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Sega Drops Dreamcast Price To $50
kerskine writes: "Just read this article on CNET that says Sega has just dropped the price of the Dreamcast console to US$49.95. Given past articles on Slashdot on all sorts of fun Dreamcast projects, now's the chance to get one. Why not get two (in case you break one)?" See also this article on getting Linux to run on Dreamcast, and NetBSD is another option to explore. 8ight points out even more interesting Dreamcast information.
The absolute best part about this is that you can get two Dreamcasts for $100. Anyone who has ever player VOOT for the Dreamcast knows that there's pretty much no console based multiplayer game that has ever gotten within miles of being as good as this game. With game prices falling, now's the chance to put together a head-to-head system that will still be playable and extremely enjoyable 10 years from now when the console is both dead and obsolete.
Don't believe me? The game is THAT good. I still play Lode Runner, and I'll be playing Virtual On ten years from now.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
Amazon.com/Toys'R'Us has them for $49.99 US.
But the Broadband (Ethernet) adaptor is extremely rare. It costs over $100 on ebay. So your DC node is going to cost you around $150 each.
Better uses include playing games (duh!), internet appliance (comes with 56k modem), and the emulators/mp3 stuff.
Just don't count on networking it for a decent price!
http://homepages.compuserve.de/bITmASTER32/dc/dc-i de.html
With pictures, etc.
Seems like boob.uk is slashdotted right now, but also check out dcemulation for news about emulators for the DC. There's a bunch.
There's also quite a few cool proggies to do other things with your dc. MPEG vid players, streaming mp3 players, and demo disks to check out.
And if you're thinking about running linux on the DC, my man Fivemouse has got 119MB Disk Juggler images you can dl and burn up. And check out his GBA webserver while you're there.
"We must be the change we wish to see in the world." -Gandhi
It's PCI. All the spccs for all the Dreamcast hardware are described in detail here.
Dude!
:-)
Just do a little investigating and you'll find that Dreamcast has a ton of awesome and addicting titles that most systems don't have.
(Sega makes a good deal of them)
Just to name a few...
Jet Grind Radio
Space Channel 5
Sonic Adventure 1 and 2
Shenmue
Soul Caliber
Virtua Fighter 3tb
Sega GT
Lots of good Capcom titles (Resident Evil, Street Fighters)
All the Sega Sports titles
check out
http://www.dreamcastplanet.com
for lots of good info!
plus for emulators to run on the DC, check out
http://www.dcemulation.com
I Love Dreamcast!
Sega Rules!
You don't need to actually fabricate a cartridge. Just pick up one of the Super Famicom/SNES "development and backup consoles" here.
It's been a while since I owned one (1993 I think) but even back then, you could copy, disassemble, and hack every game that existed on these little buggers. Back when Street Fighter II just came out on the Famicom, some friends and I patched the nintendo version to behave like arcade hacks popular at the time (check out the various sfII
roms for mame if you don't know what I'm talking about).
They were, and probably still are, pretty fun.
I have purchased 4 dreamcast systems, 2 for me and 2 as gifts, all of them have been able to play cdr's and the one i use i've moded to read cdrw's as well.
It includes 1 09/09/99 unit, 2 sportspack units and one unit purchased at bestbuy on latest batch 3 weeks agai.
All play jap imports using the hacked bootdisk by utopia
review on IGN
Username taken, please choose another one.
I used to work at Sega (and since the information is widely available on the net now, I don't think that there's any harm in posting it here, despite the little contract I signed with them when I got laid off).
It's not so much the board as it is the BootROM in the Dreamcast.
A little history here (as recounted to me by a few Sega of Japan people)... Sega of Japan (SOJ) originally intended the Dreamcast to run off of GD-ROMs only, but the problem is that GD-ROM discs cost $13 (at least, that's what the blank ones we sold to game developers cost, I have no idea what the mass production expense is). The problem is that Sega then decided that they wanted to distribute free demo discs, and the cost of GD's for this purposes was astronomical. So, they came up with this MIL-CD format that would also boot on a Dreamcast, a regular CD (in media) but had a special signature that the BootROM checked for.
SOJ thought that their little secret was safe (through security by obscurity), until somebody discovered it. I don't have any concrete facts on who did, the rumor that I heard is that the Bleem team (who are very intelligent people, BTW) had a MIL-CD imported from Japan and cracked it that way . Of course, at this time, the GameShark was starting to exploit the MIL-CD format. Then the cracking groups started exploiting it (presumably by looking at GameShark).
At this point, Sega of Japan didn't really care, but Sega of America (SOA) was mightily pissed - our third-party developers were not impressed. There was some internal experimentation on copy-protection/anti-cracking schemes (which I will NOT discuss), and we also lobbied SOJ to put out a new BootROM (v2.0?) that did not allow for booting from CD's. Once they had used their depleted stock of previous (1.1 I believe) BootROM's, then they started using the new chips.
The problem is that there were many hardware revisions of the Dreamcast, so you can't necessarily guarantee by a date (or version number) whether your DC will boot CD's or not.
Of course, there is some legality regarding using the MIL-CD format - Sega intentionally put in some Sega trademarks in the BootROM and the MIL-CD format, so that the only way to have them boot is to contain that Sega text. Thus, in theory, you are subjecting yourself to trademark infringement cases (they did this as a result of Sega v. Accolade, way back when).
-- Joe
Actually, Sega stopped the manufacture of their "broadband adaptors" (BBAs) after just a few months on sale, and even then you had to purchase it directly from Sega.
This limited supply, coupled with a high demand from gamers who want one for netplay (QIIIA, UT, and a precious few other games support the BBA), means the average going price for a BBA is far more than the DC box itself. A quick scan of eBay shows only one currently available, at a starting bid of $120 (!).
So the cost of two of these puppies, and one DC box, would set you back far more than an Ethersys router, which is an all-around better option in any case.
In addition, the DC has only one modem/BBA port; getting two to work with it would be nontrivial.
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.