Dreamcast Fuses

[benzaldehyde]

Hi all,

    The place looks great, Lawrence. Now then, to kick things off properly with one of my moronic tech questions. My DC recently decided it would stop outputting +5V through the AV out. To repair, I soldered a wire from the power board connector to the AV pin 5. It works, but then my mind started to wander. Was it a blown fuse? I'm not up on my fuse knowledge, but I didn't remember seeing any on the main PCB. The system worked even without the repair (but I need it for the ever-precious RGB), so the powerboard was working fine. Is there a possibility that there is a "stealth'  :ph34r: fuse between the +5V power board junction and the AV connector on the main PCB? Just want to sure my DC isn't going to explode into flames! Thanks all!

[NFG]

5v isn't typically enough voltage to hurt anything anywhere, but you will smoke the PSU if you short it without a fuse a few times...  Surface-mount fuses typically look very different than the glass ones we're used to.  Typically they're just little black lumps, often unlabelled (or cryptically so) to boot.  There are some that, when you know where they are, can be easily spotted.  In the PS1 for example there are little black cubes with 10, 15 or 20 printed on them.  This is the value in amps: 1.0, 1.5, or 2.0.  You can replace them easily with something called a Pica-Fuse, which looks like a resistor without any bands on it.  I could buy these in 5-packs for about $3 from an electronics shop in Canada.

[Vertigo]

On a slightly similar note, is there a way of telling what rating one of the blank white fuses like the kind you get in household appliance plugs (I don't know if you do in the US or Canada but in the UK we have them), that you can see in the DC and I believe the SNES?

[NFG]

I don't recall seeing any blank white fuses in either the SNES or the DC, but I know from experience the fuce (black, suspended between two bits of PCB near the power transistor) is a 1.5amp picafuse.