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The Dreamcast's Final Death

Posted by Zonk on from the live-on-little-console-live-on dept.

Croakyvoice writes "The Dreamcast games Last, Hope Karous and Trigger Heart Exelica will the last officially licensed Sega games for the Dreamcast because from February Sega Japan plans to stop production of GDRoms. The death of the GDRom format will mean no more Dreamcast or Naomi Arcade games. The Dreamcast Community has sent emails to Sega Japan to ask for a rethink on this issue. From the article: 'This doesn't need to happen, as developers are fond of the NAOMI for its relative low cost, ease of production and accessibility, and straightforward ports to the Dreamcast home console. Warashi returned to the scroll shooting genre with Trigger Heart Exelica on NAOMI, and Milestone would likely gladly continue to produce further games following Karous on the system as well. Sega themselves have recently presented Dynamite Deka EX running on NAOMI. If GD-ROM production continues, there is a much greater chance that we'll see a home console port of this game on DC within a year.'"

99 comments

  1. Dreamcast? by Physician · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Raise your hand if you're surprised they still make games for the Dreamcast. However, I'm in favor of anything that keeps an old console alive. I wish Nintendo would still produce SNES carts.

    --
    Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
    1. Re:Dreamcast? by nomadic · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yep, I was shocked at this myself.

      I wish they'd make one last Shenmue before they go...

    2. Re:Dreamcast? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "I wish Nintendo would still produce SNES carts."

      They do. The gameboy advance is a essentially a small SNES.

    3. Re:Dreamcast? by pipatron · · Score: 1

      Except it has a completely different CPU, GPU, sound system, and uhm.. cartridge format, and memory, etc.

      --
      c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */
    4. Re:Dreamcast? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      All of which are of roughly the same power/capacity/whatever as their SNES equivalents, meaning that to someone who isn't actually programming the thing it's basically a SNES that takes different cartridges. The only other difference from a gamer's perspective is that it's a portable and has 2 fewer buttons.

    5. Re:Dreamcast? by MrCopilot · · Score: 1

      They do. They just shrunk them to fit in a gameboy.

      --
      OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
    6. Re:Dreamcast? by Khyber · · Score: 1

      I wish every company would go back to carts. Seriously, I'm sick of loading times. Most decent games out right now can fit on a freaking 4gb flash card, and with new phase change memory coming out, there's no reason why we shouldn't have drastically faster loading times and a smaller package, not to mention a media you don't have to worry about scratching, so the games would last longer. Seriously, optical discs are so passe, and the technology is coming around in non-volatile memory to send optical into obsoletion.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  2. Or... by casualsax3 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... they could just start using CD's, since those work too.

    1. Re:Or... by HexRei · · Score: 1

      at 1/2 capacity :(

    2. Re:Or... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      damn right cd's work. the utopia bootloader was the shit (and, consequently, *almost* undisputedly the reason the console failed and sega pulled out of the hardware market)

      i must say though, i was a bit flabbergasted/discombobulated/nonplus'd to find that some companies were still producing titles for the dreamcast. i could have told them that was a bad idea december 99 (and, iirc, it was released september 99)

    3. Re:Or... by LordVader717 · · Score: 1

      It did have a following in Japan for quite some time after Sega quit the hardware business. What is the utopia bootloader anyway?
      Why would you have predicted it's death in 99? From what I've heard, it wasn't really inferior to the PS2, it just failed to get 3rd party support, for no good reason.

    4. Re:Or... by heinousjay · · Score: 1

      Nobody bought a Dreamcast because Sony was overhyping the PS2 with their claims of real time Toy Story graphics.

      --
      Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
    5. Re:Or... by Jerf · · Score: 2, Informative

      Oh, goodness yes, the Dreamcast as a whole is technically inferior to the PS2 as a whole.

      The two interesting things are that the PS2 is nowhere near as superior as it was claimed to be when Sony was killing the Dreamcast with marketting, and the PS2 has some weird aspects where the Dreamcast is superior, particularly on the per-polygon quality, but really shouldn't have been. However, the PS2 can mostly make it up with more polygons, though I've always been stunned at how little graphical improvement Soul Calibur 2 shows over Soul Calibur 1, and SC1 honestly looks cleaner to me because of the superior per-polygon quality, even if there are fewer of them.

      On the other hand, Katamari Damacy would probably have been much less fun on a Dreamcast, because it would have had far fewer objects most likely. The most detailed Dreamcast games don't really approach that.

      The Dreamcast died prematurely, but it still wasn't going to be a winner in 2004, let alone 2006. It came out earlier, so that's not really a surprise anyhow.

    6. Re:Or... by dknj · · Score: 1

      only if you have a first gen dreamcast. the 2nd iteration solved this problem

    7. Re:Or... by kestasjk · · Score: 1

      When I downloaded and wrote a game (that you can't buy here) to CD for my Dreamcast the CD caused its "Final Death".
      GDs are read from the inside out, and data is packed together more closely, this means the laser in the CD has to move less. When you use a CD you hear the constant bzzzt-bzzzt sound of the laser moving back and forth. In about a week it would often halt while loading game data, a week after that it couldn't load startup data, now by Dreamcast is unuseable.

      So unfortunately CDs won't work as a replacement, it looks like it's eBay and 2nd hand games only from now on. :(

      --
      // MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
    8. Re:Or... by CronoCloud · · Score: 0, Troll

      The PS2 has it all over the Dreamcast. hardware wise, but that (or any purported Sony hype) was not the reason the DC failed. The true reason was the Sega/arcade fanboys. You see, the DC releases were heavy with games that appealed to the Sega/arcade fanboy base and not very well to anyone else. I didn't see any DC launch games that appealed to me and so did a lot of other people. If they had released games for markets other than the "I love fighting games, 2D rules, I love SNK and Capcom, Shoryuken!" market, they'd have done better. Focusing too much effort on their hardcore fanbase was the killer.

      Of course, having a crappy bulky controller with batterysucking VMU's,and low capacity disks didn't help either. As did the tanking of the Saturn, leaving Sega's fans more hardcore than before in the Genesis days.

    9. Re:Or... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Not that much of a difference -- PS2 games max at about 8-9 million polys, the DC maxes out at about 5.5... It's not a huge difference to the naked eye, and the larger texture memory makes for sharper textures.
        As far as hardware goes, the two machines are actually pretty similar in capabilities.

    10. Re:Or... by Firehawke · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This is why you use a tool to create a large amount of dummy space at the beginning of the image before burning it. By pushing out the data to the outer edge of the disc, you reduce the stress on the drive.

      I've had my Dreamcast since US launch, and I've been using burned backups of Japanese stuff on it since then without issue.

    11. Re:Or... by b1t+r0t · · Score: 1

      GDs are read from the inside out, and data is packed together more closely

      CDs are read from the inside out too.

      --

      --
      "Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
      "Open source is evil." - Microsoft
    12. Re:Or... by muftak · · Score: 1

      Piracy didn't kill the dreamcast, it was the only reason I bought one! It's just as easy to pirate xbox games, and that didn't die untill the 360 came out.

    13. Re:Or... by nogginthenog · · Score: 1

      Piracy didn't kill the DC, rather the lack of a DVD player (which the PS2 had).

    14. Re:Or... by grumbel · · Score: 1

      I think the true reason why the Dreamcast failed is rather simple: Because Sega stopped selling them.

      The Dreamcast production was already stopped a year before Gamecube and XBox where even available in all territories. How can it succeed when you can't even by it? Looking at the numbers there are still 10mil Dreamcasts sold while 20-25mil XBox and Gamecubes, which actually looks quite good for the Dreamcast, given that Gamecube and XBox had a solid 6 years longer to sell.

      I kind of doubt that the Dreamcast would have had much problem in the long run, sure it might not have beaten the PS2, but as Nintendo shows, you don't need that to turn a very solid profit, especially considering that the Dreamcast had a ton of very good games, which later got ported to both XBox and Gamecube. If the XBox and Gamecube didn't have all those Sega games they would have been a quite a bit less attractive.

    15. Re:Or... by nbehary · · Score: 3, Informative

      The thing is, recent DC games have been shooters that really don't nearly use all of the capacity of the GDROMs. Now, that may not be univerally true of all potential NAOMI ports, but it has been for the last 2 years or so.

    16. Re:Or... by N+Monkey · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Oh, goodness yes, the Dreamcast as a whole is technically inferior to the PS2 as a whole,


      [Sarcasm mode]
      Oh yes, because PS2 didn't have native hardware support:
      • Texture compression (16-colour palettes do not count)
      • A rich set of blend modes
      • Normal map bump mapping
      • Hardware, per-pixel, translucency sorting.
      • Antialiasing
      • Modifier volumes (e.g. for shadow volumes)..

      [/Sarcasm mode]
      PS2 did achieve a high polygon and fill rate (provided you didn't mind the simple blend modes) but it did use a hectare of silicon.

      I could go on but I'm already bitter and twisted enough as it is.
    17. Re:Or... by runderwo · · Score: 1

      CDs don't work in the arcade hardware.

      --
      LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
    18. Re:Or... by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 1, Insightful

      CDs don't work in the arcade hardware.

      But surely the arcade version of the hardware doesn't rely on GD-ROM as its storage medium? One would think that in a use case like that, a more fixed and reliable technology like hard drives would be utilized.

    19. Re:Or... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is certainly not just as easy to pirate XBox games. For a Dreamcast game all you had to do was download and burn it. Period. You need to mod an XBox, be it soft or hard.

    20. Re:Or... by ReptilianSamurai · · Score: 1

      Katamari Damacy also would have been less fun on the Dreamcast's controller ;-)

      --
      I installed Linux on a car, but it crashed due to bad drivers...
    21. Re:Or... by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      I don't know about THIS hardware (Naomi) but the former crossover platform from Sega, which consisted of the Saturn and whatever they called the arcade version of that, was capable of using either ROMs (the saturn has a cart port on top, which was used for the game shark, savegames, and for ROM carts for fighting games whose software still loaded from CD) or a hard disk drive. The latter approach was used in Area 51, one of the older shooting games out there and still one of the best :D But notably the conversion on the Saturn is arcade-perfect except for load times because it's the same game.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    22. Re:Or... by STratoHAKster · · Score: 1

      Assessing whether the Dreamcast or the PS2 are superior is pointless because they are very different systems. Each system had strengths in certain areas. The Dreamcast's strength came mostly from the PowerVR graphics chipset which used a very efficient technique called 'tiled rendering' which greatly reduced the amount of bandwidth necessary to render plygons. Basically, it's a retained rendering mode where all the polys that comprise a frame are 'retained' in memory before they are ever rendered. The framebuffer is split into 'tiled' sections where each tile maintains a list of polys which intersect, where they are presorted and then rendered at once. This approach doesn't eliminate a huge amount of memory bandwidth wasted in the traditional z-buffer approach generally used on the PS2, but it allows for a great deal of parallelism. The Dreamcast was capable of rendering A LOT of polygons very, very quickly. Jet Grind Radio was a game that resulted from Sega engineers taking a look at the PS2 specs and coming up with a game to show where the Dreamcast really shined. Also, the Dreamcast supports texture-compression, which was put to great use in this game. The amount of visible polygons and very sharp textures was really the strength of this machine. On the other hand, where Dreamcast system architecture is fairly standard PC-like system (I believe it even has a PCI bus), the PS2 appears to be much more complex beast (I've only started learning the system myself). It's understandable that it took years before the PS2 had really great games because the machine is like an enigma. There are something like four or five processors - I'm still not quite certain if the VU0/VU1 are actual processing units or coprocessors to the main CPU. The PS2 appears to have pixel-shader like capability (through the GS?) though blurring doesn't appear to be as smooth. The PS2's capabilities seem limited by the skill of the developer where the Dreamcast is locked into the capabilities/limitations of the PowerVR. Take a look at Okami for an example of what the PS2 can achieve that would be impossible with the Dreamcast.

    23. Re:Or... by STratoHAKster · · Score: 1

      Crap - hastily typed reply. Should be "This approach does eliminate a huge amount of memory bandwidth wasted in the traditional z-buffer approach..." Also forgot to mention that the Dreamcast doesn't have the capacity for pixel-shader type effects, even if it were done by the CPU since the bandwidth between the CPU and framebuffer is very limited. As I understand, one of the PS2's coprocessors has very fast framebuffer access and could be used for pixel-shader like post-processing effects with little overhead to the other processing units.

    24. Re:Or... by N+Monkey · · Score: 1
      But surely the arcade version of the hardware doesn't rely on GD-ROM as its storage medium?

      I must say the only Naomi (1 & 2) boards that I saw took replaceable ROM packs, which meant they booted very quickly and probably would have been more reliable in an environment like an arcade. I suppose, however, that a GDROM based system would have made distribution of new games/updates cheaper though.
  3. Palecast? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    "However, I'm in favor of anything that keeps an old console alive."

    Let's hear it for the Colecovision.

    1. Re:Palecast? by maynard · · Score: 1

      I dunno about the colecovision, but there is still community support for the 2600 and (amazingly) the Vectrex. New games, believe it or not. I owned a colecovision back in 1982 or so. Good console, but I seem to remember playing the 2600 more often simply because it had more games. I also played lots of games on a TRS-80 model 1, as well as an original IBM XT back then. Of course the XT had superior graphics - a CGI card - in comparison to the trash 80. But that bit o trash had lots more games at that time. Good games, even. (and lets face it, the PC sucked in comparison to the Atari 800)

      So many fond memories...

    2. Re:Palecast? by SyncNine · · Score: 1

      I'm assuming you meant CGA graphics card? :) A CGI graphics card would be a strange device, indeed.

      On the nostalgia front, I still have an AMD K5-133 with a #9GXE64 (64 bit VLB-bus graphics card!) that plays 7th Guest and 11th Hour better than Windows ;)

      --
      To the darkened skies once more, and ever onward.
    3. Re:Palecast? by soft_guy · · Score: 1

      Atari 800 rules!! The greatest computer of the 8 Bits!

      --
      Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
    4. Re:Palecast? by Volzeron · · Score: 1

      It's tough to argue with the Atari 800 having better graphics. Let's face it, having 128 colors on the screen at once in 300x200 resolution in 1980 was nothing short of amazing.

      It's something people had to see to believe and a lot of them saw it and still didn't believe it.

      Yes, I still have my Atari 800 (48K) with 810 floppy drive.

  4. I miss my Dreamcast by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I loved Metropolis Street Racer, Virtual On, and Chu Chu Rocket. I still think as far as tech goes, the DC was on par with a PS2. Unfortunately, history does not agree with me.

    1. Re:I miss my Dreamcast by generikz · · Score: 2, Informative

      I guess most "Street Fighter"-based fans would agree with you!

      At the (at that time) bi-annual TKGS (Tokyo Game Show), the CAPCOM championship would oppose players on Capcom vs. SNK playing network linked systems. Each would have the choice of either playing DreamCast or PlayStation 2. 100% of them chose the DC because they blamed the PS2 for "slightly freezing from time to time" thus completely killing the carefully executed and time 24 buttons combinations triple-combo-of-death at the worst time!

      Julien

  5. Not the end by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Dreamcast can read standard CD-Roms. They don't hold quite as much as a GD-Rom... if memory serves, a GD-Rom holds close to one gig. But, GD-Roms also seem much more error-prone, and have to be more expense to press.

    1. Re:Not the end by the_nightwulf · · Score: 3, Informative

      (Most) Dreamcasts can read standard CD-ROMs. The easiest way to tell if yours will is by the manufacturing date at the bottom. If memory serves, the cutoff was February 2001. It was February of something ...

      GD-ROMs do hold close to one gig, and they are indeed much more error prone. The extra storage space is gained by removing much of the redundant data used for error correction. This is why a Dreamcast GD-R with a speck of dust may not play, but a PSX game that's been run through a blender will.

  6. What is a DreamCast? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I've never heard of it. I assume obviously some sort of gaming console, but I know a lot of people with gaming consoles and I've not seen/heard of this one.

    Or was it not released in Australia?

    1. Re:What is a DreamCast? by poisonfruitloops · · Score: 1

      Yep, it was released in australia, albeit very limitedly. i recall a telstra online pack or something of some description stickered on the box?

    2. Re:What is a DreamCast? by Penguinshit · · Score: 3, Funny

      Australia released the DreamTime.

      --

      I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...

    3. Re:What is a DreamCast? by damiangerous · · Score: 1

      The Dreamcast was the first of the last generation of consoles. It was released in the US on 9/9/99 and official discontinued in early 2002. I don't know the Australian release date but it was definitely sold there. From what I understand the Australian distributor really did a poor job though.

    4. Re:What is a DreamCast? by Simon+Garlick · · Score: 2, Informative

      From what I understand the Australian distributor really did a poor job though.

      Understatement of the century. Ozisoft (the distributor) delayed the launch, fucked up the ad campaign, overpriced the console out of the market, and drip-fed titles. The Dreamcast was doomed in Australia thanks to Ozisoft.

      My DC is still hard at work. I have it installed in the kitchen at my workplace... my workmates and I thrash each each other at Soul Calibur while we wait for the coffee to brew.

      --

      -----
      PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
    5. Re:What is a DreamCast? by atomicstrawberry · · Score: 1

      'Drip-fed' implies that the games were actually released. Generally speaking, the only viable options for getting any games at all in Australia was to import expensive UK releases or resort to piracy. A real shame, too, because the system had some excellent games.

      I still remember my despair at finding my copy of Skies of Arcadia was defective and wouldn't run. I think it was one of the five or so copies we got here. Not that I'm bitter about it or anything. :(

    6. Re:What is a DreamCast? by UltimApe · · Score: 1

      I love how it was released so much earlier than the ps2, and yet you could emulate ps2 games on it at a higher resolution.

      --
      "Infecting minds with my own memetic virus, one post at a time." Ultimape
  7. Not dead yet... by The+Good+Reverend · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That's sad that it's the end of the Sega-produced game era, but one reason the Dreamcast is so popular is that it's quite hackable, plays CDs also, and has a lot of user support. I use mine mainly to emulate older console systems like the NES, and it works great for that with CDs I burned myself. I don't see the hobby market for the Dreamcast going away any time soon.

    1. Re:Not dead yet... by Kamineko · · Score: 1

      I suggest you check out the Xbox scene if you're interested in all that stuff. :)

    2. Re:Not dead yet... by Leto-II · · Score: 1
      That's sad that it's the end of the Sega-produced game era

      Well it's not really the end of Sega-produced games. They now produce games for all the other platforms which used to be their competitors. For instance, they make Sonic games for Nintendo systems.
      --
      Do not anger the worm.
    3. Re:Not dead yet... by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      I gave up on NES emulation on the dreamcast and started doing it on the Xbox. The DC really doesn't seem to have the power to do it, you get a lot of slowdown, which is pretty sad on NES but understandable on SNES. But the Xbox does the SNES well too. Your mileage may vary of course. Also I got tired of burning CDs. You could put every non-CD console game from every system 16 bit and older on an Xbox without even making much of a hard drive upgrade, and find emulators to run them, too.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  8. Dead? by p0tat03 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Dead in what sense? Dead as in practically nobody buys/plays it anymore? If so, the DC has been dead for a long time, the corpse rotted, and now you're just digging up bones.

    If you mean dead in the sense that *really nobody* is playing, then no, the DC is still alive... but so is the SNES and Genesis, if you want to count the absurdly small minority that still play with their old consoles.

    1. Re:Dead? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wait... you do realise that the Dreamcast is the same generation as the PS2, XBox and Gamecube, right? a comparison to the SNES and Mega Drive (I myself still play the latter) is just... illogical.

      Anyway, if you believe no-one has played it for a long time, maybe this will be of interest to you:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast#Return_of_t he_Dreamcast

    2. Re:Dead? by Anthony+Baby · · Score: 1

      Dead in the sense that if the media needed to load games onto the console no longer is being made, no future games can be expected, but the release of Trigger Heart Exelica pretty much says otherwise. I know people are still making games for the Atari 2600, and I believe even selling a few. Long live Atari!

  9. This doesn't stop the Dreamcast. by supabeast! · · Score: 1

    There's no reason that ending production of GD-Roms will stop production of Dreamcast games. The Dreamcast is quite capable of playing games from CD with no modification of the console, people have been playing bootleg Dreamcast games this way for years. It does, however, limit the size of any further releases to around 800 megabytes.

    1. Re:This doesn't stop the Dreamcast. by Raz1r · · Score: 1

      You're right, and the cost of 2 CDs can't be much more than a GD-ROM can it?

    2. Re:This doesn't stop the Dreamcast. by supabeast! · · Score: 1

      Given that the patents on CDs have probably expired by now, two CDs probably cost less than a GD-ROM because no special facilities are needed and no fees would be paid to Yamaha.

  10. $50 paperweight anyone? by Vacardo · · Score: 1

    Releasing a Dreamcast game while the Dreamcast itself is discontinued... Exactly HOW much is Sega expecting to get in returns for this?

    1. Re:$50 paperweight anyone? by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 1

      Maybe the installed base didn't shrink much? It sounds like it's trivial to port a game for a certain type of arcade machine to run on a Dreamcast. Even if only a small percentage of users still buy the games, it might be just enough to justify a small run.

    2. Re:$50 paperweight anyone? by ClamIAm · · Score: 2, Informative

      Game systems seem to live on a while longer in Japan than the US. The AV Famicom (AKA the re-designed NES) was only discontinued by Nintendo in 2003, and the Playstation was produced until March of last year. Sega released their last DC game in 04, also.

    3. Re:$50 paperweight anyone? by dafoomie · · Score: 1

      Games like Under Defeat, Radilgy, and Trizeal were originally on the Naomi arcade systems, and were very cheap to port, requiring only modest sales to become profitable. Additionally, many of these games sold relatively well, Under Defeat sold out in under a week and prompted a second print. Many of these titles also saw such popularity that they were later picked up and published on PS2 and Gamecube. Radilgy, Ikaruga, Chaos Field, and Trizeal are all examples of this.

      If you're a small company with limited funds, this seems like a perfectly reasonable way to get your product out there, make a little money, and maybe draw enough attention to yourself to get it published on a current system. Sega still gets paid, plus the format is used for both the Dreamcast and the Naomi arcade systems. They could just start releasing official games on CD's, which are supported by the system anyway.

    4. Re:$50 paperweight anyone? by Sinistar2k · · Score: 1

      You'd be surprised how long they live in the US, too. I recently sold off a number of my consoles and games. Of the items offered, my Nintendo 64 and all of my N64 games sold in a single day to a variety of people who either needed replacement hardware or just wanted more games for their existing N64s. I was completely blown away that there was still demand for that console.

  11. Releases still possible by oman_ · · Score: 1

    They could probably stamp official licensed games on cdrom in a pinch using the backdoors that the pirates exploited long ago.
    The downside to this is that the games would be damn easy to copy.

    --
    Rats would be more funny if they could fart.
    1. Re:Releases still possible by mgabrys_sf · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      re:rats - they can fart - it's just very high pitched.

      Actually, I'm not certain about that - but they can laugh - and that was proven with an occiloscope and some bored lab students tickling their feet with paintbrushes. The laughter was ultrasonic.

    2. Re:Releases still possible by Slashcrap · · Score: 1

      There are no backdoors because Sega didn't artificially limit what their customers could do with a Dreamcast.

      That's not really true though is it? The Dreamcast was never intended to be able to boot from CDs and it required a hack to do so.

    3. Re:Releases still possible by twistedsymphony · · Score: 2, Informative

      That's not exactly true... The GDRom had a small inner ring that was formatted like a CD (go look on the bottom of a real DC disc if you've got one). To my understanding all games booted up in the CD section which sometimes would include bonus content you could load on your PC like wallpapers and screen savers etc. Once the console initialized into this section it pass an instruction for the disc to change over into the GD formatted section of the disc to play games.

      basically there wasn't any encryption, the copy protection was in the proprietary formatting, but booting all games from a CD formatted section of the disc was it's Achilles' heal. Basically hackers just stripped the CD based boot sector raw and cut out the last bit before it switched over to the GD formatting... hence the famed "Utopia Boot Disc" that early bootlegs required. After a while they simply started dumping the boot disc right at the beginning of the boot legs which allowed pirate kiddies the ability to just burn a single disc and throw it in their unmoded console. GDRoms can't even be read in a PC, and though they're based loosely on the CD format they could only be ripped by a Dreamcast with a special cable and some homebrew software, I've never done it but I've heard the process can take hours per disc due to the fact that the interface is basically just RS232.

      If you need even further proof that Sega didn't condone these methods, Dreamcast V2.0s started showing up around February 2001 in Japan that somehow blocked the widely used boot code from functioning. Being that they didn't roll out the updated console until late in it's manufacturing life those units are pretty rare, and AFAIK they never even released any in the US (mostly Japan and a few other areas).

      --
      Collector's Edition
    4. Re:Releases still possible by Legion303 · · Score: 1

      "All Dreamcast games are easy to copy if they don't exceed the capacity of a CD."

      Echelon (AKA gods) managed to take a GD game (Skies of Arcadia), compress it to fit onto two CDs instead of two GD disks, and wrote a small DC program that uncompressed and streamed the large movie files on the fly while you played, with pretty good results. It was about as impressive as the DC itself.

  12. Oh. A subject, huh? by FunkLord84 · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I didn't know they still made games for the DC anywhere. I didn't know that the arcade NAOMI hardware ran off of GDROM... Anyway, Dynamite Deka 2 is a sweet game (Dynamite Cop to those who may be familiar with the American Release), so I hope they keep it going. I'd love to see a Deka EX avaliable, whatever that is. I love my dreamcast. I play Worms on it all the time, and still play Sonic Adventure and Rayman 2 occasionally. Bust-A-Move 4 and Mr. Driller, also, for real. Man, I think I'm going to play some Typing of the Dead, directly. I just wish I bought some more backup units when they were bundled used at GameStop for $14.95....

    1. Re:Oh. A subject, huh? by CronoCloud · · Score: 1

      I am still ticked off at Sega for one thing, after they went out of the hardware business, they focused too much effort on the Gamecube, when it would have been much smarter to do PS2 games with the bigger market. Porting Skies of Arcadia to the Gamecube, a machine with very few RPG fans compared to the massive RPG fanbase of the PS2? That's just stupid. And never getting around to porting Typing of the Dead to the PS2, which has actual USB ports so you don't have to buy (or bundle) a special keyboard since any USB one will work.

      Maybe they were just bitter at Sony.

    2. Re:Oh. A subject, huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh wow, you get it less now than Sega did several years ago. So much for the accuracy of hindsight.

  13. No, they can't use CDs. by Myria · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Later models of Dreamcast don't boot the special multisession disks at all, for obvious reasons. There were a few legitimate music CDs that had Dreamcast content on them, but Sega sacrificed that feature to prevent piracy - a good decision, considering.

    --
    "Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
    1. Re:No, they can't use CDs. by b1t+r0t · · Score: 2, Informative

      Later models of Dreamcast don't boot the special multisession disks at all

      That was the "common wisdom" in the past, however, when people tried to confirm exactly which models couldn't boot multisession CDs, they couldn't actually find any that wouldn't boot. The information is somewhere on dcemulation.com, and I just tried looking for that page, but I couldn't find it. In any case, there are so many of the older units available used that this is not much of an issue.

      --

      --
      "Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
      "Open source is evil." - Microsoft
    2. Re:No, they can't use CDs. by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 1

      There were a few legitimate music CDs that had Dreamcast content on them, but Sega sacrificed that feature to prevent piracy - a good decision, considering.

      Considering what? That Sega shut down production on Dreamcast consoles a couple months after switching to a drive model that wouldn't read standard CDs?

    3. Re:No, they can't use CDs. by moloko_synthemesc · · Score: 1

      Yes, they can. All one has to do is reverse the order of the sessions, xeal's most famous app did this automatically. (bin2boot)

  14. My dreamcast broke down last year. by Lerc · · Score: 1

    So I bought another console. It didn't teke much effort to decide which console presented me with the best options of games I enjoy playing.

    I bought another Dreamcast.

    I took it to a friends place the other day and the XBox got unplugged and we had a good blast on the Dreamcast. It may be old but the games are still fun.

    So far the only thing that looks like it has a chance of displacing it is the Wii.

    --
    -- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
  15. Slashdot killed the Dreamcast 8 times by genrader · · Score: 1

    How many times are we going to have slashdot posts about the death of the dreamcast before it finally dies? I predict at least 2 more by the end of this year.

    --
    the Political Inquirer
    1. Re:Slashdot killed the Dreamcast 8 times by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      How many times are we going to have slashdot posts about the death of the dreamcast before it finally dies? I predict at least 2 more by the end of this year.


      Are you kidding? Slashdot still thinks the Amiga isn't quite dead yet.

      We'll be seeing Dreamcast posts for at least the next 40 years.
  16. The final blow landed on an... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    already beaten dead horse. I don't think there's anything new to see here folks, move along!

  17. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  18. "The Dreamcast Community..." by DesireCampbell · · Score: 0, Troll

    "The Dreamcast Community has sent emails to Sega Japan to ask for a rethink on this issue"

    "Dreamcast Community" (read: George, Leslie, and Frank).

    --
    Whoo, signature!
    DesireCampbell.com
    1. Re:"The Dreamcast Community..." by BigBuckHunter · · Score: 1

      This is Frank. I gave my DC to Tim 3 months ago. Get with the times.

  19. 2002 called..... by acidrain69 · · Score: 1, Funny

    And they want their slashdot story back.

    Yes, I know there is a comminity out there, but they will continue on as they have. I didn't even know SEGA still made games for it.

    --
    -- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
  20. The Wii *IS* my new Dreamcast by Cybrex · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So far the only thing that looks like it has a chance of displacing it is the Wii.

    Funny you should mention this. I'm a big Dreamcast fan and recently the very happy owner of a Wii, and for reasons that I can't quite put my finger on the two systems remind me of each other.

    The white case and Japanese UI aesthetic are obvious factors, but I think it goes beyond that. Neither system has the most powerful processor, but both are overflowing with creative engineering that goes beyond mere novelty, both are ideally suited to party play (IIRC the DC was the only system of its generation that easily supported 4 controllers, and for virtual console games the Wii could in theory support up to 8), both are IMHO the most fun consoles of their generation.

    I fondly remember having absurd amounts of fun playing Bomberman with 4 players on the DC. It naturally follows that the first Virtual Console game I pulled down for the Wii was Bomberman '93.

    I've never understood why the Dreamcast wasn't a runaway success, and the whole sad saga was like living in Bizzaro world where the better system is forgotten by the world. At the risk of sounding 'woo-woo', the Wii feels like the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast, and seeing the more innovative system finally getting the popularity it deserves this time around takes a lot of the bitterness off of the DC's ignominious end.

    If they ever come out with Chu Chu Rocket for the Wii then all will truly be right with the world. :-)

    --
    Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
    1. Re:The Wii *IS* my new Dreamcast by DDLKermit007 · · Score: 1

      Two reasons the DC died. Sega seriously pissed off the Japanese gamer-base with tons of hardware that had little support. Sega CD, 32x, and the Saturn and I LOVE the Saturn. You can't get 8-10 player Bomberman anywhere else. Just as with the Sega CD & 32x, Sega did not support it very well before dumping it for the DC. They flatly got their act together too late. The other reason is how amazingly easy it was to pirate DC games. Utopia Bootdisk for instance? Hell it isn't that hard to make most games self-boot with the right patcher. Many cite Sony's hyping of the PS2s graphics that stole the DCs thunder, but that didn't do nearly as much damage as the first two.

    2. Re:The Wii *IS* my new Dreamcast by KDR_11k · · Score: 1

      I LOVE the Saturn. You can't get 8-10 player Bomberman anywhere else.

      Yes you can, Atomic Bomberman for the PC supports 10 players, though I think you need more than one computer for that many people.

      --
      Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
    3. Re:The Wii *IS* my new Dreamcast by Luminus · · Score: 0

      The similarities between DC and wii were close enough for me that when I finally got my hands on a wii and found its disc light slowly pulsing with a vaguely intelligent light after I'd shut it off, swore I could hear someone somewhere whispering: "it's *blinking*." (Dreamcast's slogan was "It's thinking" for those of you that don't remember)

      I made a small video of this here if you don't know what I mean (sound effects added):

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D61u9bG99n0

    4. Re:The Wii *IS* my new Dreamcast by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 1

      IIRC the DC was the only system of its generation that easily supported 4 controllers

      Not sure whether you consider Dreamcast to be part of the PS1/N64 generation, or the PS2/GC/Xbox generation, but all of the Nintendo and Microsoft consoles released in both of those generations also came with 4 controller ports standard.

      and for virtual console games the Wii could in theory support up to 8

      In THEORY, the Wii could probably support more controllers than would even be practical. Four Gamecube controllers, four remotes, four Classic Controllers attached to the remotes -- that's 12-player simultaneous play right there. Perhaps even more players could join in using DS'es as controllers via WiFi -- but where would everybody sit?

    5. Re:The Wii *IS* my new Dreamcast by Cybrex · · Score: 1

      That's a neat idea, but in the absence of definitive data I'm going with the more conservative estimate. I've got a classic controller, and in the games I've played with it it simply replicates buttons that are already on the wiimote/nunchuk. However, I suppose that if a game could be played with one player on the wiimote and another on the nunchuk then in that case you'd be right.

      --
      Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
    6. Re:The Wii *IS* my new Dreamcast by drinkypoo · · Score: 1
      Not sure whether you consider Dreamcast to be part of the PS1/N64 generation, or the PS2/GC/Xbox generation, but all of the Nintendo and Microsoft consoles released in both of those generations also came with 4 controller ports standard.

      The Dreamcast simply can not be part of the PS1/N64 generation, because that was when Sega was trying to push the Saturn. It was expensive, hard to code for compared to either of the other two platforms (it had twice as much CPU as the playstation, because it had two SH2s to the PSX's one R3k, but no 3d hardware transparency) and ended up dying.

      FWIW the Saturn had only two controller ports, but each multitap supported six controllers and you could plug two of them in at once. AFAIK only one game actually did that, which was Saturn Bomberman. It supported up to ten players and they also made a single-port Ten player tap that was shaped kind of like bomberman. Don't know if it would also work as a regular six player tap. I've actually played nine player bomberman but never got that tenth person into the game. I don't think there was really any space in the room anyway. Then I sold my saturn and got rid of all my games. Then I got another Saturn. I'm looking for a 3d control pad, virtua cop 1 and 2, and Area 51. If anyone can help me out, let me know. I still have a black (Japanese) light gun...

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    7. Re:The Wii *IS* my new Dreamcast by DDLKermit007 · · Score: 1

      Since were getting into semantic here. Let me rephrase that since were being anal. The only Bomberman you can easily get 10 friends to play. I have Atomic Bomberman, and am not nearly as impressed with it. It's a console game that doesn't translate to PC well.

  21. Plextor? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What sort of format is the GD-ROM in?

    The Plextor Premium, Premium 2 and most of their 7-series DVD writers have a feature called GigaRec, which allows the drives to write a gig to a normal CD by burning the pits and lands closer together.

    Only really well-made drives can usually read the disks 'tho; Espescially the 1.4x compressed modes!

    If the GD-ROM isn't anything majorly exotic, it ought to be possible to burn the GD-ROMs to a normal CD with a Plextor. Whether the DC will read it...

  22. Reason 3.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Two reasons the DC died. Sega ...]
    Reason 3: Sony could afford to pay developers to go exclusive.

  23. Re:Atari 2600? by Xenolith · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Cripes, there are still games being made for the Atari 2600. http://www.atariage.com/store/index.php?main_page= index&cPath=21_85

    --

    Journal
  24. They are still making games for Dreamcast ? by CK2004PA · · Score: 0

    That is good news for you new PS3 owners!

    --
    "I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator"-Adolf Hitler or George W Bush?
  25. As mentioned below by goldcd · · Score: 2, Informative

    CDs are read from the inside out as well. A noise you can here is the CD head being moved, but that should move no more than it does for a GD-ROM.
    The different noise you hear when putting in a CD-R is normally the drive trying to continually re-focus the laser on the disk to read it (laser is tuned to GD, not CDR).
    You could usually get around this by burning your disks slower, using a CD with a different dye, tweaking the Pots (or a combination of all).

  26. The game names by PaganRitual · · Score: 1

    It's a small point I guess but

    "The Dreamcast games Last, Hope Karous and Trigger Heart Exelica will the last officially licensed Sega games"

    should actually read

    "The Dreamcast games Last Hope, Karous and Trigger Heart Exelica will the last officially licensed Sega games"

    The games are

    Last Hope
    Karous
    Trigger Heart Exelica

  27. Re:Atari 2600? by bjb · · Score: 1
    Though for this you can definitely argue that the reasons are
    • nostalgia
    • challenge of hacking 6502 and stella

    Not sure how many people actually buy the cartridges that are produced (not saying there are zero sales; but I actually don't know), but there is absolutely serious geek credibility these days to someone who reads the specifications of 2600 architecture, learns these old technologies and limitations and then hacks out a half-way decent game.

    I hacked enough 6502 code on the Apple II back in my day, but for someone to come out nowadays with all the abstractions and "programming comforts" of the last 25 years (read: framebuffers, for example) it is still impressive to get anything out of the 2600's 30 year old architecture since you really need to code "bare metal".

    --
    Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
  28. Re:Atari 2600? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm not sure what this means really, but I noticed these 2600 carts (such as Lonestar Runner RPG) coming out, and it appears that essentially no new cames for 2600 came out from about 1990-2004 or so, then all these new games have been released late 2005 to present.