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Dreamcast (Finally) Goes Broadband
Thornburg writes: "The Dreamcast Broadband adapter is finally available for sale directly from Sega's online store. I got the story from Console Wire, here." So the next time you hear someone complain about how the Internet isn't how it used to be and Why Back In The Day Sonny We Didn't Have "Keyboards," you can tell him how you "use your existing Ethernet network, DSL or Cable modem services for smooth, low-ping gameplay."
Don't worry - you'll still need ping to verify your routing, test your interfaces, that kind of thing. You can leave your 'Story about Ping' on your O'Reilly shelf...
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If you haven't played it online, you haven't played it at all. I was starting to get a little disappointed with it until I got it online - trust me, it's a whole new kettle of fish.
www.gamefaqs.com have detailed instructions on how to get the Japanese version online (on the PSO messageboard)
I just can't wait to see how it handles lag and dead reckoning
Pretty well. The game is designed to hide it, so it rarely becomes visible and almost never affects gameplay significantly.
I guess the biggest hurdle now is getting the US servers online
They're already there (and rather busy)
What's funny to me is, people who grew up on PC first-person shooters (Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, etc.) agree resoundingly that the mouse+keyboard combination is the only way to play an FPS. However...
...people that grew up playing console games say that a controller is the only way to play an FPS (GoldenEye, Timesplitters, Perfect Dark).
Case in point: I just recently got a friend of mine into playing PC FPS (Unreal Tournament, Soldier of Fortune). He loves it, and he's (annoyingly) good at it...his only complaint is having to reach all the way over to hell-and-be-gone just to switch weapons, or jump, or crouch. I'd never thought of it that way, because I'd ALWAYS played it that way (anyone remember when Duke Nukem 3D (IIRC) brought 'jump' and 'crouch' to FPS?).
The point is, simply, that it's personal preference. A skilled console player I'm sure would be excellent comp for a skilled PC player. I'll see you guys on the Net.
P.S.-->The only game (other than flight sims) where I've seen keyboard skill REALLY make a difference is Starcraft. It's SCARY watching a skilled keyboardist play....sheesh.
--Just Another Pimp A$$ Perl Hacker
El riesgo vive siempre!
According to both the official site and this ConsoleWire.com site, games need to explicity acknowledge broadband access as opposed to a standard modem so not all games will work.
What were they thinking with this? They've been developing this adapter for long enough (how long has it been since they announced it was in development?) that they should have created all their games with the future in mind. What's the point of creating great games with internet access, if you intentionally leave out any sort of high speed upgradeability.
There's no excuse for not planning for the future, and this is what Sega has done. If this system flops before the XBox and the PS2 and the GameCube, then good. They were slow and they didn't look forward far enough... killer flaws in the video game world.
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RumorsDaily
The difference is, it hadn't been released for sale yet. Now you can actually go buy it. -- Dr. Eldarion --
Quake III and Diablo II both work really well.
Probably because that's what the Cisco engineers use to debug.
Debug. Yeah, that's it!
Yes, boss, I'm working hard. I'm debugging a feature in our router to direct UDP packets to the right place.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Now Dreamcast owners can experience, first hand, the joy of being told they '4r3 4ll p1ng, n0 skiLlz!!! FuX0ring LPB!@# Eye 0Wn j00 on L4N!!!"
I probably should have been more clear. My firewall allows me to forward both TCP and UDP ports. This is how I got Net2Phone working. I can even forward TCP port X and UDP port X to two different places (which means you don't have to tie up the TCP port that you are using for a UDP game). I'm sure that linux firewalls will allow this too.
-no broken link
Well... it does have a serial port. You could hook up an external modem up to that, hook the ethernet port up to your LAN, and have a dialup firewall server.
;)
Wonder if they can port Gibraltar (that firewall on a single CD) to this. Add in some kind of VMU support and you can use that for configuration storage, like the floppy disk used in the current x86 version.
Windows: The operating system built for the internet. Unix: The operating system the Internet was built for.
what with fiber-optic to the home, and things like that. I mean, why bother timing how long it takes light to travel the forty-thousand miles along optic fiber?
40000 mi * 5280 ft/mi * 1.5ns/ft (approx speed of light in fiber) * 1 s/ 1e9ns * 2 = 0.63 s (round trip ping time).
You can't beat the laws of physics. (You may try to change the laws though.)
sorry but i just had to reply to this, have you actually played chuchu rocket with a group of four people? this game is party crack. girls love it. non games people love it. everyone loves it! its the best multiplayer at a single console crack to come along since bomberman. the only negative is the pacing; it can be way too fast for some people.
--- I do not moderate.
All that aside, go get your NIC here, grab yourself a copy of Quake III: Arena and POD Speedzone. You'll be on your way to blowing up some ass and speeding down the tracks at broadband speeds. Now that is how network play on consoles was supposed to be.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
What would be really cool is if the DC Quake3 could play on standard Q3 servers along side its computer cousins.
-- iCEBaLM
You COULD have a firewall with only one ethernet jack. Just give the dreamcast an internal and external IP, all the other computers internal IPs, and plug everything you can find with an RJ45 jack into the same fully switched hub.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Maybe you haven't noticed, but game consoles are already "dumbed down" and "restricted" machines, they always have been and likely always will be. They're not marketed as "open platforms" for anyone to hack away at, which is why there's a big novelty factor when someone actually does.
The console industry raked in $9 billion last year; any similarity between console makers and a "creative cottage industry" is purely coincidental. But to those truly interested in hacking these specialized little boxes to do things they were never built for, the booting restriction is only one more small hurdle for the determined hacker to leap.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Haven't seen the ebonics-over-IP RFC yet, is that part of the IP-V6 spec?
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Carmack said they actually rewrote a custom stack for Quake III Arena for Dreamcast. Apparently the one that shipped with the machine wasn't up to his standards.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
It's coming out in a few months, and every review I've read for it has called it "revolutionary". Famitsu (a venerable Japanese gaming mag that's notorious for giving out harsh reviews) gave it a total score of 37 out of 40. Apparently anything above 35 is incredible.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Here in Europe cable access is a lot cheaper than keeping your phoneline busy for hours. For my cable access I papy a fix amount per month, my phoneline is payed per second I use it. SO the adaptor will be a good investment.
The broadband adapter, as far as I know, runs solely in hardware.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Aside: I dislike the use of the term "broadband" to apply to fast Net access. Broadband basically means analog, while baseband basically means digital. Cable Modems *are* broadband, but DSL is not. A 56K modem, on the other *is* broadband.
For Quake (PC-based) over NAT, or RealPlayer, both of which use UDP, you need a special kernel module to support it. I'm guessing that for some games, this will be the case...
My journal has hot
It doesn't work with NFL2k1, or several other multiplayer games (but Q3 works). Support has to be built in by the developer.
The whole "lameness filter" is pretty ironic considering how taco and crew like to scream about any hint of "censorship."
/. , the web's first stop for hypocracy.
Apparently, just like the Slashdotters who believe others work shoudl be free but not theirs, Slashdot managemetn believs that other media should be censorship free, but not theirs.
Welcome to
http://www.sega.com/pc/segastore/SegaProduct.jhtml ?PRODID=447&CATID=39
Too bad games need to explicitly support it, so I can't download new tags for Jet Grind Radio without swapping out the NIC for a modem
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Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
I wonder how much money the casual DC player is going to spend just so they can play games via broadband, though? You can't really download anything on this right? And I don't THINK the DC has any sort of media player for downloading pr0n, which we ALL know is the main reason for broadband.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Forget the fact that this is awesome for console gamers for the moment, consider the news about a week ago that someone has released a Dreamcast NetBSD ISO. With Broadband, a whole new bunch of possibilities open up (remote boot, remote X Terms) that would make the dreamcast an EXTRMEELY small, powerful, and usefull device, once the correct modules and drivers have been hacked for it.
I don't have any video game systems, but as soon as I have some free time I'll be all over them :)
My question is how well all of these broadband adapters (I guess this is the first) will deal with NAT (IP Masquerade in Linux). It's becoming increasingly popular, with all those hub-router broadband boxes that people are buying. But games tend to use UDP, which has problems with NAT, being connectionless and all. I can't imagine anyone wanting to unplug their computer from the broadband connection and plug their Dreamcast in instead very often, so NAT seems like the best option. Will it all be painful or smooth? Or will it all be on a game-by-game basis?
I wonder is we could launch a DoS attack on a DreamCast and bring it down to it's knee's. :-)
PSO is supposed to support the broadband adapter, so I guess the biggest hurdle now is getting the US servers online and synched with the rest of the world.
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While I think the DC ethernet adapter is a step in the nice direction, I'm still not in a rush to go out and order one. For one thing, it only works with a small, select group of games. And while some people are going to be excited at the prospect of being able to play low-ping 4-player games of Quake III Arena (that's all the DC version supports) at 640x480 resolution, that's going to strike a lot of people as old news. Of course, one can expect there to be more broadband-enabled games in the future.
Up until recently, I would have been more excited about the ethernet adapter, what with the fact that progress has been made porting Linux to the DC, as well as lots of emulators and other projects (VCD and MP3 players and like). But alas, the rumors I'm hearing more and more frequently are that Sega is going to start shipping new Dreamcasts that won't boot CD-ROMS (only the proprietary GD-ROM), in an effort to keep people from copying games. That'll work real well for all two weeks until a mod chip comes out, but could really cramp the efforts of people doing independent development on the system, if their project won't work on new Dreamcasts without a hardware modification.
I guess the main reason I won't be investing in new DC gadgetry, though, is that it becomes more and more apparent over time that game companies are by and large not neat, creative cottage industries interested in hacking, exploration, or or neat development products. They are evil consumer electronics corporations who want my money are who are all too eager to restrict, dumb down, and hobble their products if it is in the interest of their bottom line.
My bottom line is that I think I'll use that $90 to buy some art supplies and used CDs, and do something with my spare time other than point and drool for a change.
The thing is that older Dreamcast online games don't recognise the ethernet thingy. They only have the drivers necessary to dial out with the modem.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?