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Is The Dreamcast Undead?
PlaidG writes "An interesting article has been posted on Antigames.com about the community revolving around the yet-living Sega Dreamcast. It covers the reasons behind the continuing viability of the Dreamcast, and the thriving underground surrounding it." Quite apart from the cool stuff such as MP3 players or Dreamcast Linux you can hack around with, the array of great games now available so cheaply makes Sega's console very enticing, even past its prime.
But try to find a cheep NIC card for the fancy stuff! The Dreamcast may be $50, but the NIC card is ~$150 on E-bay!
AnamanFan - Trying to find the Truth, one post at a time.
I'd pick one of those suckers up in a second, if I saw it (can't be bothered to order online). I mean, the sheer neat factor of the VMUs alone would be worth it, let alone the mods mentioned above.
I have a DC, I love the DC - but all of these other *useless~I mean uses* are insane to me. I justify not buying Dreamcast games by purchasing the 'greatest hits' titles for the Xbox and PS2. I justify not using the Dreamcast as a PC by using a PC (which I can install any distro I want and doubles as an MP3 player). I do like seeing all the crazy modifications/hacks people do, but I would rather spend my spare time playing games instead of modifying the use of the hardware.
Um... How exactly would having the broadband adaptor enable piracy? Last time I checked, Dreamcasts didn't include hard drives and CD burners...
I recently got a used Dreamcast for less than $50 at Electronics Boutique, and the games sell for less than $10 or so. As far as I can tell, the hardware is just about as good as any other console, and at that price, it's hard to say it's not worth it.
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
I mean, the Atari 2600 is technically undead because people still make new games for it, trade games, and even make goofy hardwood handheld versions of it.
...soon
This is all uber-cool and very stimulating to my inner nerd self, but lets be real-- its not exactly giving the Xbox a run for the money.
On the other hand, the dreamcast is a very nice little custom game platform. I am surprised no one has figured out commercial applications for a 50 dollar Windows CE based platform that has zippy graphics, a cd-rom drive, and a modem. Hey, add a crad reader and a tv and you could make it into an ATM!
Oh well. I bought the Dreamcast for one reason, and one reason only. A reason that refuses to die even this very day. And that reason is....
S E A M A N !
(start Leonard Nimoy's voice)
Welcome back. It is good to see you so.....
(unnatural pause)
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
Plus, I need to invest the time to figure out how to burn a CD with MAME and some ROMs. That should prolong its life.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. I had to laugh when I read that post. Does that mean the PS2 are Xbox are also supporting piracy by having network adapters?
Well unless you are playing a tech demo.
The games that you can get for the dreamcast are still some of the very best games availible for any console. Plus you can pick up a new DC at some places for under $50 and the best games for around $10-$20.
That is a hard bargin to pass up.
I am a student, and wanted to get this thing based solely on the fact that I'd be able to get it cheap and buy second-hand games for next to nothing. I see my buddies with Playstations and Gamecubes and I like most of the games they play, but my roommate and I have gotten literally HUNDREDS of hours out of my $14 NHL 2K2 - and I know my friend put Zelda Wind Waker down inside of three days (as soon as he beat it).
:)
The games are easy to back up (which, yes, makes them easy to pirate, too) so I don't have to worry about $60 going to waste on a PS2 DVD because of an errant fall or a little carelessness in loading the disc. The one concern I have with the DC is the laser motor - sites like DCEmu seem to indicate this is a legitimate fear, as there are tools available on their site making backups a little easier on the DC's laser.
I got my DC with a dozen games, two controllers and a memory pack for under $50. I bought more games but I still play the nucleus of old games and get at least a couple hours' use out of them every night. Needless to say, I am very happy with this purchase.
I agree in part, the broadband adapter did make it /faster/ to copy games, but the homemade serial cables that connected the dreamcast console to your computer enabled patient crackers the ability to rip games long before the broadband adapter came out
On a pirate site which I shan't name, I saw, free for download, a collection of two Dreamcast emulation programs and all the games ever released worldwide for the platform. The collection weighed in at a staggering 3.3 gigabytes, compressed. I think there were some 2,000+ games. If it took you a day to get tired of a game, that's at least 6 years of no repeats.
With a legacy like that, I'd expect it to last a good, long time.
Among the other mentioned uses, the dreamcast will work wonderfully as an interweb device. If you can find the keyboard and mouse attachments, or use one of the adaptors that Mad Catz sold for ps2 keyboards, it's very simple to set up the included web browsing software and have at it. All dreamcasts came with a built in modem, and if you can find one, the broadband adaptors work well also. If you don't want to shell out the money for the expensive and rare broadband adaptor, you can still connect your dreamcast to the internet through your PC's broadband connection using the guide here for windows and here for linux.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
The collection was for SNES.
X_X;
Damn, an Undead! Simon, cover me while I chant 'Turn Undead'!
....you meant "Is the Dreamcast Not Dead"?
Solution: After I turn the machine on, I open the lid and rapidly spin the disc with my finger, then slam the lid shut (like the propellers on old WWI planes). While the motor can't accelerate , it is apparently powerful enough to keep it going at a constant angular velocity. Besides, my friends get a kick out of watching me do it.
God, you don't know how hard I laughed when I read this. Something to tell the grandkids! (Back in our day we had to spin the discs before we got to play the games!)
...it won't recognize my controllers anymore. It powers on, so i guess it's technically a paraplegic. Maybe someday i'll get another. Sour Calibur was a good game.
Um... How exactly would having the broadband adaptor enable piracy? Last time I checked, Dreamcasts didn't include hard drives and CD burners...
Easy. Write a program for the Dreamcast that dumps the contents of a GD-ROM to a host computer. Make any adjustments necessary to get it to fit on a CD, burn to said CD, and you've just committed copyright infringement.
(Got an Ethernet interface? Must be a criminal...)
Last year sometime, our NES burnt out. We tried to replace the capacitor that blew, but it wasn't the exact one we needed and the NES will only run for a few minutes then die between reboots. So... I forget about it.
A few months ago, I was really jonsin for some NES. I tried using an emulator on my iBook and my PDA, but it just wasn't what I wanted. I was thinking about making an NES controller adapter for my iBook or PC and then outputting to the screen, but that was a huge PIA.
The other option was buying a new NES. After looking around some, I accidentally came across information about emulation on the Dreamcast. Did a little math, and found that it would likely be cheaper to get a DC than it would to get an NES that worked with some additional games!
So, I bought a DC for $30 from Half.com. I've seen them at my local Funcoland for $35 as well. Man, $30! For that $30, I have a machine that can not only play the NES games I have, but pretty much every damned NES game that has ever existed. Plus, SNES, Genesis, Sega Master System, and others! And, I don't have to deal with a super-crashy NES and all the associated mouth-wind-rituals involved.
I am not sure if it is needed, but I made sure to get a DC manufactured before Dec 2000 (or whatever the cut-off is), so that I could easily burn CDs of ROMs and emulators as well as my own and other folks' homebrew software.
I don't own one DC game though... I've been meaning to find out a couple decent ones and buy them cheap. But we've got the GameCube for that, so I've not really been motivated to look too hard.
Can anyone reccomend any really good games that can be had for the DC that I couldn't get for the GameCube? I'd love to hear some reccomendations!
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Yeah, I gotta say that even though it is supposedly dead, it -still- justifies the $50. All the games you can get for dirt cheap, and the hax0r scene is pretty alive. Up until recently I was still playing my DC more than my PS2 and Xbox combined, Skies of Arcadia and Grandia 2 were really great. I guess you can pick up both titles for gc, ps2, xbox or whatever. Probably at the price of the DC + a game though. Oh well. DC is still hardcore.
However, only downside are the VMUs. While they are really novel, they are also really expensive. Batteries for those things are not cheap, and they chew through them like no tomorrow. They also emit a rather loud beeping noise when plugged into the console after they are out of batteries.
I guess that's what I'll always remember the DC by.
*power*
*beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep*
*head explode*
Hey, it's my OPINION that dogs have eight legs and make a sound like a car horn every time they take a piss.
A long time ago, I worked for Convergent Technologies, which partnered with post-breakup AT&T to produce the first commercial hardware to be sold under the AT&T label. (Before the breakup, AT&T was a utility, and thus not allowed to sell hardware commercially.) This was (dig the irony) "Project Safari". The biggest result of this collaboration was the Unix PC.
Now, AT&T spent about $1 billion on this project. Paid most of it to Convergent to fill their supply chain with these boxes. Which they never even tried to sell, because upper management decided to concentrate on IBM compatibles. Almost all got remaindered away to various hackers who jumped at the chance to buy a serious Unix workstation for less then it cost to manufacture the thing. Hundreds of people got their introduction to Unix this way. Not a bad thing, but not a ressurection either.
Wait, was the DC ever alive anyway?
But all joking aside, the DC rocks. Sega just has really bad luck with gaming systems. The genesis did really well, but the sega CD and 32x bombed. Which was sad, because sega CD had some really solid games.
Bah, I'm too tired to rant.
What luck for rulers, that men do not think. - Adolph Hitler
My DC is one of five or six consoles currently sitting in front of my TV. I ended up getting it with the help of my mother after a couple of junkies broke into my house and took my Playstation and something like 80 games. (God bless drugs.)
For arcade fighting, especially 2D, no other console can beat the Dreamcast. Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 were two of the coolest games I've ever played, you can get discs of old ROMs (SNES and Megadrive) to play on a DC, and finding older games and/or ISOs is pretty easy now. Before I got a Gamecube, it was also great for four-player party games like Powerstone.
I am fortunate enough to own an Xbox, a Gamecube, a PC (and a mac, but we won't go there..) as well as a dreamcast. I can honestly say the DC gets more use that the rest put together.
Ikaruga, Rez, Gigawing, Soul Calibur, Zero Gunner, Mars Matrix - all waiting to be bettered.
If your in the UK don't look at it as a cheap platform though - most of the best games are imports costing up to £50 a pop.
Dreamcast is terriffic for its price and ability to run Linux and NetBSD off CDs. Ive always wanted to put a beowulf cluster of dreamcasts on my resume.. but have yet to buy the first dreamcast. The problem is I'm always considering PS2 that might fall in price after the PS3 is debuted, which has native Linux support. The dreamcast also has its BBA thats too expensive.. dont you just wish it had an ISA slot instead?
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Standing in EB, one can see used Capcom vs Marvel 2 DC for $35US, and then turn around and see the same title for PS2 for $39US.
This is one of the reasons I decided to break down and get a PS2. The games I wanted were availible on current platforms at nearly the same if not better prices.
Now, indeed there are some good cheap games out there: Tokyo Xtreme Racer ($14.99), SF3 Double Impact ($14.99), Virtua Fighter 3TB ($8.00, I was dancing over that one), Shenmue ($19.99), ShadowMan ($14.99). But on the whole, these are titles that I hunted down, and granted I bought most of them at EB/EBG instead of doing the half.com thing (the power of instant gratification!) but still... the really cool titles out there are still way overpriced IMO.
I can't figure out why the retailers don't get in line at this point and drop their prices on DC games. They aren't paying crap for them anymore (if they even buy them), and most of the titles they have left are dusty because they either suck or are overpriced.
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
I'm sorry the GD-ROM was what made it difficult to copy the DC games.... the PS2 and XBOX both use formats that CAN be read on a regular drive... try and find a GDROM unit for sale for your pc... you don't find that at Frys... all the money they put into enabling that specialized interface was wasted. They could have used regular old CDROMS instead of the ugly GDROM's with the crummy control track.
I'm sorry spending all they did to STOP pirates by using the GDROM (primarily anyways, there were standard CDROM games used, but they were easily copied.)
I figured, this being about the history of the DC people would be educated as to my reasons. I guess not.
That, and I defended Copy Protection at all.
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WHO WHAT? HE THINKS COPY PROTECTION IS A GOOD IDEA?? -1 FLAMEBAIT -1 OVERRATED
I just picked up QIII Arena for DC JUST LAST NIGHT.
I rock! And so does my mighty DREAMCAST.
I mean, Quake on a 17-inch flattie is one thing, but on a 32-inch Sony through a stereo system, it ROARS.