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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.
Just a small step below the new generation - PS2/X-box/Gamecube, and only $50! I bought one for $90 Canadian a short while ago, and am duly impressed with the graphics. Buy the damn thing, already - it comes with 3 or 4 demos, and costs about as much as a single *game* for other systems out there.
Last post!
On the one side, that's a great plug for the Dreamcast. It's a great little system - the games are fun, interesting, the controller is fairly comfortable, and yes, there's all the other cool (Linux) tricks coming out for it.
;).
But there is a dark side to this. A lot of the good games (Grandia II, Phantasy Star Online, Skies of Arcadia) are being ported to the Playstation 2, GameCube, and the Xbox.
Then we can take the other side and say it's a good thing Sega is porting those games over. Take Resident Evil: Code Veronica - it's around $40-$50 for the Playstation 2 version, while the Dreamcast version can be found (usually used, granted) for around $20. Looks the same, plays the same, and except for those added scenes in the Playstation 2 version, is pretty much the same game.
So you could get a Dreamcast for $50, and the good games for around $20-$30 each, or just wait until the good games (because most of the crappy ones won't be brought thanks to Darwin's Survival of the Funnest, except for Sakura Taisen which will probably never reach an English market).
Me? I'm buying another Dreamcast, just in case the one I have ever blows up
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Hey, if the XBox fails and is closed out similarly, it will be a better situation since the XBox includes an ethernet interface. And, the XBox includes a disk drive. Sounds interesting.
It sounds like there is a small, limited supply of Dreamcast broadband adapters. I haven't seen mention where they can be purchased for less than the closeout $50 cost of the Dreamcast console itself.
Actually none of the 128-bit consoles (Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube & X-Box) have a 128-bit processor, I sincerely doubt one exists, only stupid reviewers from crappy gaming sites which haven't got a single clue on hardware talk about 128-bit consoles. The Dreamcast's SuperH 4 has a 32-bit datapath, the tweaked PowerPC 750 (G3) on GameCube too, the Vr5900 (that's a tweaked R5000 from MIPS) of the PS2 on the other hand has a 64-bit datapath but that doesn't do any real difference since the PS2 will never address more than it's 32 megs of RAM. And well, X-Box, talk about mobile Celeron ;-). Everybody is shouting about 128-bit consoles just because every one of those has some vector unit inside able to crunch 128-bit vectors (that is 4 32-bit floating point vars). Well, since the SH4 can multiply 4x4 matrices directly why not talking about the powerful 512-bit CPU of the Dreamcast :-)
This is a functionality that Sega took away several months ago, meaning that the newer dreamcasts cannot boot Linux/DC, NetBSD/DC, the Bleem packs, the Utopia bootdisk, or anything else that isn't on a GDROM.
The $50 dreamcasts are a nice cheap game system, but don't buy a new DC expecting to run linux or netbsd just by burning the images on the net to a CDR.
You're looking for shapes in clouds. The set of slashdot users that happen to post to a given article has much less uniformity of opinion than people seem to expect.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
The set of slashdot users that happen to post to a given article has much less uniformity of opinion than people seem to expect.
Not true at all. In most cases it is easy to predict what the replies will be before reading them.
First - this was a rumor - I have a dreamcast that was just purchased in the store the other day - in the black and red box (with the sports scene on it) - boots CDR's just fine. I don't know where it came from, but I have YET TO SEE a DC that can't boot cdr's and I've picked up like 4 of these for friends and family.
Second you can boot a DC off a CD and then bootstrap it off a NFS server (or whatever) - I've got this kind of setup at home - so in essence the cdr is just a bootstrap medium. Of course it helps to have a cross compiler for SH4 - but that seems to be more effort then the average slashdotter is in to.
Great console to have, not just for its own nostalgic merit, but for also for emulating other nostalgic systems (handles MAME and Nintendo very well)...It's just crazy to believe that about 1450 nintendo games can all fit on the same self-booting cd...and all under 300MB I believe.
-jc