33 ms·

Rare Dreamcast-Powered Sega Fish Life Preserved and Released by Musée Bolo

172 points by yrochat 7y ago

beefsack 7y ago
It's scary to think about all the games we're going to lose because so many games are implemented as SAAS nowadays. As someone interested in gaming history and the preservation of games it's actually quite saddening.
- vanadium 7y ago
  The gaming console space up to a couple of generations ago, prior to digital distribution, is pretty well covered (and I've contributed ~75 titles and variations of console-based prototypes myself to the public), but most modern gaming is going to have a much more pronounced preservation issue. Consider also the download-only releases of console games, usually by indies but not always, nowadays on the big 3 platforms; other than avenues like Limited Run Games that provide for production of limited physical runs of previously download-only titles, they're lost to the aether eventually.
  - unicornporn 7y ago
    > most modern gaming is going to have a much more pronounced preservation issue. That's putting it mildly. Gameplay videos is all that's going to be left for plenty of games.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ekianjo 7y ago
  Well more concerning is that source code is never ever released for most games even when they are not sold anywhere anymore. Being able to run a proprietary piece of software is one thing, but being able to check how it was implemented would be more interesting at way many more levels. But gamedevs have no interest in preserving anything, they like it disposable.
  - neurotrace 7y ago
    That's not fair to the devs. Plenty of devs would love to share their code but the companies they develop for prevent them from doing so for obvious reasons.
    - ekianjo 7y ago
      Indies dont release their source code either so I dont think there is any proof that they care, since they dont even do it when they only work for themselves.
- woodrowbarlow 7y ago
  it's not hopeless, though. as an example, look at the communities that have preserved "vanilla WoW" through reverse-engineered custom servers and patched clients.
phren0logy 7y ago
If you like that, then you need to check out SeaMan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaman_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaman_(video_game) "The narration is voiced by Toshiyuki Hosokawa in the original Japanese-language version and by Leonard Nimoy in the English-language version. ... The 'Seaman' is a form of freshwater fish (the color and shape of the fins suggest that it is a Carp) with a very lifelike human face. It possesses human mannerisms and behavior with which the player interacts. ... Seaman is considered a unique video game in that it presents limited action. The player's role is to feed and care for Seaman, while providing him with the company that he needs. In fact, the player is required to check on the Seaman every day of real time, or he could die. A portion of Seaman's knowledge is random trivia. When he asks what the player's birthday is (and the player responds via the microphone input), Seaman will then share significant events which happened on that date." It's like a super weird Tamagochi.
- fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
  If you want to see seaman in action with some humorous commentary: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-IV8hCvsXy0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-IV8hCvsXy0
  - w_s_l 7y ago
    oh man I remember the hype around this game in magazines back then! It's AI would "adapt" to your inputs and that was a 'wow' in my mind back then. all in all Dreamcast, imho, was the perfect console. You could emulate PSX games at higher, smoother res and sharper textures, there are emulators for various games now. I wonder how much it costs to pick one up now...
    - ianai 7y ago
      I wonder whether the AI was as good as it looked in his video.
    - lostgame 7y ago
      The Dreamcast had an incredible array of quality software, and ran at a beautiful full 640x480 while other consoles were for the most part stuck at 320.
daodedickinson 7y ago
Wow... I read Dreamcast Junkyard for years, starting back around 2005 or 2006, had a few fishing games for the Dreamcast as well as the fishing controller, and have never even heard of this one! This one is even more interesting than some of the weird ones I know about, like the Dreamcast in the shape of Sonic's head with the built-in TV. So glad to see Dreamcast Junkyard is still at it after all these years! :) Still no English Segagaga though :(
- AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
  Even ignoring Sega's dire financial situation at the time, Segagaga had some uh..."issues" that may have prevented its localization: >For the most part, once you've assigned your staff, this process is fairly automated. You pretty much just kick back, speed up time, and watch as the numbers pile up. Sometimes different random events will pop up, like an employee getting married (which makes them happy), getting divorced (which makes them depressed), making friends or enemies with other programmers, discovering efficient design tricks or coming across some nasty bugs. You can give specific orders to each person, telling them to work harder, or to take a break to study, or take a rest. You can give various items to alter various stats as well, most of which just refresh their stamina. (One of the skills, which shows up as a Question Mark, summons an underage girl wearing a gym uniform, who refreshes each staff member with incredible boosts.)[0] [0]https://hg101.kontek.net/segagaga/segagaga.htm https://hg101.kontek.net/segagaga/segagaga.htm
atomical 7y ago
I love Dreamcast. I'm thinking about upgrading the GDROM drive with the FPGA chip. It's only a matter of time before the laser fails.
- vernie 7y ago
  The GDEMU is great and it looks like there are now tons of clones on Amazon and AliExpress.
Jerry2 7y ago
Long time ago, I read somewhere that SEGA, the company, has very little source code and hardware development artifacts saved from their Dreamcast days (and even earlier than that). They either lost or just junked majority of it as time went on. Do other companies care so little about their own history? If I was running one of these companies, I'd save a copy of every game, console, HW development platform and source codes of every game in a vault somewhere.
- jonah-archive 7y ago
  Often even when people try, it doesn't work out: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/business/7559762-181/hewlett-packard-archives-at-keysight-destroyed https://www.pressdemocrat.com/business/7559762-181/hewlett-p... Lots of copies keep stuff safe.
- sb057 7y ago
  That's part of the problem; standard practice for Japanese companies until rather recently (as in, within the past decade or so) was to physically print out a copy of the completed game's source code and stick it in a filing cabinet somewhere, never to be seen again. Most remasters of games released ~1995-2005 are based on beta code they happened to find on old workstations.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  Japanese companies may be good at certain things, but by far and large most companies I have seen in Japan are really, really bad at documenting and archiving what they do. They work like the past stuff has no value whatsoever.
- Grazester 7y ago
  I don't know if this is true of the Dreamcast era Sega but it is for the Saturn era. They lost source code for some of their games. A lot of Dreamcast games were ported to other console when the Dreamcast died
daodedickinson 7y ago
You'd think somebody could print money with a Dreamcast Classic instead of all the cheap looking Genesis things out there. I think the fact that the Dreamcast had too many arcade-like games would make it better than that Playstation Classic which had a lot of slow games that you can't easily jump in and out of.
- monocasa 7y ago
  The IP might be in question; PowerVR made the GPU, and the patents wouldn't have expired yet for instance.
  - toast0 7y ago
    The patents should be pretty close to expiration. We're coming up on the 20th anniversary of US launch, although I think that may have been the end of the era of submarine patents.
- toast0 7y ago
  You would need to put real money into the storage though, and you would want to spend real money getting the emulator tuned up so that the end result is good (Nintendo showed how nice things could be, although maybe sales from the Playstation Classic might show it doesn't matter?)
- CWuestefeld 7y ago
  I've been playing around a lot with RetroPie recently - I built myself a full-size arcade cabinet and everything. I started it running on a RaspberryPi, but recently upgraded to a cheap used Dell OptiPlex. Right now, Dreamcast seems to be the sweetspot for hardware emulation. A sub-$100 PC (on the used market, anyway) can easily emulate a Dreamcast (for all the games I've tried, anyway - Tony Hawk 2, DOA 2, etc), possibly even with extra cycles to provide extra video smoothing to get rid of jaggies that are pretty obvious at its normal resolution. So yeah, I think this would be possible. I wouldn't think the IP for the hardware would be an issue since it's all emulated, it's just down to the BIOS and the games themselves.
bredren 7y ago
I realize this may be an unpopular opinion, but this is just not an interesting find to me. A slightly mutated game computer used to display a virtual aquarium? Knock me over with a feather. I get the obsession w game hardware and that it was Japanese. But this article makes it sound like this was a lost DaVinci sketch book, and these comments liken game design dust to the same.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  The interest mystifies me too. OK, it's rare. Everything that flopped is rare. But there are millions of flops. I get that SEGA has a following. But even when SEGA was selling like hotcakes, SEGA fans were not interested in this. Why the interest now? Genuinely curious.
  - rfrancois 7y ago
    I think the interest comes from the fact that it is the last "home" console by SEGA before going software only. It's also due to the fact that Sega gave its approval to release disc images that allows emulation. A big Japanese company approving this kind of work is kind of unprecedented.
    - mounds 7y ago
      Exactly this. I think too there's some homage to those who were die-hard Sega fans, and who continue to be, that find this piece of hardware an extraordinary find. There's a few dedicated communities to hacking on old Sega hardware and walking through the architecture from the time. Pretty cool stuff all things considered, in a community always watching out for the next shiny thing.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  It strikes me as odd that you'd spend the time to read an article on something you don't find interesting, and then go on to write a comment about how uninterested you are. When I come across uninteresting things online I tend to just skip them and carry on with my day.
rfrancois 7y ago
The link to the Sega Fish Life preservation project: https://segafish.museebolo.ch/en/ https://segafish.museebolo.ch/en/
sandworm101 7y ago
>> It is also at this stage where the player releases the seaman into the wild Not good. Not something to teach to kids, or anyone. I cannot stand people who think that it is acceptable to raise an animal and then "release" it into the wild once it isn't cute anymore. Setting aside the horror of doing this to a dog, there was also a famous Japanese cartoon where a pet raccoon was released once it became an adult. Raccoons, like many wild animals, start off cute but can become violent as they mature. Raccoons are now an invasive pest in Japan, a problem that started during the years after the cartoon. The concept of keeping animals in a cage with the intention that one animal will eat the other is also very problematic. There is a very fine line between a "natural behavior" and cage fighting. Zoos may feed the lions meat from a dead Zebra. They don't release live Zebras into the lion enclosure.
joshstrange 7y ago
Is right-click disabled on this website for anyone else?

172 points by yrochat 7y ago

It's scary to think about all the games we're going to lose because so many games are implemented as SAAS nowadays. As someone interested in gaming history and the preservation of games it's actually quite saddening.

vanadium 7y ago
The gaming console space up to a couple of generations ago, prior to digital distribution, is pretty well covered (and I've contributed ~75 titles and variations of console-based prototypes myself to the public), but most modern gaming is going to have a much more pronounced preservation issue. Consider also the download-only releases of console games, usually by indies but not always, nowadays on the big 3 platforms; other than avenues like Limited Run Games that provide for production of limited physical runs of previously download-only titles, they're lost to the aether eventually.
- unicornporn 7y ago
  > most modern gaming is going to have a much more pronounced preservation issue. That's putting it mildly. Gameplay videos is all that's going to be left for plenty of games.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ekianjo 7y ago
Well more concerning is that source code is never ever released for most games even when they are not sold anywhere anymore. Being able to run a proprietary piece of software is one thing, but being able to check how it was implemented would be more interesting at way many more levels. But gamedevs have no interest in preserving anything, they like it disposable.
- neurotrace 7y ago
  That's not fair to the devs. Plenty of devs would love to share their code but the companies they develop for prevent them from doing so for obvious reasons.
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    Indies dont release their source code either so I dont think there is any proof that they care, since they dont even do it when they only work for themselves.
woodrowbarlow 7y ago
it's not hopeless, though. as an example, look at the communities that have preserved "vanilla WoW" through reverse-engineered custom servers and patched clients.

phren0logy 7y ago

If you like that, then you need to check out SeaMan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaman_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaman_(video_game) "The narration is voiced by Toshiyuki Hosokawa in the original Japanese-language version and by Leonard Nimoy in the English-language version. ... The 'Seaman' is a form of freshwater fish (the color and shape of the fins suggest that it is a Carp) with a very lifelike human face. It possesses human mannerisms and behavior with which the player interacts. ... Seaman is considered a unique video game in that it presents limited action. The player's role is to feed and care for Seaman, while providing him with the company that he needs. In fact, the player is required to check on the Seaman every day of real time, or he could die. A portion of Seaman's knowledge is random trivia. When he asks what the player's birthday is (and the player responds via the microphone input), Seaman will then share significant events which happened on that date." It's like a super weird Tamagochi.

fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
If you want to see seaman in action with some humorous commentary: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-IV8hCvsXy0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-IV8hCvsXy0
- w_s_l 7y ago
  oh man I remember the hype around this game in magazines back then! It's AI would "adapt" to your inputs and that was a 'wow' in my mind back then. all in all Dreamcast, imho, was the perfect console. You could emulate PSX games at higher, smoother res and sharper textures, there are emulators for various games now. I wonder how much it costs to pick one up now...
  - ianai 7y ago
    I wonder whether the AI was as good as it looked in his video.
  - lostgame 7y ago
    The Dreamcast had an incredible array of quality software, and ran at a beautiful full 640x480 while other consoles were for the most part stuck at 320.

daodedickinson 7y ago

Wow... I read Dreamcast Junkyard for years, starting back around 2005 or 2006, had a few fishing games for the Dreamcast as well as the fishing controller, and have never even heard of this one! This one is even more interesting than some of the weird ones I know about, like the Dreamcast in the shape of Sonic's head with the built-in TV. So glad to see Dreamcast Junkyard is still at it after all these years! :) Still no English Segagaga though :(

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
Even ignoring Sega's dire financial situation at the time, Segagaga had some uh..."issues" that may have prevented its localization: >For the most part, once you've assigned your staff, this process is fairly automated. You pretty much just kick back, speed up time, and watch as the numbers pile up. Sometimes different random events will pop up, like an employee getting married (which makes them happy), getting divorced (which makes them depressed), making friends or enemies with other programmers, discovering efficient design tricks or coming across some nasty bugs. You can give specific orders to each person, telling them to work harder, or to take a break to study, or take a rest. You can give various items to alter various stats as well, most of which just refresh their stamina. (One of the skills, which shows up as a Question Mark, summons an underage girl wearing a gym uniform, who refreshes each staff member with incredible boosts.)[0] [0]https://hg101.kontek.net/segagaga/segagaga.htm https://hg101.kontek.net/segagaga/segagaga.htm

atomical 7y ago

I love Dreamcast. I'm thinking about upgrading the GDROM drive with the FPGA chip. It's only a matter of time before the laser fails.

vernie 7y ago
The GDEMU is great and it looks like there are now tons of clones on Amazon and AliExpress.

Jerry2 7y ago

Long time ago, I read somewhere that SEGA, the company, has very little source code and hardware development artifacts saved from their Dreamcast days (and even earlier than that). They either lost or just junked majority of it as time went on. Do other companies care so little about their own history? If I was running one of these companies, I'd save a copy of every game, console, HW development platform and source codes of every game in a vault somewhere.

jonah-archive 7y ago
Often even when people try, it doesn't work out: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/business/7559762-181/hewlett-packard-archives-at-keysight-destroyed https://www.pressdemocrat.com/business/7559762-181/hewlett-p... Lots of copies keep stuff safe.
sb057 7y ago
That's part of the problem; standard practice for Japanese companies until rather recently (as in, within the past decade or so) was to physically print out a copy of the completed game's source code and stick it in a filing cabinet somewhere, never to be seen again. Most remasters of games released ~1995-2005 are based on beta code they happened to find on old workstations.
ekianjo 7y ago
Japanese companies may be good at certain things, but by far and large most companies I have seen in Japan are really, really bad at documenting and archiving what they do. They work like the past stuff has no value whatsoever.
Grazester 7y ago
I don't know if this is true of the Dreamcast era Sega but it is for the Saturn era. They lost source code for some of their games. A lot of Dreamcast games were ported to other console when the Dreamcast died

daodedickinson 7y ago

You'd think somebody could print money with a Dreamcast Classic instead of all the cheap looking Genesis things out there. I think the fact that the Dreamcast had too many arcade-like games would make it better than that Playstation Classic which had a lot of slow games that you can't easily jump in and out of.

monocasa 7y ago
The IP might be in question; PowerVR made the GPU, and the patents wouldn't have expired yet for instance.
- toast0 7y ago
  The patents should be pretty close to expiration. We're coming up on the 20th anniversary of US launch, although I think that may have been the end of the era of submarine patents.
toast0 7y ago
You would need to put real money into the storage though, and you would want to spend real money getting the emulator tuned up so that the end result is good (Nintendo showed how nice things could be, although maybe sales from the Playstation Classic might show it doesn't matter?)
CWuestefeld 7y ago
I've been playing around a lot with RetroPie recently - I built myself a full-size arcade cabinet and everything. I started it running on a RaspberryPi, but recently upgraded to a cheap used Dell OptiPlex. Right now, Dreamcast seems to be the sweetspot for hardware emulation. A sub-$100 PC (on the used market, anyway) can easily emulate a Dreamcast (for all the games I've tried, anyway - Tony Hawk 2, DOA 2, etc), possibly even with extra cycles to provide extra video smoothing to get rid of jaggies that are pretty obvious at its normal resolution. So yeah, I think this would be possible. I wouldn't think the IP for the hardware would be an issue since it's all emulated, it's just down to the BIOS and the games themselves.

bredren 7y ago

I realize this may be an unpopular opinion, but this is just not an interesting find to me. A slightly mutated game computer used to display a virtual aquarium? Knock me over with a feather. I get the obsession w game hardware and that it was Japanese. But this article makes it sound like this was a lost DaVinci sketch book, and these comments liken game design dust to the same.

ncmncm 7y ago
The interest mystifies me too. OK, it's rare. Everything that flopped is rare. But there are millions of flops. I get that SEGA has a following. But even when SEGA was selling like hotcakes, SEGA fans were not interested in this. Why the interest now? Genuinely curious.
- rfrancois 7y ago
  I think the interest comes from the fact that it is the last "home" console by SEGA before going software only. It's also due to the fact that Sega gave its approval to release disc images that allows emulation. A big Japanese company approving this kind of work is kind of unprecedented.
  - mounds 7y ago
    Exactly this. I think too there's some homage to those who were die-hard Sega fans, and who continue to be, that find this piece of hardware an extraordinary find. There's a few dedicated communities to hacking on old Sega hardware and walking through the architecture from the time. Pretty cool stuff all things considered, in a community always watching out for the next shiny thing.
SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
It strikes me as odd that you'd spend the time to read an article on something you don't find interesting, and then go on to write a comment about how uninterested you are. When I come across uninteresting things online I tend to just skip them and carry on with my day.

rfrancois 7y ago

The link to the Sega Fish Life preservation project: https://segafish.museebolo.ch/en/ https://segafish.museebolo.ch/en/

sandworm101 7y ago

>> It is also at this stage where the player releases the seaman into the wild Not good. Not something to teach to kids, or anyone. I cannot stand people who think that it is acceptable to raise an animal and then "release" it into the wild once it isn't cute anymore. Setting aside the horror of doing this to a dog, there was also a famous Japanese cartoon where a pet raccoon was released once it became an adult. Raccoons, like many wild animals, start off cute but can become violent as they mature. Raccoons are now an invasive pest in Japan, a problem that started during the years after the cartoon. The concept of keeping animals in a cage with the intention that one animal will eat the other is also very problematic. There is a very fine line between a "natural behavior" and cage fighting. Zoos may feed the lions meat from a dead Zebra. They don't release live Zebras into the lion enclosure.

joshstrange 7y ago

Is right-click disabled on this website for anyone else?