So these past few months i've been messing with a dreamcast I've owned for 10 years. Disc drive has always worked perfectly, but it's been giving me a lot of other issues - mainly related to the controller board and NOT the usual things (my controllers weren't being recognized half the time due to cracked solder joints and the fan header was also loose and causing the console to reset)
I've just started getting around those issues, as well as others that popped up (power supply causing the console to reset due to poor contact with the motherboard pins and a dead VMU), but the disc drive has always worked perfectly until today. Like from one day to the next it's just... dead. It spins the disc and moves the laser up and down, but it won't see the disc and stops spinning. Cleaning it with IPA didn't help. PSU seems to be working fine under load (though the 12v rail shows a little over 13v, but that might be normal). I've been told that failing capacitors might be to blame, but tmk, they degrade gradually. Is the laser just dead? Should I try finding a replacement for the laser? Should I recap? Both? Is there a way to diagnose the issue further?
It's a yamaha gd rom drive with an SPU-3200 laser, if anyone knows a reliable seller lmk.
