The Sega Dreamcast appreciation thread

[Oh Danny Boy]

5 hours ago, Ketchup said:

How much power of the Dreamcast can indie developers tap into, as we haven't really seen many 3D games but they do exist.

Xenocider, that came out last year is the most impressive, the team behind that developed the engine from scratch. Definitely the most impressive 3D indie game on the system. 

[MikeJ]

I love the Dreamcast but I struggle to see the attraction to anyone of something like Postal which was crap when it came out and very crap when Dreamcast launched. As a hobby port fine but £40?

I can appreciate the effort that has gone into Xenocider and it’s a nice change from the normal shovelware, but as a game it would have been a solid 3/10 had it launched during the DCs lifetime. 

[Oh Danny Boy]

1 hour ago, MikeJ said:

I love the Dreamcast but I struggle to see the attraction to anyone of something like Postal which was crap when it came out and very crap when Dreamcast launched. As a hobby port fine but £40?

I can appreciate the effort that has gone into Xenocider and it’s a nice change from the normal shovelware, but as a game it would have been a solid 3/10 had it launched during the DCs lifetime. 

Xenocider is a great game. 3/10, what are you smoking? You should pick it up for your Dreamcast and give it some love, it’s worthy  of taking its place alongside the best games on the system. 
 

 

[davyK]

 

My first Dreamcast was bought January 2002. It was the pack that gave you VF3tb, Ecco and MSR.  It was on sale in Argos for £50 and they threw in a 2nd 3rd party controller. Would have been rude not too.  Cue me vulturing the games off the shelves cheap in GAME and EB as it died.  Have a rather nice PAL collection and all the gubbins - wheels, arcade sticks, guns , coloured VMUs. Have 2 keyboards for Typing of the Dead (US version I use with a boot disc).  Pretty happy with my collection but still fancy picking up Gigawing 2.

 

Picked up a couple of indies - Sturmwind and Wind&Water Puzzle Battle.  Both very nice indeed.  Have a VGA box but I'm using the RGB SCART with the CRT at the minute.

 

Favorite? Tough - between Daytona, Mr Driller and Gigawing.

 

First console that made the scales fall from my eyes and discovered 60Hz gaming. Changed my ways after that.

[Oh Danny Boy]

15 minutes ago, davyK said:

 

My first Dreamcast was bought January 2002. It was the pack that gave you VF3tb, Ecco and MSR.  It was on sale in Argos for £50 and they threw in a 2nd 3rd party controller. Would have been rude not too.  Cue me vulturing the games off the shelves cheap in GAME and EB as it died.  Have a rather nice PAL collection and all the gubbins - wheels, arcade sticks, guns , coloured VMUs. Have 2 keyboards for Typing of the Dead (US version I use with a boot disc).  Pretty happy with my collection but still fancy picking up Gigawing 2.

 

Picked up a couple of indies - Sturmwind and Wind&Water Puzzle Battle.  Both very nice indeed.  Have a VGA box but I'm using the RGB SCART with the CRT at the minute.

 

Favorite? Tough - between Daytona, Mr Driller and Gigawing.

 

First console that made the scales fall from my eyes and discovered 60Hz gaming. Changed my ways after that.

If you’re wanting to discover some other indie gens definitely pick up Xenocider, Intrepid Izzy, Flea! and Xeno Crisis

[bplus]

On 14/02/2022 at 19:41, ucci said:

@Ketchup If your interested there are some interesting discussions on implementing the PowerVR API using a homebrew library.

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/lets-build-a-sega-dreamcast-game-from-scratch-breakout.916501/

 

Does make you nostalgic reading about the powerful PowerVR gpu running at 100MHz able to pump out those vivid texture compressed polys. 

Been skimming this, really interesting:

 

"Many assume the Dreamcast had poor anti-piracy measures, but the reality is that the Dreamcast was broken wide open early on by a pretty heinous and serious breech of security. The only reason Dreamcast piracy and homebrew were ever possible is because a Katana SDK - the official Sega SDK for the Dreamcast, was stolen by the warezgroup Utopia sometime around late 1999. The Katana SDK contained a scrambling program that would automatically reverse scramble your binary for you, intended to let developers burn non-game related tools on CD-ROM instead of GD-ROM. Access to the Katana SDK did not mean piracy groups could freely author software, as it still took a few years of research to reverse engineer the pseudo-random scatter algorithm (which they did by examining pre-scattered code against post-scattered code), but rather it allowed them to create one single program which could load other programs, which they dubbed the utopia boot CD. Had that Katana SDK never been stolen, the entire Dreamcast piracy and homebrew scenes would likely never have materialized."

 

Pretty annoying a warez group contributed to killing the Dreamcast.

 

Any really great post!

[Rex Grossman]

29 minutes ago, bplus said:

Pretty annoying a warez group contributed to killing the Dreamcast.

Playing devil’s advocate I would say that the PlayStation and Amiga suffered comparable levels of piracy (relative to their userbase) but it wasn’t the reason they eventually ‘died’. They both reached the end of their natural life despite the negative effect of piracy.

[bplus]

2 hours ago, Rex Grossman said:

Playing devil’s advocate I would say that the PlayStation and Amiga suffered comparable levels of piracy (relative to their userbase) but it wasn’t the reason they eventually ‘died’. They both reached the end of their natural life despite the negative effect of piracy.

Obviously I don't know the answer but I think that how early piracy hit in the Dreamcast's life plus the ease of piracy , no chip required, made it worse. Unlike the Amiga the dreamcast was being sold at a loss in the hope of profit from games. I vaguely remember an interview with a developer saying piracey was so bad for the DC that  it put studios and publishers off. Feels like a contributing factor in it's demise to me, to what extent , who knows. Though to be fair sega were scuppered by multiple things. Shame, it was the last console I really liked

[davyK]

Dreamcast was the arcade at home and I don't think the mainstream gamer wanted that any more*. That and Sega pissing away money and annoying the user base over the MD addons that they never fully recovered from.

 

 

 

 

* It's exactly why I like it.

[dumpster]

There's a widely quoted story of how a Datel Action Replay demo disk on a magazine let you play pirate games, but that wasn't the case (it may have allowed imports). But the whole 'piracy killed the dreamcast' story is nonsense in my opinion. Ps1 and DS had piracy that was rampant and they were hugely succesful.  The DC had no chance from the very beginning.

 

The advertising was terrible, the online side didn't work at launch, etc. But the PlayStation 1 was the most successful console of all time and everyone knew there was a PlayStation 2 around the corner.  The PS2 had hype levels off the chart. It had an emotion engine! It would play DVDs (at a time when a DVD player would cost you hundreds of pounds). Gary Liddon said the DC was the milky way of consoles, a snack to consume between PlayStation's, and he was right.  The sad part is that when PS2 did launch, I felt it was a disappointment, and the DC with its crisp VGA graphics blew away Ridge Racer 5, The Bouncer, Tekken Tag, in fact all the launch games were a bit average really.  The DC was the better console, at least initially, but by the time anyone realised it was too late.  

 

 

[Ketchup]

Yeah I wonder if during that first launch year of the Ps2 of the Dreamcast could have held on as it did have the better looking and playing games for a bit there. Also the Dreamcast didn’t do too badly all things considered and probably would have ended up at GameCube levels rather than Wii U.

[Oh Danny Boy]

June issue of Sega Powered will come with the first Dreamcast demo disc in over 20yrs courtesy of WAVE games. Probably be Intrepid Izzy, Xenocider, Flea!, Rush rush rally and Postal. Some bangers right there.

 

 

 

[Oh Danny Boy]

 

Recent purchases. Been wanting Karous for ages but always too pricey, managed to pick it up for £50 and it’s as good as new so well happy with that. Also never played Sonic Adventure 2 before! 😱 It’s been on my wish list for 20yrs, I’ve even somehow managed to skip on the 360 version. But original version with Chao adventure is where it’s at. 

[Oh Danny Boy]

Postal is out, got my copy through but my Dreamcast is boxed up as I’m in the process of moving. Getting good reviews online and liking the addition of a couch four player mode for it too.

 

Also Shadowgangs is out next month. For those who did back the Kickstarter it’s being published by WAVE and is available on their site. 
 

https://www.wavegamestudios.com/shop/shadow-gangs

 

 

[MLH75]

Can anyone recommend a HDMI connection for my Dreamcast to connect to my PC via an Elgato HD60S? 

[electricmastro]

Underrated puzzle game for Dreamcast using blocks to create mounds to hold in as much water as possible.

 

[Haribokart]

4 hours ago, electricmastro said:

Underrated puzzle game for Dreamcast using blocks to create mounds to hold in as much water as possible.

 

 

Wetrix on Dreamcast was indeed a great game, made by our very own @Ste Pickford & @JPickford if you didn't know.

 

That US box art though 

[Ste Pickford]

I went to Japan and signed a deal with Sega for them to publish it in Japan on the Dreamcast, and they wanted to rename it Aqua Panic for the Japanese market.

The money was shit, but we were being published by Sega in Japan, so how cool was that?!  We even had articles in the newspapers of the 'coals to newcastle' variety.

It was right at the end of the Dreamcast, and even though we'd signed the deal and finished the game for them (with the new logo), they cancelled all Dreamcast software production so it was never released, and we never did get our game published by Sega.

[Ketchup]

It’s such a fun game if frustrating because I just want to collect water with no leaks 😂

 

Is the PS2 version the definitive version?

 

That cover though, a game all about water and they still make the cover brown.

[Ste Pickford]

There's probably not much in it between the PS2 and the N64.  The N64 is the purest, where we got to re-write the PC version (which was essentially a prototype turned into a full game) from scratch.  We had to add some things to the PS2 version for the benefit of the Japanese publisher (who funded development), but they weren't quite on the same wavelength as us, so any changes were a little half-baked.

 

Would love to do a proper sequel.

[Ninja Doctor]

Is switch indie dev accessible?

[Ste Pickford]

Yeah, but nobody is paying me to do it.

[Ninja Doctor]

I’ll chip in £2. 

[gunrock]

I have Wetrix for Dreamcast. I bought it because I played 30 mins or so at work. Class.

[carlospie]

You could make a global warming dlc where you have to provide water to the UK which is now barren lands and everyone is melting 

[Elseb]

Ohhhhhh man Wetrix! 

 

We didn't have much money growing up so new games didn't happen often and when they did, we had to make sure we got our monies worth. 

 

Christmas of 99 was a difficult one for the family money wise and we didn't get much. One game we did end up with was... Wetrix, I suspect it had become a bargain bin title by that point?

Anyway, I had absolutely no expectations going into it, I figured it would be a case of maybe getting half hour out of it before it got put in a cupboard until January when I would try and trade it at school for another game. (I actually managed to trade a copy of Clayfighter 64 for Zelda a few months later...)

 

I BECAME ADDICTED. I literally spent the majority of my Christmas holiday playing it and just trying to break my high scores. I hadn't been this addicted to a game since Sonic 2. 

 

I still own the game and it's one of the few from my childhood I still own. (It's been through like 12 house moves!). I also own the Dreamcast version which is great.

 

So thanks @Ste Pickford Made a big impact on my childhood! 

 

 

[luth714]

Hi all, does anyone have any experience of this hdmi “converter” for the DC? Got mine today and tried a couple of what I think are VGA compatible games - Sonic Adventure and Soul Calibur - but I keep getting a black flicker of the screen during various moments, no really rhyme or reason when it’s happening.

 

Tried it going direct into the TV using the same hdmi I use for my PS4 and Xbox One, used the cable it came to and run it into my hdmi switcher box but get the same result each time.

 

just trying to figure out if the issue is my end or if it’s a faulty unit.

 

Thanks!

[Pistol]

Try it without the HDMI switcher. They can be a bit weird.

 

 

 I’ve had one that worked fine for years, then one day I couldn’t play blu rays on the Xbox one without ridiculous audio delay. Tore my hair out trying to find out what was going on; eventually it turned out to be the - previously unflappable - HDMI switch.

[luth714]

Yeah tried it direct into the tv and it was doing the black screen too

[SeanR]

Are you providing microUSB power?

 

I’ve got a few of these (Xbox, dc, and ps2), and some won’t work without the 5v juice