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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.'"
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.
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... they could just start using CD's, since those work too.
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.
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.
Australia released the DreamTime.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
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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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
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.
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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).
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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
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).