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?"

Comments

More emulation on Dreamcast

[Anonymous Coward]

There's plenty of emulators available for the not-so-dead dreamcast
http://www.zophar.net/consoles/dreamcast.html

Re:More emulation on Dreamcast

[lou2ser]

>>There's plenty of emulators available for the >>not-so-dead dreamcast
>>http://www.zophar.net/consoles/dreamc ast.html

Or you could just goto DCEmulation.com the mother of all Dreamcast Homebrew Software.

Cool system for $15

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Burnable games..

[artlu]

Don't forget that people were also able to burn games for the dreamcast without the use of modchips.

GroupShares Inc.

Re:Burnable games..

[billcopc]

The Dreamcast died because Sega killed it.

Mine is still hooked up to a VGA monitor, and Ikaruga gets a spin almost every day, but I still suck at it.

Had the console been properly marketed in North America, Sega would probably still be cranking out consoles today. It's the asian piracy market that killed it outright. Is it Taiwan that doesn't honor internation copyright ? Anyways, out there you can just buy pirated copies from the corner store or video rental place. Piracy is a BUSINESS over there, with employees and taxes. Over here people 'think' of getting a modchip, over there you buy the system premodded right from the electronics dealer.

I used to do PSX mod installations locally, and it took me forever to get rid of my initial order of 15 chips. If people really wanted to pirate games here, they'd have no problem blowing 50-80$ on a mod and 'recouping' their investment after only 2 games.

On the other hand, lots and lots of people have emulated satellite systems, VCR timebase-correctors to defeat VHS copy protection, CD burners and camera phones. We pirate a lot of shit!

Re:Dreamcast CD-reading question

[drcagn]

The system itself could read CD-ROMs and GD-ROMs (Sega's special high-density format) perfectly. GD-ROMs had two tracks, a normal low-density track readable by normal CD-ROMs (PCs, etc) and a high-density Dreamcast-only track. The low-density track often had wallpapers and screensavers one could grab from them on a PC.

A Dreamcast disk requires a bit of special burning (two tracks, the first with at least 4 seconds of data, and other requirements) but the whole disk is accessible.

The reason CD reading was allowed was so that third parties could create unoffical products such as Action Replay, or so artists could have their music CDs have Dreamcast extras (a few CDs in Asia I believe actually did this, but I haven't heard of one in the west). Sega didn't expect the GD-ROM format to be read, but a way was found to read the GD-ROMs (by ripping them from the Dreamcast connected to a PC). The games were then cracked to work on a CD-ROM, and piracy followed. Homebrew developers then created thier own code.

DC Emulator on PC

[ProudClod]

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.

Chankast is that piece of software, and it's a joy to see running :) I can now play rez on my PC.

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.

Re:Isn't this illegal?

[foidulus]

Try starting your gameboy(original, I don't know about later versions of it) up without a cartridge. Interestingly enough, it seems to go through the whole nintendo thing, only instead of the word nintendo, you just see a block. Kind of pointless, but in a fun kind of pointless way.

Re:Isn't this illegal?

[drcagn]

Sega v. Accolade in the Genesis days determined that if a display of a trademark is required for the software to boot, it is legal to display it and boot even if the trademark isn't correct. Also, in the bottom right quadrant of the screen, a developer can insert an image at the same time as the Trademark Sega text is shown. Unnofficial developers such as bleem! (The commercial PSX emulator for DC) used this space to insert an image that basically says "-- Ignore that information right there, it's not true"

Well, thats not really publishing, just porting

[Barret7SC]

I mean, they are rather technically impressive, but there is more to the Dreamcast Dev scene than just ports.

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.

Re:See, it's like this...

[butters the odd]

I can point you to many people.

dcemulation.com
dcemu uk
ConsoleVision
Boob