Black swirl on DC boot

[kremiso]

i had read about this issue times ago, but luckily never happened on real hardware through all these years;
so, a bit of fun/astonishment yesterday, running NullDC and finding this on boot...
on emulation lol; seems impossible to boot anything, after the first load the console goes to the audio menu

dbs.PNG (19.35 KiB) Viewed 4642 times

time for a fresh new emulator install, but what if happens on real hw?, is it an easy fix?

[BlueCrab]

On real hardware, I believe this is a symptom of corruption of the "read-only" portion of the flashrom where region settings are stored. Usually this happens when someone fails to undo the simple hardware mod that is required to write to the read-only portion of the flashrom and then some buggy program/game goes through and attempts to write to that area (for some reason).

[kremiso]

thank you for the explain, seems an extremely rare issue, even more on untouched hardware

oh, searching on Google seems it is called black swirl of death, ouch

[fafadou]

Go on @dragoncity Dreamcast website.
Hé has some Issues for the black swirl of death.