Slashdot Mirror
Amateurs Pushing the Dreamcast's Boundaries
Wraggster writes "The Sega Dreamcast console, which died an early commercial death, has recently seen some amazing new projects mainly aimed at emulation. Recently, a coder named Bluecrab released a port of the Saturn emulator called Yabause for the Dreamcast. Also, GPF (Troy Davis) has ported the excellent Visual Boy Advance (Game Boy Advance Emulator) to the Dreamcast. Finally, yesterday it was announced that Nincest (Nintendo 64 Emulator), an early N64 emulator that played demos only, has also been ported to the Dreamcast. All the projects are somewhat slow, but the achievement of the work is not to be discounted. Who says the Dreamcast is dead?"
i'm to say. it's dead, let it go.
Having BSD on Dreamcast made the system appealing to me. Granted, NetBSD has been ported to every electronic device that has enough memory to hold the kernel. But there is a certain geeky alure to using a video game console as a terminal, or, as some people have demonstrated, even as a webserver.
I guess it's just the "I can do this" aspect that draws me to it. Just having the ability to tinker with things makes them more interesting.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=114624&cid=972 0923/
Creative Demolition
Wouldn't "known as" be more appropriate? At least I hope so, otherwise his parents gave him a very unhappy childhood.
No sig for you.
There's plenty of emulators available for the not-so-dead dreamcast
http://www.zophar.net/consoles/dreamcast.html
Best part about the Dreamcast is that it can be found for as low as $15. I recently picked one up at EB. It was a great decision as I can get all the games I want online. These kinds of projects just make me even happier to have bought it.
Don't forget that people were also able to burn games for the dreamcast without the use of modchips.
GroupShares Inc.
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artlu.net
I bought a dreamcast about a year ago to run my games. It makes a great emulator. I have tons of NES, SNES, and GB games on it. In fact I only have one actual dreamcast game. The Xbox can be modded to do this sort of thing also but when it is priced at 150 dollars and there is a 30 dollar alternative the dreamcast is a much better system for emulation purposes. I also have it set up to play VCDs as well as being able to use it as an MP3 player.
These days, Dreamcast freaks are more likely to be emulator users rather than Sega fanboys. All it takes is a CD-ROM burner, a Dreamcast of the appropriate vintage, and you've got hundreds of games on a handful of disks.
The answer is obvious. It's hard to beat Amiga freaks for pathetic-ness. Unless you're a BeOS freak, anyhow.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Sega
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Certainly this was the case with the Gameboy, although I've noticed a lot of games seem to carry a brand. Even if the Dreamcast is effectively dead, wouldn't there be some concern about any workaround for such a device?
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Ah, you're referring to the Xbox...
Dreamcast started dying the moment Sega decided not to give up on making their own consoles and make games for other consoles instead. While the Dreamcast may be prolonging its death by homebrew games, there's never going to be a Dreamcast 2. Not to mention that Dreamcast is at the bottom of the list for popularity in current-generation consoles.
That said, it is nice to hear of someone finding something useful to do with those Dreamcasts.
I can see it now, my Xbox emulates the Dreamcast which can emulate ___________.
Can somebody explain a question I have regarding Dreamcast "home-brews"?
I was under the impression that the machine itself was physically unable to read normal CDs, except for something like the first 30MB or so. I thought real game disks used a special high-density format.
If so, are all these home-brews severely limited in capacity, or was a hack found?
Dead or not, the Dreamcast is a full-featured system, with lots of potential for those who want to spend the time learning it.
Granted, somebody like me, who is employed full-time, and has very little time as it is, won't be spending too much time on it (I still have my Dreamcast, complete with broadband adaptor, keyboard and serial cable). But, for somebody who has some free time and wants to learn about the Dreamcast, there's a lot of knowledge that can be gained, and applied to other systems.
Never hurts to have it on the resume - as a matter of fact, I got my job interview at Sega in part due to the demos that I did on the Commodore 64 back in the early 1990's.
-- Joe
Well, I never thought the source would be of any use to anyone (although the debugger was used in the dev of another emu). I was a Fresh/Soph in highschool when I wrote this. That was my last major project where I had the enthusiasm to code. I burned out after re-writing the part where I emulate the exception handling, and delay slots to be "proper" (to the R4x00 processor specs), I actually had a dirty hack in for the delay slot instructions. I rewrote that part of the code three times from scratch, and each time I would have the same problem; everything would break. I couldn't figure it out and eventually burned out. I keep my coding down to a minimum these days.
I hope only one thing, the porter, GPF?, puts the source back out again... I learned from other's source, and I hope others can learn from mine.
- marius
NINCEST 64: Get sis or get out.
nope, not the case. The dreamcast did and still does have the best tennis game ever made for a console. If you don't like tennis games, who cares. Still proves your point wrong.
what this story doesn't tell you is that these emulators would be completely unplayable on a machine with a 200Mhz processor. If you've ever tried to emulate a saturn even on a modern PC you'll see that the machine is one of the trickiest consoles ever to emulate. (It had something like 14 processors). And as for the N64...
I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, I just think there are more useful things to develop for DC.
I'll tell you what, go find a copy of this superb tennis game at Wal-Mart or Best Buy and I'll agree with you.
And yet some people still went out and bought them? Clueless.
So clueless! What fool does not heed the word of the middle manager supervising an anonymous game programmer? Seriously, 'my boss said it was dead, so it was' has to be the most insane thing I have heard today.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Try a second hand store or ebay. The world doesn't begin and end in Walmart, thank goodness.
Porting stuff to the Dreamcast is 1,000 times more constructive than getting Linux to run on an iPod.
You can get a Dreamcast used pretty cheaply now and those of us who like to tinker will happily use this stuff.
"middle manager supervising"
Huh?
That is most certainly not true. There are plenty of homebrew games developed specifically for the Dreamcast. Emulators tend to be the choice for people because they do the most, so they get the most attention, but homebrew games are still being developed. http://homebrew.dcemulation.com/ Officially, yes, the system is dead. But we're Slashdotters--since when does anything official apply to us?
Scorta futuere amo!
I guess you missed the point!
It's worth noting another recent breakthrough in the DC scene - a DC emulator for PC that works with real games at a playable rate.
:) I can now play rez on my PC.
Chankast is that piece of software, and it's a joy to see running
However, with DCs available at as low as 15GBP, it's silly not to pick it up. As a games writer, it's my favourite console I've owned, for the high quantity of top-notch games that were released in its short life. In fact, if you haven't explored the DC's back catalogue - I'd thoroughly recommend it. It's one of modern gaming's best kept secrets.
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
... now if only someone would build broadband adapters for the DC - it's really hard to get one and they're pretty expensive.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Who says the Dreamcast is dead?
Netcraft confirms it, Dreamcast is dying.
Well, somebody had to say it. ;-)
Do they keep everything in RAM, patch on a hard drive somehow? How does whatever emulator or system on there run so it can also run other things?
Not anymore! Most of the releases floating around now have the boot track embedded with the image.
More interesting is the fact that some of these 'new' images were games in development that never quite made it out. A fine example would be 'Half-Life'. Who released this? Probably some disgruntled programmer.
It's a shame too because besides the long (and often) load times, it's a GREAT port!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
"Who says the Dreamcast is dead?"
If there isn't new hardware being produced, the architecture is 'dead' for all intents and purposes. I could write code to make the 8085 in my TRS-80 Model 100 emulate an 8088 and run MS-DOS on it. An enthusiast could get an old PDP-11 to emulate an Apple II.
It's cool, it's great hacking material, but it's a 'dead end' project. Nothing wrong at all with cool dead-end projects (Anybody need an Intersil 6100 chip? 12 bit static CMOS microcontrollers that run the PDP-8 instruction set rule!), but they're, ummm, dead.
resigned
Me and my cohorts at S+F Software are getting a game published via the Goat Store, if they can get the pressing details worked out. It's a addictive four player puzzle game called Inhabitants, also available on Lik-Sang
The nice thing about the DC is that it is quite easy to code for using open tools. The KallistOS library gives you easy access to the hardware. It even has a openGL library that does a decent job for simple 3d stuff, and a badass object oriented 2d library.
it was only a deadend product because of developers like you and your company: the dreamcast had plenty of promising features, and has some of the best games for its generation.
"the dreamcast had plenty of promising features"
Other than 'deadness' what features are you referring to?
"has some of the best games for its generation"
Nope.
Seems the fan community for the Dreamcast is as enamored with them as the Newton Community is. Both groups continue to love their minicomputers, maintain them, and mod away! Very cool! While the DC is learning how to emulate, Newton just learned how to run Gameboy games. Newton now can do wi-fi and bluetooth, so will that be coming to DC as well? Bluetooth keyboards and controls anyone? Very cool stuff!
I can point you to many people.
dcemulation.com
dcemu uk
ConsoleVision
Boob
The middle manager who supervises ... the anonymous programmer's boss, who is a middle manager ...
50 bucks for a box that can play mp3's, practically every nes, genesis, and gameboy game, browse the internet, play jet set radio, and a ton of other stuff i'm too busy smoking to list right now... i wished my dreamcast still worked (and i also wish the second hand ones didn't have such dicey read mechanisms...) /me tips a 40 for the dreamcast
I have not discovered a better way to casually access internet resources from the comfort of my living room couch without going to the trouble of booting up a computer or spending a fair bit of dough. You can telnet, edit/upload html, check email and browse web pages with a Dreamcast. I have a stack of demo games that rarely get played but the Browser 3.0 and eCos Linux CD's get used regularly. I am not much into games so a PSOne suits me fine, the Dreamcast is an obviously more advanced platform only surpassed by the PS2 and the "BIGBOX".
I learned how to code HTML and IRC on a Dreamcast. It was pretty fun.
oh yeah, it plays rez too. the first american console to do so. :)
I have a 1.5Ghz Athlon and the emulator slows down my entire system when I run it. How fast could it possibly be on the DC?
DC Phone Home (ppt, rtsp only).
Great. /graf0z.
But I'm not sure how porting emulators of weaker hardware to the Dreamcast in any way constitutes "pushing it's boundaries".
Hmm...console as computer or terminal eh? Well the "geeky allure" certainly has nothing to do with novelty, as the concept is far from new. Witness the following:
1. The Bally Astrocade console of 1978 was the first to explore the concept commercially, as one of it's "game" carts was the BASIC programming language and cassette interface.
2. Later in 1978 Magnavox (the producer of the first ever home console called Odyssey) introduced the successor Odyssey^2. Marketed head-to-head with the Atari 2600 as a console, it actually had an integrated keyboard. It wasn't really a computer (The Sinclair ZX81 came standard with EIGHT TIMES the memory of the O^2!) the idea was that adventure/strategy games could better use a keyboard than a joystick, and that expanding it to a computer would simply involve adding a RAM expansion pack.
3. It seems Mattel had intentions from the start to give the Intellivision a computer expansion option, and touted those intentions from the console's intro in 1979. However, they were late in delivering on their promises, and were eventually forced by the FTC to bring out the computer expansion or pay huge fines. They did comply--barely--by selling a few hundred in test markets, then pulled out. Eventually the introduced a newer, quite different design to a wider market, however the result was a major disappointment.
4. Atari beat both Bally and Magnavox to the colour console market with the 2600, but it was a bit later in exploting the computer expansion option. This was probably because they figured the entry-level micro market was served adequately by its Atari 400 offering. In the end the "Graduate" keyboard was never released.
5. Coleco was probably had the most success at turning their Colecovision console into a computer in terms of units produced (300K to 500K, although much of that stock never sold) and time on the market (nearly 1.5 years starting in 1983). This was probably more to do with Coleco selling the ADAM as a self contained computer alongside the "expansion module 3" that attached to an existing Colecovision--which sold in lower numbers. The ADAM in fact simply contained a slightly modified Colecovision and the logic board of the Expansion Module 3 in one case.
And that only covers until 1983. Nintendo Famicom and the Sony PS2 could also be made into a computer (with the manufacturer's blessing and products). There certainly is some appeal in being able to "tinker" and have the flexibility of a full-fledged computer, so why did none of these ideas really take off?
I'd have to say that both price and features had a great deal to do with it--the same reason the whole market crashed in 1984. With the exception of the Coleco products (which failed because of poor marketing/late delivery and poor quality control of its initial run) all these expanded consoles were lousy computers, and the combined cost of the console and expander was the same or more than a better entry-level micro. Why would you purchase an Atari 2600 and graduate if the Atari 400 by itself was a way better system that had great games already? Why buy an intellivision that you MIGHT be able to expand to a computer when you could get a VIC or a 400 or a Speccy that was already a computer for the same price? Not only that, but these computers all came with great games to boot.
I also find the "geeky allure" appealing, but I think the market is limited--in fact I think the drive to "tinker" with some of these devices is because the were commercial failures. Hardcore fans feel like they are abandoned by the company and band together for support and to get the most out of the system. Because the supply of orphaned sys
...and quit whining about how much a new Mac costs. A Blue & White G3 will set you back less than two hundred bucks, and even though they're five years old, they still run the latest OS X beta quite well. If you don't want to pay that much, STFU and get a beige box running Linux. That's still a lot cheaper than those "new" Amiga motherboards and the DRM chip required to boot the "new" Amiga OS.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I can get DC games at the local dollar store, not the best games, but at leats they are cheap.
anyone who plays ut2k3 or ut2k4 has ogg files ;)
The ones who got a kickass game console at blowout prices? Why is it sad, because they didn't "win"? They were on the "unpopular loser" side? You seem to think that your choice of console is some sort of popularity contest, maybe you're just insecure. The rest of us buy consoles that are fun to play. And at our parties, the dreamcast still gets more use than any other consoles from that time. But I'm sure you don't have parties, do you?
I suggest none of you actually visit the links he has provided as hes one of thsoe good ol fashioned spam whores who runs ads to get money. As a plus he ripped the name off of www.dcemulation.com, which is a lot better and contains less newbs and more experienced individuals. www.consolevision is good as well but not early as active forum wise.
The best thing about the Dreamcast and its homebrew scene was that Sega supported it from day 1! They never gave tools to developers but they told them it was ok and they wouldnt get sued for doing it.
I remember someone from Sega tech support on the dcemulation forums telling people how to get the Dreamcast coders cable working, which is funny cause while that cable allows homebrew things to happen quicker it also allows the ripping of dreamcst games.
The xbox is like the Dreamcast 2 in spirit, its basicly the same exact thing just with a hard drive and better hardware, Microsoft is even following the Sega method of console design, inovation.
The Dreamcast was dead before it hit the shelves.
In other words, Netcraft comfirms the Dreamcast is dying? Wait- it shipped with a 56k modem? Crap.
Pathetic if your an amiga fan waiting for the 2nd coming of the amiga.
The amiga os was great, for it's time, and had it not been tied to deadend hardware could have evolved into an easy to use resource efficient operating system anyone who used the amiga as anything other than a games machine knows it had a nice os.
however the reality is Pc's running windows rule the desktop, Linux is great but it just isn't very intuitive.
maybe it is possible to port exec to the pc and create an amiga flavoured port. in fact possibly linux could be the key since almost everything exists as source code. everyone is free to develop a kernel if they have the time and inclination but its not going to happen anytime soon.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Seriously, 'my boss said it was dead, so it was' has to be the most insane thing I have heard today.
It looks like his boss wasn't wrong. Sega has a long history of fucking over the people who adopt their game systems. After the Genesis, Sega seemed to treat every other system that they developed as a way to raise money for the "next generation" system that in turn would be brought to market to raise money for the next "next generation" system.
32X, SegaCD, Saturn, Dreamcast. All decent systems that never got a fair shot in the marketplace because Sega killed them off too early.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
It's hard to beat Amiga freaks for pathetic-ness.
Somehow, month after month Apple FanBoys seem to manage this nigh impossible feat.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
As long as there are people who still enjoy tinkering with something, I really don't think it should be considered 'dead'. This applies to 'dead' consoles, such as the Dreamcast, and 'dead' computers/operating systems, such as the Amiga, and BeOS.:)
They may be dead commercially, but not dead for hobbyists.
A slow emulator is a worthless emulator. As a major emulation fan, I was considering getting a GP32 (GamePark32) handheld, due to the wealth of emulators available for it.
Then I looked into what is actually available. Sure, lots of emulators-- some of which are missing sound, and virtually ALL of which run at some fraction (1/3, 1/2, 2/3, whatever) of the speed of the "real" console.
Thanks, but no thanks. You don't have to be a purist (heck, if I was a purist, I'd be lugging around an actual SNES around in my backpack, and an LCD display to plug it into) to be MAJORLY put off by a non-full-speed emulator, or-- just as much-- an emulator without sound.
Can you imagine playing Final Fantasy 6, or Chrono Trigger, at 2/3 speed, with no sound?
I wouldn't want to. Not in a billion years.
To me, slow emulators have ONE use and ONE use only: Capturing screenshots of games.
(Incidentally, all of my comments apply solely to game console emulators. There are, obviously, uses for slow COMPUTER emulators-- although there comes a point where they become too slow for anything except development/debugging use (e.g. Bochs, which is so incredibly slow as to be a joke).)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
But do they care? Does Joe User genuinely care whether he has "Ogg Vorbis"--a name that's simply embarrassing to say--or MP3/AAC files?
No.
That's all that matters, but Slashdot OSS fanatics always miss the point, making usability and practicality subservient to ideology. (Illustrations: the unusable "desktops" Gnome and KDE.)
This emulation business is all over the xbox scene since the modchips where released. Why resurect a dead machine and not get an xbox for curren games and older emulation platforms.
Since i got my chip from http://www.xboxchips.com/ my xbox hasnt shutdown since cuz of linux, mame, gba internet browsing and cool media players and endless features.
Again, dreamcast is dead, leave it there... invest the time on a current console that has more power and might even be worth it for future stuff.
There is also a man porting the original Zelda for the NES to the dreamcast. Of course, all sprites and such had to be changed, because Nintendo found out about it (back when it was for PC only) and used the DMCA to force the creators to either drop it, or stop using their art. The link for today's project, Openlynks, is located here.
Are you telling me that you don't see the connection between government and laughing at people? - Interviewer
that it must be popular to be good?
I saw a copy at EB the other week. That good enough for ya?
Who says the Dreamcast is dead?
Me, and everyone who threw theirs away years ago...
do you have your PC hooked up to a TV, with a console controller attached, with an easy way to switch games without going back to your keyboard/mouse?
Yes. I run my N64 controller through an Adaptoid and a pair of PlayStation digital controllers through an EMS USB2 adapter through a USB hub to my PC with a Radeon 9000 video card with TV output. I also run a pair of PlayStation dance pads through the same EMS USB2 to the PC so that I can play StepMania on a regulation-size 27" TV. And yes, there exist joystick based frontends to PC-hosted emulators.
when steve job annouced the g4 cube at macworld i read it using the internet browser cd that came with my dreamcast.... not only that, i bought my g4 cube online with my dreamcast. i got a little scared when the apple store asked me to print out the user aggrement, but 5 weeks later(i put in my order the day they were announced) i was tracking my cube(still using the dreamcast). good times, fun stuff, fuck microsoft.
Emulation is about learning. It is not about getting things for free.
Part of it is about learning or spreading information. Part of it is also about playing games for free. If you don't accept that, you're being naive.
My other first post is car post.
Can someone reccomend some actually GOOD free homebrew games for DC? Last time I checked, they all seemed to be either all abandoned in 2002 or just crappy versions of Tetris or things along those lines.
I have a Dreamcast and I love it, but the emulators have left me rather disappointed. There still isn't a SNES emu that runs at full speed with sound. If 16-bit system emulation is still struggling, I don't have much hope for these newer systems running well anytime soon...
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
I thought someone was trolling/kidding about the Treamcast but apparently it does exist. No, that's not a typo...that's what the HK wizards who built it call it.
There is precious little info in the reviews I linked to. The dcemu.co.uk review mentioned an empty modem slot...will a DC modem fit the slot? How about the Broadband adapter? What about usage of all my DC goodies with this machine...some of the stuff I like to play requires not one, but two VMUs to make it work like I like it, and I have favorite controllers I use. The one that comes with the Treamcast looks pretty lame. And what about The Typing Of The Dead? Can I plug in my SegaNet keyboard and type some zombie ass to Kingdom Come?
Despite the unanswered questions, the Treamcast suggests there's life in the old platform yet, regardless of Sega killing it before its time. Between the fanboys writing new games for it and the legally questionable but laudable in many other respects manufacture of this brand new version of the platform what remains of Sega is probably kicking itself.
You can't keep a good console down! W00t!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Ahh piss off. Wake me up when they have a usable Commodore 64 emulator for the DC.
The things that made the Amiga unique have been eclipsed by modern hardware. The final moment was when Apple started using the 3D card to move desktop windows around, which Amiga (before they were bought out and f'ed up by Commodore) was doing more than a decade earlier.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Actually, from what I see, they run like crap. Then again, I wouldn't expect any machine to run OS X acceptably with only a maximal 128MB of RAM.
Er, the blue and white G3s that have a maximum of 1 gig of RAM? Check your facts before you post something like that.
Not everyone knows.
Long live the Amiga! The Amiga scene is still very active. A good example is that recently UAE (amiga emulator) was ported to the PocketPC! I was wondering when this was going to happen and I think it's pretty nifty to be playing some of my old favorites on my iPaq.
congrats on getting /.'d, bluecrab.
from everyone on #dreamcastdev
Marius?! How are things, man? Still in the bay area? How's Garkin doing? Will you finally delete my profile?
- Anonymous Coward #134217727
Eh, I don't think that's something that qualifies as a "DRM" chip. Does it really matter, I mean, why would Pegasos users want to run AmigaOS4 anyway? After all, they're always saying how MorphOS is so much better...
Shameless Related Web-Comic Plug #13,976 http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=100
> Pathetic if your an amiga fan waiting for the 2nd coming of the amiga.
More pathetic is having such a poor command of the English language that such a person frequently spells "you are"/"you're" with the posessive-case: "your". Now I ask you: "my WHAT?"
.
Amigas don't get infected . . PCs cop it ALL!
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
There is a small section of the demoscene producing works on the dreamcast. http://pouet.net/prodlist.php?type=&platform=Dream cast&type2=&platform2=&type3=&platform3=&x=32&y=11
"maybe it is possible to port exec to the pc and create an amiga flavoured port."
http://aros.sourceforge.net/
Dreamcast never died! *jumps to his sofa and cuddles his DC console*
Jees... I don't get why people bother.
Because I don't like to play games that 1. run at half speed, 2. run without sound, or 3. crash on startup because the not-yet-accurate emulator misinterprets the game's copy protection. Almost every ROM I've tried in, say, DreamSNES has suffered from at least one of these problems.
maybe think about the fact that your setup has cost more than the DC way
Are you sure? Making selfboot emulator discs for Dreamcast still costs money for a CD burner and the PC to run it. In addition, not everybody has as much space as I have; people living in a university dorm room often can't fit a TV nor find a Dreamcast VGA box to buy.
"The Sega Dreamcast console, which died an early commercial death, has recently seen some amazing new projects mainly aimed at emulation."
"Who says the Dreamcast is dead?"
Appearantly you.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
and as nearly all of PCs sold to consumers right now have CD burners already on them
They didn't in late 2000, when I bought my PC with a PIII 866 MHz. (I bought a CD burner a few months later.) Such a PC can run more complex non-Sega systems' emulators at full speed than a Dreamcast could even dream of.
we have a dreamcast system bought (15 bucks?)
Where did you find that deal? EBGames was selling them for $30 when I bought mine.
extra controllers (10 bucks apiece?)
How much did your Dreamcast controllers cost? I also happened to already own a (pre-Dual Shock) PlayStation console.
Another reason I stick with a PC with TV out is that I develop my own games. First, it appears that the publicly available development tools for PC and GBA are much more mature and better understood than those for DC. For instance, the KOS library isn't known to work well on a Windows host except in a Cygwin bash environment. Second, the compile-link-load-test cycle runs more quickly on PC (or even on GBA) than on DC. I have a DC coder's cable, but I'd like to be able to develop programs of over 1 MB without waiting forever for the programs to be sent at 100 kbps over such a cable and without having to save up $200 and pounce on an eBay auction of a BBA.
just that you seemed rather clueless about the fact that playing DC games on a DC is -much- easier
For somebody who enjoys simple mindless games such as Dance Dance Revolution, Tetris, Puyo Puyo, Super Smash Bros. Melee, and WarioWare, do you have any recommendations on what official Dreamcast games I could pick up at a local used game store and enjoy?
Maybe the Dreamcast is dead, but not it's broadband adapter. Try and source one! They're like hens teeth! I say someone should start making 3rd party BB Adapters for the Dreamcast. :-)
I was recently emailed by lik-sang who wanted to buy mine back off me
You forgot the part about how you can put a 1.1GHz G3 processor into them too.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
It's a normal Dreamcast with a flip-top LCD and modifies top panel. The control is actually a clone of the excellent Japanese pad for the Saturn, great for all types of games, actually nicer to play with than the standard DC pads, just no VMU ports. The modem port is just what it sounds like: a port which can be used to connect the DC modem or BBA. All of this info can be found in many places, like DCemu.co.uk, which has a review of the unit, Lik-Sang.com, which sells the unit and has many pictures. I guess if you aren't lazy, blind, or just plain brain-dead, you could have answered all your own questions in a minute or two of research.
Check out my foes list to see who is so retarded that they can't use the signature line!!!
It's just a shame the Dreamcast wasn't just A BIT FASTER. It's fast enough to play 320x240 Divx videos, but not enough for full res.
If the DC's processor was just a bit faster, we'd have had the PERFECT platform for an ultra-cheap SVCD/MPEG-4/Ogm/XCD player, long before the first commercial "Divx" certified players.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
And yet some people still went out and bought them? Clueless.
So go ahead and show me another way I can play Capcom's excellent Power Stone, or Soul Calibur.