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Most Dreamcast Online Servers Halted
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the official Sega announcement that most of their Dreamcast game servers will be shut down starting this month. According to the site, "Effective June 2003, the only Dreamcast titles that Sega will continue to support online are Phantasy Star Online and Phantasy Star Online ver. 2. No other Dreamcast titles will be playable online after this time." This means that titles such as Alien Front Online (which pre-dated Xbox Live with a headset feature), the Sega Sports titles, Quake III, and even the classy Chu Chu Rocket will no longer be online-compatible, admittedly long after their prime. Perhaps someone could find a homebrew solution?
its a sad state of affairs when a console with so many quality games can just sink into the ground like this
In the uber-competative world of console + PC + handheld gaming , it may be tragic to some, but is this really unexpected? I mean these companies want you to buy a new one every two years. Should I have any sympathy when they start dying off just as quickly?
Sega could pull off a huge public relations coup by releasing the source code to their servers so that the development community that has grown up around the Dreamcast can continue to grow. Sure, they wont make any money but it will go a long way towards making people trust them enough to buy their next console...if they ever make one.
IMO, the type of online PC games that are hosted by users will last longer because they're hosted by users. Typically, someone has to host a central server info server, but that doesn't cost them much. The new MMP environments won't fit this model...
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
I think somebody on the DCEmulation forums started a PSO server emulator. He claims to have broken the encryption used for the protocol.
It is -kindof- believable, because he was/is known for other hacks on PSO. But he never followed up with information or a proof, and it went quiet after a short while.
It looks like in most cases the SEGA servers provide only a lobby, to start games and get the IP addresses of all players interchanged, from then on it's peer-to-peer with UDP messages.
I think this is the chance to break out your packet-analysers and capture a few sessions.
It should be quite easy with an Action Replay or a private name server to cheat the DC into using a different server. And it would definitely be a nice open-source project. And it would open up the possibility for LAN games...