Sega Supports Emulation

rapett0 writes "Sega of Japan has decided to take a much welcomed step and support downloading and playing of Genesis/Mega Drive and PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 games on the Dreamcast via a service called DreamLibrary. Apparently they will cost $1.50 per download/per day and you lose the game after you turn off your system, but can redownload if you still have rental time left on the game that day. The same article makes mention that Bleem! might be released for Dreamcast as well. " Granted, this is only for Japan right now - but it's a cool step.

Comments

Why can't I own it?

[kniedzw]

I'll accept that this is an interesting development, and perhaps even a good one, but in truth, it really scares me.

Perhaps I'm being old-fashioned here or even a classic trained-monkey consumer, but ... I really want to own it, rather than rent it.

Our economy today seems to be moving more and more away from individual ownership to centralized ownership where our rights to use an item or a service are doled out on a per-item basis. Consider the fact that almost no one leased a car twenty years ago; it was something of a right of passage to own one. ...but these days, it's far more likely that one of us will lease rather than buy. ...and consider the new "hot area" of the Internet: ASP (application service providers, that is) and thin clients. Will I be able to buy my proprietary software in the future, or will I have to rent a timeshare in a server?

I think this is certainly a cool development, but every time I think about the possibility of not actually owning something that is a significant part of my life, I get chills. Am I alone here, folks?

$1.50 a day?!?!?!?!??!!?

[Ferzerp]

For these old games? For a service that isn't costing them near that much? Umm, no thank you. It would be cheaper in the long run if you like these *old* (therefore cheap if you can find them) games to buy an old system and the games. Old consoles go for practically nothing.

Good for game developers

[El]

The best thing about this is it give Sega nearly instant feedback as to what games the kids are actually playing, so they'll have a much better idea what kinds of games to steer their future development to.

A secondary benefit, of course, is that they can provide bug fixes in internet time (provided they set it up right.

In the long term, I think playing against "artificial intelligence" will always be less interesting then playing against flesh and blood other players. Obviously if you got connectivity for online game rentals, you've got connectivity to multiplayer servers. Now if we could just do something about those network latencies...

a modest proposal

[mcc]

so where is this going to go eventually..?

ROMs are small. Emulators aren't large. CDs are huge. you could probably fit every worthwhile N.E.S. game ever made into fifty megabytes. You could probably fit most of the worthwhile SNES and Genesis games into the 600 megs or so you'd have left.

I don't know how public the Dreamcast development process is, if you have to buy some expensive liscence or just grab a compiler or what, but if some *cough* third party could put together a couple emulators for the dreamcast.. just port the emus already out there, maybe throw in some debuggerish or game genie cheat modes..
well..
that would be one kickass CD-R, is all i have to say.

Too bad that the closed-minded game developers will never, ever allow such a cd to be published legitimately at any price, despite the fact they haven't made new copies of these games for years are no longer getting any money off them. Their loss.
Such a shame that copyright law is going to continue being extended until those games never reach the public domain..