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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.
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.
Not entirely true. DC games are not easy to "backup." Your originals will not be copyable through conventional means and even if you do copy the files in a game, they'll need to be cracked and probably modified to run under a standard ISO9660 FS. They're easy to "backup" because of a small group of people who cracked the games. Their efforts were possible because of a loophole in Sega's MIL-CD format allowed a game's contents--burned onto CD-R--to be recognized by the console. Copying these "backups" is easy; copying real originals is hard.
yes, it's cheaper to get a modem to your pc and hook the dc up with it's modem.
;) and the community is great. i espacially like the mp3 player that uses the vmu display for control so theres no need for a monitor/tv to play mp3's as you wish.
that said, dreamcast is unbeliviable price/entertainment value, 'normal' people have lost their intrest in it. there's at leas as many GOOD games for it as there is for xbox..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
i have copied vanishing point, TER, and test drive le mans using DiscJuggler. should add that even on my relatively old DVD/CD-RW drive, it reads the data track as well as the session info without issue.
check out DCEmu, I promise, there's a lot of documentation on doing this.