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Classic Games (Games)

The Dreamcast's Final Death 99

Posted by Zonk from the live-on-little-console-live-on dept.
Croakyvoice writes "The Dreamcast games Last, Hope Karous and Trigger Heart Exelica will the last officially licensed Sega games for the Dreamcast because from February Sega Japan plans to stop production of GDRoms. The death of the GDRom format will mean no more Dreamcast or Naomi Arcade games. The Dreamcast Community has sent emails to Sega Japan to ask for a rethink on this issue. From the article: 'This doesn't need to happen, as developers are fond of the NAOMI for its relative low cost, ease of production and accessibility, and straightforward ports to the Dreamcast home console. Warashi returned to the scroll shooting genre with Trigger Heart Exelica on NAOMI, and Milestone would likely gladly continue to produce further games following Karous on the system as well. Sega themselves have recently presented Dynamite Deka EX running on NAOMI. If GD-ROM production continues, there is a much greater chance that we'll see a home console port of this game on DC within a year.'"
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The Dreamcast's Final Death ? More

The Dreamcast's Final Death ?

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  • Dreamcast? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Physician ( 861339 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2007 @07:55PM (#17655898) Homepage
    Raise your hand if you're surprised they still make games for the Dreamcast. However, I'm in favor of anything that keeps an old console alive. I wish Nintendo would still produce SNES carts.

    • Palecast? (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "However, I'm in favor of anything that keeps an old console alive."

      Let's hear it for the Colecovision.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by maynard ( 3337 )
        I dunno about the colecovision, but there is still community support for the 2600 and (amazingly) the Vectrex. New games, believe it or not. I owned a colecovision back in 1982 or so. Good console, but I seem to remember playing the 2600 more often simply because it had more games. I also played lots of games on a TRS-80 model 1, as well as an original IBM XT back then. Of course the XT had superior graphics - a CGI card - in comparison to the trash 80. But that bit o trash had lots more games at that time.
        • I'm assuming you meant CGA graphics card? :) A CGI graphics card would be a strange device, indeed.

          On the nostalgia front, I still have an AMD K5-133 with a #9GXE64 (64 bit VLB-bus graphics card!) that plays 7th Guest and 11th Hour better than Windows ;)
        • Atari 800 rules!! The greatest computer of the 8 Bits!
        • It's tough to argue with the Atari 800 having better graphics. Let's face it, having 128 colors on the screen at once in 300x200 resolution in 1980 was nothing short of amazing.

          It's something people had to see to believe and a lot of them saw it and still didn't believe it.

          Yes, I still have my Atari 800 (48K) with 810 floppy drive.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by nomadic ( 141991 )
      Yep, I was shocked at this myself.

      I wish they'd make one last Shenmue before they go...

    • Re:Atari 2600? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Xenolith ( 538304 ) on Thursday January 18, 2007 @10:39AM (#17663196) Homepage
      Cripes, there are still games being made for the Atari 2600. http://www.atariage.com/store/index.php?main_page= index&cPath=21_85 [atariage.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bjb ( 3050 ) *
        Though for this you can definitely argue that the reasons are
        • nostalgia
        • challenge of hacking 6502 and stella

        Not sure how many people actually buy the cartridges that are produced (not saying there are zero sales; but I actually don't know), but there is absolutely serious geek credibility these days to someone who reads the specifications of 2600 architecture, learns these old technologies and limitations and then hacks out a half-way decent game.

        I hacked enough 6502 code on the Apple II back in my

    • They do. They just shrunk them to fit in a gameboy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Khyber ( 864651 )
      I wish every company would go back to carts. Seriously, I'm sick of loading times. Most decent games out right now can fit on a freaking 4gb flash card, and with new phase change memory [wikipedia.org] coming out, there's no reason why we shouldn't have drastically faster loading times and a smaller package, not to mention a media you don't have to worry about scratching, so the games would last longer. Seriously, optical discs are so passe, and the technology is coming around in non-volatile memory to send optical into ob

  • Or... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by casualsax3 ( 875131 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2007 @07:55PM (#17655904)
    ... they could just start using CD's, since those work too.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HexRei ( 515117 )
      at 1/2 capacity :(

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by nbehary ( 140745 )
        The thing is, recent DC games have been shooters that really don't nearly use all of the capacity of the GDROMs. Now, that may not be univerally true of all potential NAOMI ports, but it has been for the last 2 years or so.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dknj ( 441802 )
      only if you have a first gen dreamcast. the 2nd iteration solved this problem
    • When I downloaded and wrote a game (that you can't buy here) to CD for my Dreamcast the CD caused its "Final Death".
      GDs are read from the inside out, and data is packed together more closely, this means the laser in the CD has to move less. When you use a CD you hear the constant bzzzt-bzzzt sound of the laser moving back and forth. In about a week it would often halt while loading game data, a week after that it couldn't load startup data, now by Dreamcast is unuseable.

      So unfortunately CDs won't work a

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Firehawke ( 50498 )
        This is why you use a tool to create a large amount of dummy space at the beginning of the image before burning it. By pushing out the data to the outer edge of the disc, you reduce the stress on the drive.

        I've had my Dreamcast since US launch, and I've been using burned backups of Japanese stuff on it since then without issue.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by b1t r0t ( 216468 )

        GDs are read from the inside out, and data is packed together more closely

        CDs are read from the inside out too.

      • As mentioned below (Score:3, Informative)

        by goldcd ( 587052 )
        CDs are read from the inside out as well. A noise you can here is the CD head being moved, but that should move no more than it does for a GD-ROM.
        The different noise you hear when putting in a CD-R is normally the drive trying to continually re-focus the laser on the disk to read it (laser is tuned to GD, not CDR).
        You could usually get around this by burning your disks slower, using a CD with a different dye, tweaking the Pots (or a combination of all).
    • CDs don't work in the arcade hardware.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by poot_rootbeer ( 188613 )
        CDs don't work in the arcade hardware.

        But surely the arcade version of the hardware doesn't rely on GD-ROM as its storage medium? One would think that in a use case like that, a more fixed and reliable technology like hard drives would be utilized.
        • I don't know about THIS hardware (Naomi) but the former crossover platform from Sega, which consisted of the Saturn and whatever they called the arcade version of that, was capable of using either ROMs (the saturn has a cart port on top, which was used for the game shark, savegames, and for ROM carts for fighting games whose software still loaded from CD) or a hard disk drive. The latter approach was used in Area 51, one of the older shooting games out there and still one of the best :D But notably the conv
        • But surely the arcade version of the hardware doesn't rely on GD-ROM as its storage medium?

          I must say the only Naomi (1 & 2) boards that I saw took replaceable ROM packs, which meant they booted very quickly and probably would have been more reliable in an environment like an arcade. I suppose, however, that a GDROM based system would have made distribution of new games/updates cheaper though.

  • Not the end (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17, 2007 @08:03PM (#17656000)
    The Dreamcast can read standard CD-Roms. They don't hold quite as much as a GD-Rom... if memory serves, a GD-Rom holds close to one gig. But, GD-Roms also seem much more error-prone, and have to be more expense to press.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by the_nightwulf ( 1003306 ) *
      (Most) Dreamcasts can read standard CD-ROMs. The easiest way to tell if yours will is by the manufacturing date at the bottom. If memory serves, the cutoff was February 2001. It was February of something ...

      GD-ROMs do hold close to one gig, and they are indeed much more error prone. The extra storage space is gained by removing much of the redundant data used for error correction. This is why a Dreamcast GD-R with a speck of dust may not play, but a PSX game that's been run through a blender will.

  • Not dead yet... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Good Reverend ( 84440 ) <michael@michris. c o m> on Wednesday January 17, 2007 @08:08PM (#17656062) Journal
    That's sad that it's the end of the Sega-produced game era, but one reason the Dreamcast is so popular is that it's quite hackable, plays CDs also, and has a lot of user support. I use mine mainly to emulate older console systems like the NES, and it works great for that with CDs I burned myself. I don't see the hobby market for the Dreamcast going away any time soon.
    • I suggest you check out the Xbox scene if you're interested in all that stuff. :)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Leto-II ( 1509 )
      That's sad that it's the end of the Sega-produced game era

      Well it's not really the end of Sega-produced games. They now produce games for all the other platforms which used to be their competitors. For instance, they make Sonic games for Nintendo systems.
    • I gave up on NES emulation on the dreamcast and started doing it on the Xbox. The DC really doesn't seem to have the power to do it, you get a lot of slowdown, which is pretty sad on NES but understandable on SNES. But the Xbox does the SNES well too. Your mileage may vary of course. Also I got tired of burning CDs. You could put every non-CD console game from every system 16 bit and older on an Xbox without even making much of a hard drive upgrade, and find emulators to run them, too.

  • Dead? (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by p0tat03 ( 985078 )

    Dead in what sense? Dead as in practically nobody buys/plays it anymore? If so, the DC has been dead for a long time, the corpse rotted, and now you're just digging up bones.

    If you mean dead in the sense that *really nobody* is playing, then no, the DC is still alive... but so is the SNES and Genesis, if you want to count the absurdly small minority that still play with their old consoles.

    • Dead in the sense that if the media needed to load games onto the console no longer is being made, no future games can be expected, but the release of Trigger Heart Exelica pretty much says otherwise. I know people are still making games for the Atari 2600, and I believe even selling a few. Long live Atari!
  • There's no reason that ending production of GD-Roms will stop production of Dreamcast games. The Dreamcast is quite capable of playing games from CD with no modification of the console, people have been playing bootleg Dreamcast games this way for years. It does, however, limit the size of any further releases to around 800 megabytes.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Raz1r ( 982733 )
      You're right, and the cost of 2 CDs can't be much more than a GD-ROM can it?
      • Given that the patents on CDs have probably expired by now, two CDs probably cost less than a GD-ROM because no special facilities are needed and no fees would be paid to Yamaha.
  • Releasing a Dreamcast game while the Dreamcast itself is discontinued... Exactly HOW much is Sega expecting to get in returns for this?
    • Maybe the installed base didn't shrink much? It sounds like it's trivial to port a game for a certain type of arcade machine to run on a Dreamcast. Even if only a small percentage of users still buy the games, it might be just enough to justify a small run.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by ClamIAm ( 926466 )
      Game systems seem to live on a while longer in Japan than the US. The AV Famicom (AKA the re-designed NES) was only discontinued by Nintendo in 2003, and the Playstation was produced until March of last year. Sega released their last DC game in 04, also.
      • You'd be surprised how long they live in the US, too. I recently sold off a number of my consoles and games. Of the items offered, my Nintendo 64 and all of my N64 games sold in a single day to a variety of people who either needed replacement hardware or just wanted more games for their existing N64s. I was completely blown away that there was still demand for that console.
    • Games like Under Defeat, Radilgy, and Trizeal were originally on the Naomi arcade systems, and were very cheap to port, requiring only modest sales to become profitable. Additionally, many of these games sold relatively well, Under Defeat sold out in under a week and prompted a second print. Many of these titles also saw such popularity that they were later picked up and published on PS2 and Gamecube. Radilgy, Ikaruga, Chaos Field, and Trizeal are all examples of this.

      If you're a small company with limit
  • They could probably stamp official licensed games on cdrom in a pinch using the backdoors that the pirates exploited long ago.
    The downside to this is that the games would be damn easy to copy.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • There are no backdoors because Sega didn't artificially limit what their customers could do with a Dreamcast.

        That's not really true though is it? The Dreamcast was never intended to be able to boot from CDs and it required a hack to do so.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by twistedsymphony ( 956982 )
        That's not exactly true... The GDRom had a small inner ring that was formatted like a CD (go look on the bottom of a real DC disc if you've got one). To my understanding all games booted up in the CD section which sometimes would include bonus content you could load on your PC like wallpapers and screen savers etc. Once the console initialized into this section it pass an instruction for the disc to change over into the GD formatted section of the disc to play games.

        basically there wasn't any encryption,
      • "All Dreamcast games are easy to copy if they don't exceed the capacity of a CD."

        Echelon (AKA gods) managed to take a GD game (Skies of Arcadia), compress it to fit onto two CDs instead of two GD disks, and wrote a small DC program that uncompressed and streamed the large movie files on the fly while you played, with pretty good results. It was about as impressive as the DC itself.
  • Yeah, I didn't know they still made games for the DC anywhere. I didn't know that the arcade NAOMI hardware ran off of GDROM... Anyway, Dynamite Deka 2 is a sweet game (Dynamite Cop to those who may be familiar with the American Release), so I hope they keep it going. I'd love to see a Deka EX avaliable, whatever that is. I love my dreamcast. I play Worms on it all the time, and still play Sonic Adventure and Rayman 2 occasionally. Bust-A-Move 4 and Mr. Driller, also, for real. Man, I think I'm going t
    • I am still ticked off at Sega for one thing, after they went out of the hardware business, they focused too much effort on the Gamecube, when it would have been much smarter to do PS2 games with the bigger market. Porting Skies of Arcadia to the Gamecube, a machine with very few RPG fans compared to the massive RPG fanbase of the PS2? That's just stupid. And never getting around to porting Typing of the Dead to the PS2, which has actual USB ports so you don't have to buy (or bundle) a special keyboard si

  • No, they can't use CDs. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Myria ( 562655 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2007 @10:14PM (#17657582)
    Later models of Dreamcast don't boot the special multisession disks at all, for obvious reasons. There were a few legitimate music CDs that had Dreamcast content on them, but Sega sacrificed that feature to prevent piracy - a good decision, considering.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by b1t r0t ( 216468 )

      Later models of Dreamcast don't boot the special multisession disks at all

      That was the "common wisdom" in the past, however, when people tried to confirm exactly which models couldn't boot multisession CDs, they couldn't actually find any that wouldn't boot. The information is somewhere on dcemulation.com, and I just tried looking for that page, but I couldn't find it. In any case, there are so many of the older units available used that this is not much of an issue.

    • There were a few legitimate music CDs that had Dreamcast content on them, but Sega sacrificed that feature to prevent piracy - a good decision, considering.

      Considering what? That Sega shut down production on Dreamcast consoles a couple months after switching to a drive model that wouldn't read standard CDs?
    • Yes, they can. All one has to do is reverse the order of the sessions, xeal's most famous app did this automatically. (bin2boot)
  • So I bought another console. It didn't teke much effort to decide which console presented me with the best options of games I enjoy playing.

    I bought another Dreamcast.

    I took it to a friends place the other day and the XBox got unplugged and we had a good blast on the Dreamcast. It may be old but the games are still fun.

    So far the only thing that looks like it has a chance of displacing it is the Wii.

    • The Wii *IS* my new Dreamcast (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Cybrex ( 156654 ) on Thursday January 18, 2007 @01:46AM (#17659324)
      So far the only thing that looks like it has a chance of displacing it is the Wii.

      Funny you should mention this. I'm a big Dreamcast fan and recently the very happy owner of a Wii, and for reasons that I can't quite put my finger on the two systems remind me of each other.

      The white case and Japanese UI aesthetic are obvious factors, but I think it goes beyond that. Neither system has the most powerful processor, but both are overflowing with creative engineering that goes beyond mere novelty, both are ideally suited to party play (IIRC the DC was the only system of its generation that easily supported 4 controllers, and for virtual console games the Wii could in theory support up to 8), both are IMHO the most fun consoles of their generation.

      I fondly remember having absurd amounts of fun playing Bomberman with 4 players on the DC. It naturally follows that the first Virtual Console game I pulled down for the Wii was Bomberman '93.

      I've never understood why the Dreamcast wasn't a runaway success, and the whole sad saga was like living in Bizzaro world where the better system is forgotten by the world. At the risk of sounding 'woo-woo', the Wii feels like the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast, and seeing the more innovative system finally getting the popularity it deserves this time around takes a lot of the bitterness off of the DC's ignominious end.

      If they ever come out with Chu Chu Rocket for the Wii then all will truly be right with the world. :-)
      • Two reasons the DC died. Sega seriously pissed off the Japanese gamer-base with tons of hardware that had little support. Sega CD, 32x, and the Saturn and I LOVE the Saturn. You can't get 8-10 player Bomberman anywhere else. Just as with the Sega CD & 32x, Sega did not support it very well before dumping it for the DC. They flatly got their act together too late. The other reason is how amazingly easy it was to pirate DC games. Utopia Bootdisk for instance? Hell it isn't that hard to make most games sel

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by KDR_11k ( 778916 )
          I LOVE the Saturn. You can't get 8-10 player Bomberman anywhere else.

          Yes you can, Atomic Bomberman for the PC supports 10 players, though I think you need more than one computer for that many people.
          • Since were getting into semantic here. Let me rephrase that since were being anal. The only Bomberman you can easily get 10 friends to play. I have Atomic Bomberman, and am not nearly as impressed with it. It's a console game that doesn't translate to PC well.
      • IIRC the DC was the only system of its generation that easily supported 4 controllers

        Not sure whether you consider Dreamcast to be part of the PS1/N64 generation, or the PS2/GC/Xbox generation, but all of the Nintendo and Microsoft consoles released in both of those generations also came with 4 controller ports standard.

        and for virtual console games the Wii could in theory support up to 8

        In THEORY, the Wii could probably support more controllers than would even be practical. Four Gamecube controllers, four

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Cybrex ( 156654 )
          That's a neat idea, but in the absence of definitive data I'm going with the more conservative estimate. I've got a classic controller, and in the games I've played with it it simply replicates buttons that are already on the wiimote/nunchuk. However, I suppose that if a game could be played with one player on the wiimote and another on the nunchuk then in that case you'd be right.

        • Not sure whether you consider Dreamcast to be part of the PS1/N64 generation, or the PS2/GC/Xbox generation, but all of the Nintendo and Microsoft consoles released in both of those generations also came with 4 controller ports standard.

          The Dreamcast simply can not be part of the PS1/N64 generation, because that was when Sega was trying to push the Saturn. It was expensive, hard to code for compared to either of the other two platforms (it had twice as much CPU as the playstation, because it had two SH2

  • How many times are we going to have slashdot posts about the death of the dreamcast before it finally dies? I predict at least 2 more by the end of this year.
  • "The Dreamcast Community has sent emails to Sega Japan to ask for a rethink on this issue"

    "Dreamcast Community" (read: George, Leslie, and Frank).
  • And they want their slashdot story back.

    Yes, I know there is a comminity out there, but they will continue on as they have. I didn't even know SEGA still made games for it.
  • It's a small point I guess but

    "The Dreamcast games Last, Hope Karous and Trigger Heart Exelica will the last officially licensed Sega games"

    should actually read

    "The Dreamcast games Last Hope, Karous and Trigger Heart Exelica will the last officially licensed Sega games"

    The games are

    Last Hope [play-asia.com]
    Karous [play-asia.com]
    Trigger Heart Exelica [play-asia.com]

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