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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.'"

3 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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.