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The Dreamcast Legacy
- ChrisKnott 5y agoThe legacy of the Dreamcast was the Xbox, specifically online multiplayer (and massive controllers!). Peter Moore (who worked on both consoles) has talked about this several times over the years, e.g. this recent example [0] [0] from 7:40 https://youtu.be/tadtqchbbh0&t=460 https://youtu.be/tadtqchbbh0&t=460
- kingcharles 5y agoThanks for the link. Microsoft really built XBox out of everything they learned from working with Sega on Dreamcast. Without Dreamcast there would be no XBox.
- joenathanone 5y agoFunny that, just like how Nintendo created the PlayStation through their dealings with Sony.
- matthewfcarlson 5y agoI remember going into someone’s office at microsoft after I first joined (back when everyone there had an office- it’s all open office now) and seeing a Dreamcast on someone’s shelf and being really confused. He explained he did most of the DirectX port for it and told me some of the details about working in it. It was a fascinating look into what might have been.
- kingcharles 5y agoMicrosoft went open plan?! I've not been on the campus in years. I always loved the little offices with everyone's past projects on the shelves. Next you'll be telling me they got rid of all those free snacks and drinks.
- exsf0859 5y agoI think MS went open plan starting in '07 with the "The Commons" campus. Some parts like Bungie were open plan much earlier. (The Bungie team demanded it, they felt it improved collaboration.) But before that, regular MS engineers were often "temporarily" doubled up or tripled up in their offices, so going open plan wasn't as much of a difference as it might have been. In the old days people's computers and monitors were physically much larger, you needed multiple computers to multi-task, and you needed lots of paper documentation. One reason we're open-plan now is that people can be very productive with a chair, laptop, and 24" monitor.
- ThrowawayB7 5y ago> "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 from the Dreamcast team and was IIRC MIPS-based and, of course, ran Windows CE. (And we all know which one won.) Nor did it seem that the Xbox project had any particular interest in taking on ex-Dreamcast staff; of all the IC developers on the project, only one person successfully moved from the Dreamcast team to the Xbox team to the best of my recollection. (Remember that this era was the old Gates-led, cutthroat Microsoft where the internal competitiveness was just as high as external competitiveness. The Windows division and its leadership anecdotally was not happy about the existence of Windows CE.) It remains a mystery to me to this day what expertise was supposedly transferred from the Dreamcast project to the Xbox project. Personally, I suspect it's a myth and the anecdotes by former executives are papering a happy face over a complicated history but, meh, what do I know?
- randomifcpfan 5y agoThere 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 gave them a list of things not to do. Dreamcast’s controller and accessories were also quite influential on the original Xbox controller.
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- Grazester 5y agoMicrosoft's involvement in the Dreamcast was only in the Windows CE library for game development and nothing else
- b15h0p 5y agoThe 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: '94/'95 * N64: '96 * Dreamcast: '98/'99 * PlayStation 2: 2000 * XBox: 2001 * GameCube: 2001
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- baochan 5y agoThat's as far as I read before deciding the author had no idea what they were talking about and closed the window.
- radicalbyte 5y agoThis; I went from being astonished by Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the N64 to being stunned by Shenmue only a two years later on my Dreamcast. I bought both of them on release. The Dreamcast was a great machine, I have fond memories of many hours playing Rez, Phantasy Star Online, Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, Skies of Arcadia and Space Channel 5..
- dmicah 5y agoI think they probably meant to write GameCube there.
- CameronBanga 5y agoThis still doesn't make any sense, as Sega discontinued the Dreamcast 6 months before the GameCube even released.
- arprocter 5y agoArticle also seems confused that the NES competed against the Genesis - the Master System was Sega's 8-bit console; and no mention of the 32X or Sega/Mega CD either iirc a big selling point of the PS2 was it could play DVDs, whereas the Dreamcast couldn't
- smm11 5y agoBlundered into a BestBuy early one Sunday, and the Dreamcasts were in a pile by the door at $50 with bags of games included. I then had one, running Crazy Taxi, for years and years.
- themodelplumber 5y agoSimilar here, I picked up mine at a drugstore for $50 along with a pile of discounted games from the rack. I never thought I'd own the thing for 20 years and watch my oldest beat Sonic Adventure at age 6. Watching those credits roll he gave me the most badass look, lol. They still ask to play it from time to time.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoSonic Adventure holds up surprisingly well in spite of, or perhaps because of, it's surreal voice acting and general jank. Controversial opinion: it's better than Sonic Adventure 2[0], and Big the Cat's story was a nice change of pace. [0] Even more controversial opinion: Sonic '06 is also better than Sonic Adventure 2.
- pmlamotte 5y ago> [0] Even more controversial opinion: Sonic '06 is also better than Sonic Adventure 2. Having never played either but having watched gameplay of both, I'm very interested in your thoughts on that. I also agree that Sonic Adventure 1 holds up surprisingly well despite the jank. A lot of Dreamcast era games have a certain aesthetic to them that feels distinctly different from other games. Sega really had some wild ideas and while they didn't always hit they were still exciting because of how fresh and unique they felt. The lack of polish adds to that aesthetic; the games weren't following a cookie cutter formula like lots of modern open world games, they were spending their time really experimenting because designing for 3D and internet connectivity was still so new.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoIt's pretty subjective, honestly. For context, I played Sonic Adventure when it first came out. I played Sonic Adventure 2 (DC version) less than a year ago because it had a reputation for being a fan favorite. I hated it. I played Sonic 06 recently it had a reputation for being terrible and I found I actually kinda liked it because it made me laugh. '06s reputation for being terrible is objectively overblown. It is definitely rushed, has long loading times, and is jank as hell, but it is otherwise a pretty mediocre game. I've definitely played a lot worse and I think the general "someone's free Unity game" feel helps it to not be taken too seriously. It is also occasionally completely hilarious. For instance, during the Shadow story fight with Silver, I got trapped in a notorious "It's no use" loop getting shot straight upwards. This was a little frustrating, but then Shadow's corpse fell into the ground head first and got stuck in it like a lawn dart and I laughed my ass off. By contrast I think a lot of what put me off of SA2 was how seriously it seemed to take itself. It's a lot more polished than '06, but still has enough jank to cause frustration and is otherwise just as mediocre in the gameplay department. A lot of my gripes about SA2's gameplay are actually shared by 06, but I guess I just kind of expect that from a buggy unfinished mess so it is more easily forgiven.
- ddm379 5y agoStill on the hunt for Marvel vs. Capcom 2
- louhike 5y agoMy favorite vs fighting game! The gameplay is diverse, a lot of great characters and the pixel art is beautiful. I’m lucky enough to have a dreamcast arcade stick and it’s such a thrill with it. I hope you’ll find it!
- bachmeier 5y agoI played my Dreamcast a ton. When I'd get stuck while writing my dissertation (a regular event) I'd think things through while playing a game of hockey. It provided just the right amount of distraction. I never understood the hype around the PS 2. It was so bad that when I went to the store to buy NHL 2K2, the employee said they no longer made Dreamcast games. She asked the other employee, who said the same thing. I told them the game was being advertised. They called company headquarters and were informed that it was coming out in a few days. They said I was the first customer to ask about the Dreamcast in months.
- moepstar 5y agoI still play my Dreamcast a ton. There's, to this date, new (indie) games being released, new/old builds of long-lost games do surface [0]... The Dreamcast is a gift that keeps on giving... [0] https://en.sega-dreamcast-info-games-preservation.com/ https://en.sega-dreamcast-info-games-preservation.com/
- halpert 5y agoI had a Dreamcast and loved it, but the PS2 was an amazing system. The main draw was the massive game library, great online game play, and it doubled as a DVD player. Not sure what else you’d really want?
- Grazester 5y agoGreat online plays was not a competing factor with the Dreamcast at that time. Even after a mature library with online play long after the Dreamcast's death the PS2 online scene paled compared to the Xbox.
- toywinder 5y agoThe timelines and competing consoles presented in the article are all out of order. I get the overall point they were trying to make, but that was a painful read.
- p0wn 5y agoI remember you could copy the games because they had no drm on them. My buddy had a complete collection. What a masterpiece.
- ac2u 5y agoSo 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 than a traditional CD for extra capacity), from what I can remember reading, was primary done via a dreamcast console (perhaps initially it was done via a development kit) and a serial cable or ethernet adapter. I think over the years more means of doing the GD-ROM copy became available, like firmware overwrites of certain PC drives.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoGames 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.
- monocasa 5y agoIt was the videos that were reencoded. Textures didn't add up the same way.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoI stand corrected.
- wildzzz 5y agoI remember the old way of ripping original Xbox games was to use a modded Xbox that would serve the game disc over FTP. You'd connect to the Xbox and copy the disc contents off of it. You could then burn them to a blank DVD and your modded Xbox would happily play the xex executable. You could have quite the library of games by borrowing from friends or renting from Blockbuster. The next upgrade was to drop in a larger HDD so you could play games off the HDD instead. Games loaded so fast and could load even faster with a high speed ribbon cable. 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.
- hahamrfunnyguy 5y agoOne 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 projectiles could not harm you. The reverse was also true. Really fun game!
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- nanna 5y agoIkaruga was great, however it was effectively Treasure's sequel to its imo greatest game, Radiant Silvergun for the Sega Saturn, which sadly never made it out of Japan. Best game of the 32bit generation, maybe best bullet hell ever. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Wue0F5YyeEQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Wue0F5YyeEQ
- fabiensanglard 5y agoIkaruga belongs in the hall of fame. Not only mechanics are well researched, the execution (the engine) was breathtaking at the time. When I visited Japan in 2019, I visited all arcades in Akihabara until I found ONE cabinet running it. It was magical.
- MisterBastahrd 5y agoNo 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.
- VRay 5y agoI remember that the Dreamcast was already dead by the time piracy started becoming rampant, at least in the USA where I lived
- vikingerik 5y agoAs the other reply says, this didn't really happen this way. The Dreamcast was already on its way out after the PS2's launch by the time piracy really started up. Piracy was a footnote, not a cause. Internet access was one constraining factor. Not everyone in 1999/2000 had broadband to download entire CD images. And an even smaller portion ever knew where to find the piracy methods and content - most of it was on Usenet.
- timw4mail 5y agoPS2 marketing killed the Dreamcast.
- MisterBastahrd 5y agoYes, this is far more correct. PS2 marketing had people believing that the PS2 was going to be rendering Terminator 2 level graphics in realtime.
- gogopuppygogo 5y agoLack of a DVD drive killed the Dreamcast. People saw much more value in a PS2. 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.
- aasasd 5y agoPS2 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.
- lostgame 5y agoIs 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 https://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-Native-Mac-Testing-Build
- aasasd 5y agoIt works! But... hella slow with games like Gran Turismo 3. Vaguely on par with PCSX2 in Windows in VMWare Fusion, if not slower. (Fusion can run DX10 stuff on Mac, while Wine and VirtualBox can't.) Previously I assumed that PCSX2 development for Mac stopped around 2012 with 0.9.7. Can't remember what was my result with it, but possibly the same. I guess the problem might be with the embedded GPU of the Macbook. Which is still telling, if a weak modern GPU can't handle a system from 2000 while being able to run games from mid-to-late 2010s.
- fredoralive 5y agoWith the PS2 Sony were already some way down the road that led to the PS3 and Cell and all that complexity, what with the various vector units in the Emotion Engine CPU and slightly odd graphics pipeline. So its not surprising its somewhat hard to emulate, although as other post points out it should work nowadays. The Dreamcast is somewhat simpler, a fairly straightforward CPU and an "off the shelf"[1] PowerVR chip that isn't as weird (though the tile based rendering stuff is I guess?). Cue emulator authors pointing out all the weird annoying bits of the Dreamcast I've missed. [1] In itself an interesting choice for the late '90s, when consoles still nearly always had bespoke graphics, instead of just variants of PC GPUs.
- treesknees 5y agoI've had good luck with this fork of PCSX2. I've been able to play Kingdom Hearts with my Nintendo Pro Controller on my M1 Mac and it runs really well. https://github.com/tellowkrinkle/pcsx2 https://github.com/tellowkrinkle/pcsx2
- ksec 5y agoSince it is fro hackaday, I was expecting at least a word on SuperH.
- turtlebits 5y agoCapcom had so many of my favorite games on the Dreamcast, the regular hits such as Marvel vs Capcom and Street Fighter, but Power Stone, Tech Romancer, Cannon Spike, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Rival Schools, etc.
- dfxm12 5y agoThese 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 to play Guilty Gear Strive. Especially of interest on a site like hackaday, they don't mention the homebrew scene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dreamcast_homebrew_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dreamcast_homebrew_gam... Or the ports of Atomiswave games to DC: https://www.retrorgb.com/dreamcast-atomiswave-ports.html https://www.retrorgb.com/dreamcast-atomiswave-ports.html
- giobox 5y agoI 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.
- monocasa 5y ago> 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.
- matthewfcarlson 5y agoThe article was updated with years for each console to try and make the timeline clearer. I think the initial error stating the the Nintendo 64 was released after the Dreamcast was the biggest error.
- iszomer 5y agoWhat 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNoBQ5nTeuk
- fy20 5y agoYou can also connect two VMUs together - without the host system - to play games against another person or transfer saves.
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- pupppet 5y agoI never liked the Dreamcast for no other reason than petty bitterness from having purchased a Saturn.
- waffle_maniac 5y agoThere'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
- city41 5y agoThere's been several of them over the years. The most popular one now is TerraOnion's MODE: https://shop.terraonion.com/en/home/17-Terraonion_MODE_Dreamcast_Saturn_ODE.html https://shop.terraonion.com/en/home/17-Terraonion_MODE_Dream...
- joeman1000 5y agoThe Dreamcast is still special. It never made big waves in Australia, so I bought one secondhand in 2016. My childhood was spent playing the PS2. The Dreamcast library and the whole ‘attitude’ of the system is quirky and refreshing. Playing titles like Shenmue and Jet Set Radio is still so enjoyable. If they had a 3D GTA on the system I think it could have helped.
- itisit 5y agoBrings back memories. Make a cup of tea. Hop on IRC to find the latest FTP. Download 20 some RAR files. Merge them. Burn an ISO. I must have gotten 80+ games this way. Sorry, Sega. Thanks, Windows CE!
- yob28 5y ago
- alliao 5y agono mention of Samba de amigo I even ordered the maracas kit from Japan, it worked so well. It used Doppler effect to track distance from sensor to speaker (in your hand) thus identified the height of the controller. You could go as fast as you can without throwing it off, amazing achievement. Really wished they'd re-release it on Nintendo switch, though I suspect the reason is hardware of joycon isn't able to keep up.