Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Dreamcast Legacy

hackaday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 109 posts

Re: The Dreamcast Legacy

#51

Post by monocasa »

emodendroket wrote: post #32
b15h0p wrote: post #2

The article states that the Dreamcast "fell out of the public eye as the Nintendo 64 was released". Am I missing something here? As far as I know the N64 was released more than two years before the Dreamcast's release. The Dreamcast always felt like it belonged to the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube console generation more than the PS1/N64 generation, although it was released in between generations. Release dates: * PlayStation 1:…

It was absolutely the PS2 that tanked the Dreamcast. Perhaps the author meant Xbox.

Yeah, Sony's PS2 pre release marketing hype was out of control, and a lot of it was directed at how the Dreamcast wasn't going to be worth it. The CPU of the PS2 was called the "Emotion Engine" with Sony just straight up saying it had the power to emulate the human mind.

Re: The Dreamcast Legacy

#52

Post by laumars »

dleslie wrote: post #18
ascagnel_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember right, the Saturn shipped shortly before the PlayStation, but it was more expensive ($400USD vs $300USD) and shipped in a manner that annoyed most retailers (it was initially exclusive to KB Toys, I believe). The article also didn't go into the add-ons released for the Genesis/Master System (the Sega32X and SegaCD among them), and how Sega's attempts at keeping the G/MS alive instead wore out many conso…

They launched much earlier than expected, before really any meaningful library of games were available. Third party developers were taken completely by surprise by the early launch.

It didn’t help that the Saturn didn’t ship with an SDK and was painful to develop 3D titles on due to being a sprite based machine (3D was effectively transforming sprites. Which caused bugs like breaking alpha blending).

The PlayStation wasn’t exactly easy by modern standards either but it was compared to that generation of consoles. For starters it had an SDK. Then there was the lack of storage constraints (unlike with the N64 cartridge). And while it didn’t have a Z index, at least it’s polygons weren’t just hack around 2D sprites.

That all said, I do still love my Saturn and N64 more than my PlayStation. This is Tony a rational preference but more just what I enjoy more as a retro gamer. In some ways their faults enhance the console.

Re: The Dreamcast Legacy

#53

Post by monocasa »

giobox wrote: post #49
dfxm12 wrote: post #44

These retrospectives on the Dreamcast rarely seem to bring up the fact you could play burned CDs on the system or the shared architecture with the Atomiswave arcade systems the wildly popular (to this day) NAOMI arcade system. Or the Microsoft collaboration. I also feel like more could be explored around SegaNet and its relationship to ALL.net whose legacy is now felt today every time someone sits down at an arcade t…

I was unaware one could do this, a quick Google suggests CD-R booting only possible out of the box on early Dreamcast models as a fix was introduced? A dirty but effective copy protection would have presumably been to just make use of the full 1GB of storage the retail Dreamcast GD-ROM discs had, making them to large to copy to a generic CD-R.

> I was unaware one could do this, a quick Google suggests CD-R booting only possible out of the box on early Dreamcast models as a fix was introduced?

It was the vast majority of them.

> A dirty but effective copy protection would have presumably been to just make use of the full 1GB of storage the retail Dreamcast GD-ROM discs had, making them to large to copy to a generic CD-R.

They did that, so then the release scene would re-encode whatever videos inevitably were taking up space, and bring it back down under 700mb.

Re: The Dreamcast Legacy

#54

Post by lostgame »

aasasd wrote: post #41

PS2 emulation is such a pain that I still can't make any emuls work on my Mac. Meanwhile Flycast is being ported to PS Vita with decent FPS.

Is there any reason you can't just use PCSX2?

It works on my 2012 MacBook Pro...it should work on any fairly recent hardware with zero fuss...

https://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-Native-Mac-Testing-Build

Re: The Dreamcast Legacy

#55

Post by monocasa »

moepstar wrote: post #47
fredoralive wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit more complex. Beyond using a bespoke ~1GB GD-ROM format that normal optical drives can't read, the discs did AFAIK have copy protection of the "wobbly track" variety. So even if you have a GD-Recordable drive and media, you couldn't just copy the games. (Although if you have a GD-R drive you almost certainly had the dev tools to run unprotected games anyway). Unfortunately they wanted a way to add Dreamcas…

iirc, the "wobbly track" you mention was the copy protection on the Saturn: http://segabits.com/blog/2016/07/12/sega-saturn-copy-protect...

And they continued to use it in GD-ROM drives AFAIK.

Re: The Dreamcast Legacy

#56

Post by monocasa »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #25
ac2u wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you had an ISO of a dreamcast game, it is possible to burn it to a CD-R and play it on an unmodified console (when it was first cracked it had to be a boot disc with a swap). The exploit was some sort of a software hijacking of the console's ability to play MIL-CDs which were used for interactive music discs in Japan. Copying itself from the source discs (GD-ROMs that had their grooves packed closer together th…

Games that were bigger than a CD's capacity had to have their textures downsampled and recompressed though. I only point this out as anyone interested in playing DC games they don't have a GD-ROM copy of has a much better option in the form of GDEmu or Terraonion MODE.

It was the videos that were reencoded. Textures didn't add up the same way.

Re: The Dreamcast Legacy

#57

Post by iszomer »

What I found most fascinating about the Dreamcast was the extensible utility of the VMU cartridge slotted beneath the controller in that it not only served as storage for saved game data but as a heads-down display for ongoing gameplay. It also had the capability of being a standalone unit for mini games with it's replaceable coin battery.

What's even more interesting is the modding community attempts in repurposing them and keeping the Dream alive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNoBQ5nTeuk

Re: The Dreamcast Legacy

#58

Post by perardi »

ac2u wrote: post #20
titusjohnson wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to my memory of the time, the Dreamcast launched a bit too early compared to the PS2. The Dreamcast was trying to sell games and systems right when the PS2 marketing engine went into full swing. The marketing hype for PS2 was huge , everyone I knew was talking about how many millions of pixels it would push, how the multi-core architecture would make everything else obsolete, and of course, how it was backw…

I believe the PS2 marketing hype was further bolstered by great initial sales in Japan, because it was a reasonably priced DVD movie player. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/ps2-primarily-used-as-dvd-...

Oh I so remember that, and can even find mainstream media articles to back that up.

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/26/technology/playstation-2-...

Same thing with the PS3—it was a lot of bang-for-the-buck for Blu-rays when it debuted. (Not that Blu-ray took the world by storm like DVDs, but still.)

https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/4/20992215/playstation-3-ps...

Re: The Dreamcast Legacy

#60

Post by rusk »

emodendroket wrote: post #32
b15h0p wrote: post #2

The article states that the Dreamcast "fell out of the public eye as the Nintendo 64 was released". Am I missing something here? As far as I know the N64 was released more than two years before the Dreamcast's release. The Dreamcast always felt like it belonged to the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube console generation more than the PS1/N64 generation, although it was released in between generations. Release dates: * PlayStation 1:…

It was absolutely the PS2 that tanked the Dreamcast. Perhaps the author meant Xbox.

Best selling game console of all time I think. No shame losing to the best.
Post reply on HN