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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.
Amazon.com/Toys'R'Us has them for $49.99 US.
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!
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
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