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There's a custom FPGA mod that allows you use to a usb drive to load games. I've been meaning to get around to that since eventually the GDROM drive fails. I just loved playing Dreamcast with friends. * Dynamite Cop * Unreal Tournament * NBA2k2 * Army Men
No other console tanked the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast was fatally wounded as a platform because their DRM was easily bypassed. You didn't even need a special hardware dongle or modification. You could instead straight up download copies of games that were modified to work on the system. No point in supporting a platform that was dominating arcades but whose sales were getting obliterated by piracy at home.
PS2 marketing killed the Dreamcast.
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:…
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…
One game I haven't seen mentioned here was Ikaruga. It was a top down shooter from Japan. Like many shooters, you fought your way through hordes of enemies and boss battles. You of course could upgrade your arsenal along the way by collecting powerups. One innovative gameplay mechanic was the firing mode: you would fire either white or black bullets. When you were firing white bullets, white enemy bullets and project…
When I visited Japan in 2019, I visited all arcades in Akihabara until I found ONE cabinet running it. It was magical.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I've seen videos saying they somehow overengineered the hardware too, and without libs (as you mention) people struggled to make use of the many processors and couldn't reach goals.
It wasn’t so much over engineered but more old before it’s time. Sega bet on 2D and then retrofitted their console to be 3D after rumours emerged that the PlayStation and N64 were 3D-focused systems.
I remember you could copy the games because they had no drm on them. My buddy had a complete collection. What a masterpiece.
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…
Now you can pull almost every retail Xbox game off of internet archive and throw nearly all of them on to a massive multi TB HDD.
No other console tanked the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast was fatally wounded as a platform because their DRM was easily bypassed. You didn't even need a special hardware dongle or modification. You could instead straight up download copies of games that were modified to work on the system. No point in supporting a platform that was dominating arcades but whose sales were getting obliterated by piracy at home.
I had a Dreamcast at launch and still love the games that came out on it. If it had a new revision with a DVD player in it announced at the same PS2 price point to compete with the PS2 and XBOX then Sega might still be in the console business.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " Microsoft really built XBox out of everything they learned from working with Sega on Dreamcast. " People say this but I don't think it's really true or, if it is, it certainly wasn't apparent from the worm's eye view. As the Dreamcast was dying off, there were actually two rival console proposals within MS; one was from the Windows division (whatever it was called then) that became the Xbox and the other came fro…
There was a third team from WebTV, that was based around the team that designed the 3DO M2. That team lost the original Xbox internal design contest, but went on to design the 360 and later Xbox consoles. The Dreamcast WinCE project did contribute several engineers to the Xbox org. It mostly taught MS how the console game business worked, showed them where WinCE/Direct X needed to be improved to support consoles, and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " Microsoft really built XBox out of everything they learned from working with Sega on Dreamcast. " People say this but I don't think it's really true or, if it is, it certainly wasn't apparent from the worm's eye view. As the Dreamcast was dying off, there were actually two rival console proposals within MS; one was from the Windows division (whatever it was called then) that became the Xbox and the other came fro…
There was a third team from WebTV, that was based around the team that designed the 3DO M2. That team lost the original Xbox internal design contest, but went on to design the 360 and later Xbox consoles. The Dreamcast WinCE project did contribute several engineers to the Xbox org. It mostly taught MS how the console game business worked, showed them where WinCE/Direct X needed to be improved to support consoles, and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 32x was released by Sega America and the Saturn by Sega Japan. The two groups couldn’t agree on much in that era.
It's easy to use 20/20 hindsight and say failures were a mistake, but at the time, Genesis was selling like bonkers in the USA and was a relative failure in Japan. Sega (both Japan + USA) had to balance the need to generate excitement for a new console in Japan while maintaining a happy Genesis install base in the USA. At the time, the best compromise seemed to be an early launch of Saturn in Japan while giving the U…
Knuckles Chaotix was originally penned to be Sonic 4 but I think it was always planned to be a Mega Drive release. There were a couple of failed attempts at bringing Sonic to the Saturn (the engine of one of them lives on in Saturns “Sonic Jam”) but in the end it was pushed to the Dreamcast as Sonic Adventure (and apparently influenced much of the hardware design of the DC too). There are some leaked demos of Sonic for the Saturn though.
Also I think it’s a stretch to say the Mega Drive was a failure in Japan (the US market was the only market that sold the Mega Drive as “Genesis” and that was due to someone else having the IP for the name “Mega Drive”). It was successful in Japan too. But America and Europe were undoubtedly massive markets too.
I do have both the 32x and Mega CD (as well as several versions of the Mega Drive / Genesis). The 32x wasn’t intended to be a taster for the Saturn (as you stated) but rather a device to prolong the life of the Genesis because of how successful it was. In reality it is hard to see how the 32x wasn’t undermining the Saturns market share (even Sega Japan knew this at the time and weren’t happy about it). But I honestly think the Saturn would have flopped in the west regardless because Sony outplayed Sega at every element of the PlayStation. Sony knew this too; one of the leads on the PlayStation project would often have lunch with the leads for the Saturn and Sony would taunt Sega saying how it’s only a matter of time (there’s extracts of their conversations online but it’s in Japanese).
That all said, it’s worth noting that the Saturn wasn’t a complete flop in Japan. It wasn’t massive but it did sell better than in the west and saw much more titles from more studios too.
The Master System did rather well in Europe. Better than in North America. But the real location the Master System excelled in was South America. Games were still being made relatively recently for that device. In fact there are a number of Sonics ported to the Master System exclusively for the South American audience (such as Sonic Spinball, which was previously a Mega Drive exclusive).