Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not
- Reference: 1739176209
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/02/10/who_me/
- Source link:
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Arsène" who told us about the time he got his hands on one of the first Sega Dreamcast consoles to make it into Europe. The device was acquired directly from Japan through a gray market reseller and cost well north of $1,000. The buyer ran a computer shop and thought that sum was worth it because the Dreamcast would impress customers.
One of Arsène's friends worked in the shop and, as a reward for selling lots of stuff, was allowed to take it home for a few days on condition nobody else was allowed to touch it.
[1]
He quickly broke that promise, and Arsène ended up with the machine. He then went to another friend's house and they enjoyed the console until Arsène had to go to work.
[2]
[3]
Arsène intended to take the machine with him, but the second friend begged to keep it for the night. Arsène relented.
After his shift, Arsène's phone rang. The friend he'd left the Dreamcast with was on the line and sounded panicked.
[4]
"I left the Dreamcast on the floor and went to sleep," he said. "And while I slept, my washing machine broke. Now the floor of my apartment looks like a lake. And the Dreamcast looks like a little island in the sea."
Arsène told his friend to unplug the console, dry it as best he could, then panicked as he tried to imagine how he would explain the situation.
[5]CompSci teacher sets lab task: Accidentally breaking the university
[6]Tired techie botched preventative maintenance he soon learned wasn't needed
[7]Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?
[8]Life lesson: Don't delete millions of accounts on the same day you go to the dentist
A few hours later, Arsène asked his second friend to inspect the drenched Dreamcast and learned, to his enormous surprise and relief, that it worked. Arsène went to retrieve it, turned it on, and quickly heard a nasty "pop" and saw a cloud of smoke.
Arsène and his friend pried open the console in the hope of finding a fix, but the sight of a scorched and misshapen capacitor suggested the Dreamcast would dream no more.
And then Arsène's second friend noticed something important. He'd used a French power transformer to power the Dreamcast, and it was a 220 V affair. But Japan runs at 110 V. What would happen if he used the power supply that came with the machine?
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The answer was: "The Dreamcast would miraculously come back to life, despite the cooked capacitor."
Arsène and his mate enjoyed several hours of gaming before reassembling the machine and returning it to the chap who'd been given custody of it. We presume it eventually made it back to its owner and that nobody was ever the wiser.
Reflecting on the incident, Arsène thinks the Dreamcast was probably built to survive minor accidents – as seems sensible given its intended audience was kids – and that he was the lucky beneficiary of an engineer deciding to idiot-proof the device.
Have you broken kit you swore not to share, or put at risk? The "Who, Me?" mailbag could use a few more stories to keep the column's capacitors charged, so [10]click here to send us an email so we can share your story on a future Monday. ®
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Blown Cap
The blown cap was just a noise reducer in the across the mains rail to filter unwanted noise is my guess, of course it would work, Luckily it wast an internalfuse that went. that would have been a lot more fun to sort!!!!!!!!!
Re: Blown Cap
I would still use a 250V (or higher) rated capacitor in that role. Luckily one of Murphy's Laws didn't kick in (A $500 component will blow to protect a $0.05 fuse).
"built to survive minor accidents"
We don't do that anymore. It's too expensive, plus our bright young engineers don't have the expertise to predict what might happen if a capacitor is blown.
In my experience, if your electronic thingamajig gives you a puff of smoke, it's done.
And forget repairing. We've lost that as well.
Ah, progress . . .
Re: "built to survive minor accidents"
I don't think bright young engineers are to blame. The penny pushers have figured out building things to survive is bad for business because it stops replacement sales - thus engineers were instructed to build in predetermined breaking points.
Re: "built to survive minor accidents"
When it's brown, it's cooked. When it's black and smoking, it's buggered...
Re: "built to survive minor accidents"
When it's brown, it's cooked. When it's black and smoking†, it's buggered...
Taken in a different domain of interpretation not exactly PC but nonetheless not too far from the truth.
Third electrical case is when the components is supplied with a voltage a couple of orders magnitude outside spec which causes the "surprised" component to fly off the circuit board at something approaching escape velocity due the instantaneous vaporization of its leads.
Having prised such a tortured component from the case's lid I was a little surprised that it was still functional if amputated.
† depends on what it's been smoking I imagine.
"Bad for Business"
Yet, back when things were built to last and to be repairable, manufacturers somehow managed to prosper.
Re: "Bad for Business"
Because things were relatively more expensive back in the day.
You'd be looking at paying £150-200 for a 20" TV in 1970, (£3,000 to £4000 today).
Re: "built to survive minor accidents"
It all depends on "Who let the magic smoke out"...
Re: "built to survive minor accidents"
> Who let the magic smoke out
Oh, I thought it was the Sisterhood of Karn who did that.
HP/UX go pop
In the 1990s we had one of the first HP/UX machines in Europe at work.
It had a smart auto-switching power supply so no need to worry about 110V/220V/240V settings.
Work was a country house in a village, taking a lot of power, being full of computers and industrial printers, and often suffered brownouts and power cuts; after a cut the IT guys walked round turning things back on nice and slowly so as not to make a surge - 5" rotating disc storage for one thing.
Every brownout, the HP/UX machine went pop: it happily switched to 110V mode from 240, but was far too slow at switching back to 240V mode....
Eventually they sent the machine back with a boring fixed voltage PSU and all was happy....
Whats in a name?
> one of the first HP/UX machines
A company that could have had a very different operating system if it had been called Packard Hewlett
Re: Whats in a name?
I fear products under the PH brand would have attracted some acidic commentary.
100V
Japanese hardware runs on 100V, not 110V.
Just to save everyone from another smoke event.
Yes, some devices rated for 100V will work fine on 110V.
Re: 100V
And depending where you are it might be 50 or 60 Hz. Most appliances don't care, but I have had one record player that really preferred 50 Hz, unless you wanted everything sped up by 20%.
Dreamcast Economics & Limitations
The Dreamcast was not worth the money to me as a new unit. In addition to the console cost, there was the subscription fee to use it online (it came with a modem). It had proprietary features, such as the GD-ROM, to ensure only officially-sanctioned programs were developed and released for it.
When it became trailing-edge, I picked one up for £20. It (at least the one I got) let you change the menus and game languages between Japanese and English. It was a kick to hear Kasumi in "Dead or Alive" exclaim, "Uruse nai wa!" ("I will never forgive you!")
We once had an IBM terminal go pop first thing on a Monday morning, not a huge problem as we were generally moving over to emulation software on PCs so had spare terminals. We swapped the dead one out for a known good device, plugged it in, switched it on and it also went pop, this time accompanied by smoke!
At that point we stopped plugging terminals in and instructed the arriving staff to not turn anything on until we said so. The in-house electrician confirmed that instead of live and neutral on the sockets we had two phases hence the overvoltage supply. He blamed the ancient wiring in the factory but I wasn't entirely convinced they hadn't made a change over the weekend that caused the problem.
Ch-Ch-Changes
Things worked fine for you until after that fateful weekend. You're quite right to ask, "So, what changed?" and to reject the sparky's "old wiring" booshwah.
It's always worth checking
UK phase-colours were Red/Yellow/Blue: A pub nearby had its 3-phase supply 'updated'. Unfortunately, the electrician connected 'red' and 'blue' as 'live' and 'neutral' thus exposing every device to 415 V..... The resulting damage was extensive and expensive. Every electrical appliance was replaced.
Fortunately, business was able to continue by candlelight, hand-pumps and cash. ---->
These days, phase colours are Brown/Black/Grey which are sufficiently indistinguishable to encourage checks on completion......
suggested the Dreamcast would dream no more.
Ah ah, lol. Thanks for this good lol, El Reg !
Hm
But the Dreamcast has an internal mains psu, with a figure of 8 input. The internal psu defines the voltage input, there is no wall wart.
Re: Hm
What's the saying, "never let the truth get in the way of a good story"?
To be charitable though, maybe it was supplied with a 240->120V converter, and the smoke incident occurred when they plugged it in directly to 240V instead of using that? Or maybe the teller got his consoles mixed up.
Sniff
> reassembling the machine and returning it to the chap who'd been given custody of it
... who then asked why it smelled of washing powder
Arsène?
Got it! Looped in by friend #1 (erstwhile custodian of the Sega.;)
I was surprised that these beasties only had isolation transformers rather than supplying DC say 12V but that may have been before cheap switch mode wall warts. Given the unit got a decent dose of 220-240V AC and survived I suspect the internal PS was a switch mode or at least autoranging.
As for Japan being synonymous with 100V AC mains, I once read elsewhere in this forum and confirmed by [1]wikip the eastern JP is on 100V/50Hz and western JP 200V/60Hz. Moving house from Tokyo to Kyoto could be interesting. (Not that I suppose one could afford to live in either city.;)
For the details of the North American 120/240V split phase system:
[2]https://theengineeringmindset.com/120-240v-split-phase-us-can/
Sodding Rather peculiar IMHO but then what now isn't south of the 49 th parallel?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country
[2] https://theengineeringmindset.com/120-240v-split-phase-us-can/
Anybody remember Sun Microsystems?
I'm being facetious, we all do.
Also remember their ad motto? "We are the dot in dotcom".
Yeah... about that...