you so much for figuring that out!
Aug 9th, 2008
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