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The Dreamcast's Final Death
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.'"
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
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.
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
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).