traycerb writes "It's been 10 years since 9/9/1999, when the Dreamcast launched on American shores. The hardware was ahead of its time; online capability, web browser, a visual memory unit, and a controller that anticipated the much-loved Xbox 360 controller. The games were amazing: Jet Set Radio (the first popular 3d cell-shaded game on a console), Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (still the apotheosis of 2-d fighting; just try finding a copy on ebay), Soul Calibur (still looks good compared to the recent Xbox/PS3 versions), NFL 2K (came out of nowhere, and was so good that it shook EA into spending tens of millions of dollars to seal up exclusivity for NFL rights), and many others. No doubt some of the reasons for the Dreamcast's demise lay with Sega, whose dubious hardware decisions (ahem, 32x) finally caught up to them, in the form of ambivalence from both developers and gamers, just as the console-making world was shifting to the multinationals with big pockets who were willing to spend it on pricey hardware design (or could absorb the cost of faulty hardware design). It was also one of the first consoles widely used for homebrew. In honor of the 10th anniversary, a new game is being released for the Dreamcast, called Rush Rush Rally Racing. The Dreamcast is dead! Long live the Dreamcast!"
There has never been a console that was that far ahead of its competition at the time. It's the lightsaber of consoles, an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
that, sadly, no-one really took seriously. It was a wonderful console with some wonderful games. No-one really took the Dreamcast seriously after the flagging failure of the Saturn, expecting the same thing this time around. All the big developers went to PS2/Xbox (With the PS2 winning that round) and utterly burying the Dreamcast.
The developers went to the PS2 and XBox because the Dreamcast was stupidly easy to pirate games for. If the developers weren't making money, why support the system?
There is a difference between 'possible' and 'stupidly easy'.
It was only stupidly easy if you had a CD burner, a broadband connection, and knew your way around IRC and warez sites... in 1999. You may have had several buddies doing it, but the masses weren't. Piracy did not kill the Dreamcast.
What did kill the DC was Sega needed to make 10 million more units and had no money to do it. Limited growth potential, limited developer support.
"What did kill the DC was Sega needed to make 10 million more units and had no money to do it."
Nope, what killed the Dreamcast was the Sony media spin, which went into full swing Spring 1999, touting the next gen Playstation 2 to have "Toy Story" graphics [cnn.com]. Everywhere I went I kept seeing reviews and commercials for PS2 and the amazing graphics, so everyone just waited for the PS2. By the time they got a PS2 and found out the graphics were not even close to the movie it was too late for DC. Plus it didn't help that the Playstation already had some excellent PS only series of titles, like Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear and Castlevania.
Disagree. Sega has no one to blame but themselves. First I bought a Genesis which was cool. Then a 32X which was only supported a year, and then the Saturn which was only supported two years, and then Sega announced Dreamcast. I (and millions of others) decided we were tired of getting screwed buying 32Xs or Saturns that were barely-supported. So we turned our backs on Sega and their new dreamcast.
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice? Fat fucking chance!"
I think the only conclusion we can come to is that Sega had an array of factors aligned against them, among them their own erratic past in hardware, lingering financial troubles, and Sony's FUD. It's truly a shame that what sank them was their cleanest, most forward-looking console ever.
The PS2 ultimately went on to produce titles like Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 3 which, while not of Toy Story graphical quality, did nonetheless show a significant improvement in graphical capability when compared to Dreamcast titles like Shenmue. Having said that, Dreamcast titles seem to have aged well graphically compared to other consoles.
In my opinion, what ultimately sunk the Dreamcast was a lack of system selling titles. While titles like Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, Soul Calibur and Phastasy S
I would have to say Xbox was way easier to pirate the games. Heck with the dreamcast you had to burn discs, with the Xbox you could copy them to the hard drive.
Besides the dreamcast was 2 years old when the PS2 cameout and 3 when Xbox came out.
After you paid somebody to do a chip or softmod (or did it yourself), and bought a hard drive. Neither of which you needed to do with Dreamcast. Burn and go.
The only advantage to Xbox was that you could pirate a friend's game easily; Dreamcast really needed someone else to do it for you, and you d/l the ISO.
I think people over-emphasize the piracy aspect. Yes DC games were relatively-easy to copy, but still not as easy the CD-ROM based playstation 1. To copy DC discs required some hacking to remove extra videos and make the 1-gigabyte game fit onto a stand 0.7 gig CD. The PS1 did not require that, making it easier to pirate, and yet the PS1 seemed to do moderately okay (120 million sold).
Dreamcast was killed by mistrust. After buying The Genesis, then the 32X, then the Saturn, and getting screwed on the last two deals, I made-up my mind that I would never again touch a Sega console. So I ignored the DC.
Sega, like Atari and Commodore before it, made stupid decisions that made them lose consumer confidence.
For most people, burning a CD is much easier and less risky than opening up the XBox to mod it, and copy the content to the hard drive than it is to just burn a CD. If the CD doesn't work, you lose $1 (at the time of the dreamcast), if you bork up your XBox by opening it up to mod it, you are out the price of a console.
True, but the CD method is every freaking time, with the Xbox you just open it once. Heck, you could and probably still can buy premoded Xbox. All with a nice little switch that turns of the mod chip for online play.
Since most of the Dreamcast games have been ported to other consoles, is there any remaining reason to go buy one? What "must play" games still exist on the original console but are not available elsewhere?
There's a good list at Racketboy [racketboy.com]. One that's not on the list is Propeller Arena, a great arcade style dogfight game which was canceled and leaked to the internet.
>>>no-one really took seriously. It was a wonderful console with some wonderful games.
Yes and I love playing those DC ports on my PS2 (Space Channel 5) or my Gamecube (Skies of Arcadia), but I don't think the console was really powerful enough to beat the other 3 from Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft. The Dreamcast is the weakest of the four and since it uses a CD has even less room for videos/graphics than the Gamecube had (1 megabyte versus 1.5 megabyte) both of which were woefully-inadequate compar
A proper keyboard and mouse are enough to make me agree. Dammit, 10 years and no one else has bothered to get that right since. I want to play my UT3 Black, BioShock and Rage like a civilized human being, not like I'm an 8 year old with Nintendo thumb.
I must admit I have very fond memories of the Dreamcast. It debuted during the first semester of my Freshman year in college. All my previous consoles had technically been joint gifts to me and my brother so I left them all at home for him to play, and the Dreamcast was the first console I bought with my own money - which I bought on launch day so that I'd have something to play at school. Soul Caliber was a blast, as was Resident Evil Code Veronica and Sonic, as was Skies of Arcadia, but I really, REALLY liked Grandia II on that system.
Despite it's early death, I think that the Dreamcast still held it's own against all the consoles of that generation (Gamecube, PS2, Xbox - I owned them all eventually).
Dreamcast was an excellent system and ahead of its time, which could be another reason it failed. Money was a big issue. Tough to go against Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo.
Luckily, a few of those GREAT games were ported over to the GameCube, which I still have, like Ikaruga(yes I know it eventually got ported to the XBOX360), Skies of Arkadia, Shenmue, etc.
who when reading " In honor of the 10th anniversary, a new game is being released for the Dreamcast, called Rush Rush Rally Racing. " Was expecting the game to be called "Rush Rushed Out the Door"?
A shame the Dreamcast died. I dunno if I should be angry at Sega, or it's run of bad luck. Sega has a history for abandoning consoles very quickly. But the Dreamcast had stiff competition, and needed to sell a lot of units to turn a profit. When sales were falling short of Sega's expectations they pulled the plug on it. I can't help but feel that if Sega has hung in there it might of been a huge success but I can't really laminate about how terrible sega is. RIP Dreamcast you died to young.
Nah I just don't know what I would of done differently to make the Dreamcast be profitable. It was awesome but awesome things are only awesome if people are buying them. They just couldn't compete with Sony.
This is true, it was a fantastic console and such a shame it didn't last the race. I remember playing Phantasy Star Online over the 56k modem before the term MMO even existed. And I still would rather play that than WoW. With Soul Calibur, Jet Set Radio, Power Stone, Crazy Taxi and of course Shenmue it seems that the Dreamcast proved that quality games is not enough to survive in this particular market. RIP!
You are forgetting one of the most revolutionary games that changed the face of console gaming(okay maybe not), SEAMAN.
It was the game where you raised the fish and interacted with them using the included microphone. I remember buying that game and beating the shit out of those fish.
My little brother also got a note sent home to our parents from his second grade teacher about discouraging him from talking about his semen. Hilarity ensued.
Phantasy Star Online was amazing; it was basically networked Gauntlet with great graphics and music. Very atmospheric. Unfortunately the old timey game cheating devices worked on it, so it was unplayable online because there was unlimited weapons, money, etc. floating around.
I was actually one of the most well-known cheaters in PSO. A few friends and I disassembled the game and figured out how various parts worked, making GameShark cheat codes in the process. I had a serial cable between my PC and Dreamcast that let me dump memory and target-debug PSO.
My favorite trick that I would do with the debugger is overwrite my own character with the data from another character in the lobby, then rejoin the lobby. I would appear as an exact clone of them. I even would do things like start listing the items they had in their inventory, as that was broadcast to every other client. Until Sega's servers started detecting it, I would also run around the lobby as Sonic.
When the GameCube version came out, we applied our knowledge from the Dreamcast version to break the new encryption it used on the protocol. We didn't have a way to remote-debug the GameCube, so instead we wrote a transparent proxy server that let us mess with the packet stream instead.
PSO for Xbox is what led to GameCube homebrew, and eventually sped up GameCube piracy. In the Dreamcast days, because of our cheating and bugs, Sega added a packet in "version 2" known as RcvProgramPatch that would tell the client to execute arbitrary SH4 assembly code. The GameCube version had this feature too. Because the GameCube packet encryption was then unknown (to homebrew; we knew it) and the disks were unreadable, there was no obvious way to break it without disassembling the game. The same encryption algorithm was used in the Xbox version of the game - big mistake. Xbox disks were readily dumped, and by disassembling the Xbox version's encryption they got the GameCube version's encryption. From there they simply sent PowerPC assembly code to the GameCube via RcvProgramPatch and it was all over.
We actually cracked the encryption before the Xbox version came out using an elaborate trick involving misuse of stream ciphers by Sega. They violated two rules of stream ciphers and cryptography in general: always have both the server and client provide pieces that hash to the session key, and never let the server session key equal the client session key. This led us to get about 1 MB of the encryption stream for a particular key that we could repeatedly use. From there, we tried RcvProgramPatch, but it was broken. (We later figured out that it didn't flush the instruction cache before executing code. We later worked around that, as did the homebrewers.) Instead, we took advantage of another feature of RcvProgramPatch: the ability to request a CRC32 of an arbitrary chunk of memory. We asked for the CRC32 of every 2-byte word of memory, and from that we were able to get a copy of the game's RAM, and thus the assembly code containing the encryption. It was just disassembly from there to get to the algorithm.
I spent waaaay too much time in that game, to the point that I've heard its lobby music far more than any other song in my life. Maybe someday I'll write the story of PSO hacking.
you admit to being one of the people that fucked it up for everyone else?
Yep, although the damage I did to the game was mostly indirect. I did far more damage by giving out our cheat codes than in anything I did myself.
However, when some cheats went too far, like with the hack to break into password-locked games, I emailed Sega with information on how to fix it. Sega Europe had some people who spoke Japanese and were willing to translate my emails for them. That hack was one of my regrets - I was the one who made it.
Congratulations. You're a fucking douchebag. I hope you get cancer and die.
That's nice. Statistically speaking, your wish probably will be granted, but not likely for a few decades.
Thanks for ruining the game by being too much of a pussy TO JUST FUCKING PLAY IT.
Cheating and the game itself were separated. Although I ran around the game like a goddess, my own play character wasn't cheated. I had a character image on my hard drive that I would play with when I wanted to play the game as opposed to cheat in it.
The cheating was a game in itself, to me. I actually found it more fun than the game itself. I didn't like ruining the game for other people.
As for item duping, I can't be completely blamed for that. There's actually a bug in the game's UI windowing system that allowed you to dupe items [youtube.com] without any cheat programs or hardware at all.
For such a short lived console, it's amazing how many great games there are for it. You can't forget about Ikaruga, one of the finest top down shooters ever. Or Rez, one of the finest rail shooters ever. It's got a couple world class JRPGs, Skies of Arcadia and Grandia II, and one of the best adventure games ever released for a console, Shenmue. Then there's Crazy Taxi, Bust-a-move 4, Powerstone, Ecco, Typing of the Dead, Virtua Tennis (so much fun with 4 players), and that's just off the top of my head.
Other good consoles that also were under-appreciated were the Atari Lynx [wikipedia.org] and the Atari Jaguar [wikipedia.org]. The Atari Lynx was truly ahead of its time, a full color portable console in the day and age when the Nintendo Game Boy had all of four shades of gray for its games. The games were excellent, including the fully three dimensional Stun Runner and a 3D fighter shooting video game; no other portable console could come close.
The Jaguar was also ahead of its time, with textured 3D graphics in an era when the SNES
I agree on the Atari Lynx being ahead of its time, but the Jaguar had lousy graphics, especially when compared to the PS1 released just one year later. No wonder it flopped.
Also despite Atari's last-ditch attempts to rename Jaguar as "Jaguar 64", nobody was fooled. Everyone knew it was a 32-bit 68000 CPU - same thing that ran the five-year-old Sega Genesis and the 10 year old Macintosh or Amiga. The Jaguar has a better GPU, but that was its only advantage over those other machines.
Was probably one of the funnest games I ever played through.
Agreed.
Skies of Arcadia is definitely one of the top 3 console RPGs for me. Terrific game. Great gameplay mechanics... Fun characters... Some innovative elements...
Exploring the skies in your very own airship, discovering uncharted territories... Using the beeping of the VMU to track down those shards... Airship combat...
Wow. Seriously wish I still owned a Dreamcast and a copy of that game.
Unfortunately I never had a Dreamcast but I absolutely loved Skies of Arcadia: Legends on the Gamecube. It has some additions and improved loading times, but it lacked that VMU feature. A Skies of Arcadia sequel would automatically jump to the top of my "to buy" list. FYI, Vyse and Aika are playable in Valkyria Chronicles on the PS3, which is also an excellent game.
Wow, the DC had good games, that's for sure, but it was also plagued with one of the least comfortable controllers since the awkward devices of the 8 bit era. I can't be the only one who couldn't play a DC game too long before my thumb felt like it was shredded to ribbons. That was the sharpest D-Pad ever to grace a controller AFAIK.
The Visual Memory Unit was completely gimmicky as well.
Wow, the DC had good games, that's for sure, but it was also plagued with one of the least comfortable controllers since the awkward devices of the 8 bit era. I can't be the only one who couldn't play a DC game too long before my thumb felt like it was shredded to ribbons. That was the sharpest D-Pad ever to grace a controller AFAIK.
Meh. I never found the Dreamcast controller all that unweildy. Lots of folks complained about it... But I just never had that hard a time with it.
The N64 controller, however, drove me up the wall.
The Visual Memory Unit was completely gimmicky as well.
The VMU had some real possibilities... But with the exception of one or two games (Skies of Arcadia) it was completely neglected. Definitely some wasted resources there.
I found out that Dreamcasts were going for $70 at my local Rite-Aid, so I did a quick newsgroup search to find out if any of the games were that great, and which. Turns out a nearby CD shop had a ton of 'em. Bought Soul Calibur, Jet Grind Radio, Dance Dance Revolution (with dance pad) and Chu Chu Rocket.
Chu Chu Rocket sat there unused for days while my roommates played Soul Calibur. Then we pulled it out one Saturday morning and discovered that it was probably the best game I had purchased. Even people who
When I woke up this morning and looked at the calendar, the first thing that came to mind was flashbacks of buying my Dreamcast on 9/9/99 at Sears. I still have it and it's box, close to new condition, along with 4 controllers and a plethora of games and accessories (4 VMU's, Tremor packs, keyboard, mouse, I even had the BROADBAND adapter aka a NIC).
Dreamcast is probably my favorite system of all time.
Favorite games:
1) Skies of Arcadia (one of the best RPG I have ever played)
2) Shenmue
3) Soul Caliber
Sonic Adventure, Jet Set Radio, Phantasy Star Online, and many many others were great as well. People don't realize how revolutionary Dreamcast (and SEGA) was and how much it influenced the other future consoles. Look at Saturn, the first console to support internet-based play. I stil have my 28.8k NetLink modem. Dreamcast pushed online gaming even further by supporting 56k and having an optional LAN card. Games like PSO set a benchmark for many other MMORPGS like WoW.
Although SEGA failed at marketing and spent way too much time trying to improve one of my other favorite systems, the Genesis ( with the 32x and SEGA CD), they were still on the cutting edge of console technology, and set an example that many future consoles and games followed.
If it had been possible to find a broadband adapter for less than I paid for the console (on closeout), I'd probably still have it hooked up as a hacktoy.
I don't remember the exact specifics because this was in 2000 but I used a USR modem in my Linux router and attached the DC modem directly to it. I configured pppd and mgetty there to accept a blind "dial" from the DC to get internet access through my cable connection. I guess using the DC broadband adapter would have been easier but they were too costly at the time. That was probably the last time I ever used pap-secrets file.
ahh good times (Score:5, Funny)
Re:ahh good times (Score:5, Interesting)
that, sadly, no-one really took seriously. It was a wonderful console with some wonderful games. No-one really took the Dreamcast seriously after the flagging failure of the Saturn, expecting the same thing this time around. All the big developers went to PS2/Xbox (With the PS2 winning that round) and utterly burying the Dreamcast.
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The developers went to the PS2 and XBox because the Dreamcast was stupidly easy to pirate games for. If the developers weren't making money, why support the system?
Re:ahh good times (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:ahh good times (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a difference between 'possible' and 'stupidly easy'.
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Re:ahh good times (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a difference between 'possible' and 'stupidly easy'.
It was only stupidly easy if you had a CD burner, a broadband connection, and knew your way around IRC and warez sites... in 1999. You may have had several buddies doing it, but the masses weren't. Piracy did not kill the Dreamcast.
What did kill the DC was Sega needed to make 10 million more units and had no money to do it. Limited growth potential, limited developer support.
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Re:ahh good times (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, what killed the Dreamcast was the Sony media spin, which went into full swing Spring 1999, touting the next gen Playstation 2 to have "Toy Story" graphics [cnn.com]. Everywhere I went I kept seeing reviews and commercials for PS2 and the amazing graphics, so everyone just waited for the PS2. By the time they got a PS2 and found out the graphics were not even close to the movie it was too late for DC. Plus it didn't help that the Playstation already had some excellent PS only series of titles, like Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear and Castlevania.
It wasn't until 2009 when the PS3 finally did bring Toy Story graphics to consoles [gamezine.co.uk].
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Re:ahh good times (Score:4, Informative)
>>>what killed the Dreamcast was the Sony me
Disagree. Sega has no one to blame but themselves. First I bought a Genesis which was cool. Then a 32X which was only supported a year, and then the Saturn which was only supported two years, and then Sega announced Dreamcast. I (and millions of others) decided we were tired of getting screwed buying 32Xs or Saturns that were barely-supported. So we turned our backs on Sega and their new dreamcast.
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice? Fat fucking chance!"
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Re:ahh good times (Score:4, Informative)
I think the only conclusion we can come to is that Sega had an array of factors aligned against them, among them their own erratic past in hardware, lingering financial troubles, and Sony's FUD. It's truly a shame that what sank them was their cleanest, most forward-looking console ever.
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The PS2 ultimately went on to produce titles like Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 3 which, while not of Toy Story graphical quality, did nonetheless show a significant improvement in graphical capability when compared to Dreamcast titles like Shenmue. Having said that, Dreamcast titles seem to have aged well graphically compared to other consoles.
In my opinion, what ultimately sunk the Dreamcast was a lack of system selling titles. While titles like Sonic Adventure, Shenmue, Soul Calibur and Phastasy S
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Re:ahh good times (Score:4, Interesting)
I would have to say Xbox was way easier to pirate the games. Heck with the dreamcast you had to burn discs, with the Xbox you could copy them to the hard drive.
Besides the dreamcast was 2 years old when the PS2 cameout and 3 when Xbox came out.
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The only advantage to Xbox was that you could pirate a friend's game easily; Dreamcast really needed someone else to do it for you, and you d/l the ISO.
Re:ahh good times (Score:5, Interesting)
I think people over-emphasize the piracy aspect. Yes DC games were relatively-easy to copy, but still not as easy the CD-ROM based playstation 1. To copy DC discs required some hacking to remove extra videos and make the 1-gigabyte game fit onto a stand 0.7 gig CD. The PS1 did not require that, making it easier to pirate, and yet the PS1 seemed to do moderately okay (120 million sold).
Dreamcast was killed by mistrust. After buying The Genesis, then the 32X, then the Saturn, and getting screwed on the last two deals, I made-up my mind that I would never again touch a Sega console. So I ignored the DC.
Sega, like Atari and Commodore before it, made stupid decisions that made them lose consumer confidence.
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True, but the CD method is every freaking time, with the Xbox you just open it once. Heck, you could and probably still can buy premoded Xbox. All with a nice little switch that turns of the mod chip for online play.
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P.S.
Since most of the Dreamcast games have been ported to other consoles, is there any remaining reason to go buy one? What "must play" games still exist on the original console but are not available elsewhere?
Re:ahh good times (Score:5, Informative)
There's a good list at Racketboy [racketboy.com]. One that's not on the list is Propeller Arena, a great arcade style dogfight game which was canceled and leaked to the internet.
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>>>no-one really took seriously. It was a wonderful console with some wonderful games.
Yes and I love playing those DC ports on my PS2 (Space Channel 5) or my Gamecube (Skies of Arcadia), but I don't think the console was really powerful enough to beat the other 3 from Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft. The Dreamcast is the weakest of the four and since it uses a CD has even less room for videos/graphics than the Gamecube had (1 megabyte versus 1.5 megabyte) both of which were woefully-inadequate compar
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[edit]
"1 versus 1.5 [gigabyte] both of which were woefully-inadequate compared to the 8 [gigabytes] available to PS2 or Xbox."
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A proper keyboard and mouse are enough to make me agree. Dammit, 10 years and no one else has bothered to get that right since. I want to play my UT3 Black, BioShock and Rage like a civilized human being, not like I'm an 8 year old with Nintendo thumb.
My first console I bought myself (Score:5, Interesting)
I must admit I have very fond memories of the Dreamcast. It debuted during the first semester of my Freshman year in college. All my previous consoles had technically been joint gifts to me and my brother so I left them all at home for him to play, and the Dreamcast was the first console I bought with my own money - which I bought on launch day so that I'd have something to play at school. Soul Caliber was a blast, as was Resident Evil Code Veronica and Sonic, as was Skies of Arcadia, but I really, REALLY liked Grandia II on that system.
Despite it's early death, I think that the Dreamcast still held it's own against all the consoles of that generation (Gamecube, PS2, Xbox - I owned them all eventually).
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Dreamcast was an excellent system and ahead of its time, which could be another reason it failed. Money was a big issue. Tough to go against Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo.
Gamasutra has an interesting article as well on the history:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4128/the_rise_and_fall_of_the_dreamcast.php [gamasutra.com]
Luckily, a few of those GREAT games were ported over to the GameCube, which I still have, like Ikaruga(yes I know it eventually got ported to the XBOX360), Skies of Arkadia, Shenmue, etc.
Am I the only one.. (Score:2)
who when reading " In honor of the 10th anniversary, a new game is being released for the Dreamcast, called Rush Rush Rally Racing. " Was expecting the game to be called "Rush Rushed Out the Door"?
To bad really (Score:2)
Re:To bad really (Score:5, Funny)
but I can't really laminate about how terrible sega is
Are you afraid you might gloss over the story?
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A great console (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A great console (Score:5, Informative)
You are forgetting one of the most revolutionary games that changed the face of console gaming(okay maybe not), SEAMAN.
It was the game where you raised the fish and interacted with them using the included microphone. I remember buying that game and beating the shit out of those fish.
My little brother also got a note sent home to our parents from his second grade teacher about discouraging him from talking about his semen. Hilarity ensued.
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Re:A great console (Score:5, Interesting)
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My PSO hacking days (Score:5, Interesting)
I was actually one of the most well-known cheaters in PSO. A few friends and I disassembled the game and figured out how various parts worked, making GameShark cheat codes in the process. I had a serial cable between my PC and Dreamcast that let me dump memory and target-debug PSO.
My favorite trick that I would do with the debugger is overwrite my own character with the data from another character in the lobby, then rejoin the lobby. I would appear as an exact clone of them. I even would do things like start listing the items they had in their inventory, as that was broadcast to every other client. Until Sega's servers started detecting it, I would also run around the lobby as Sonic.
When the GameCube version came out, we applied our knowledge from the Dreamcast version to break the new encryption it used on the protocol. We didn't have a way to remote-debug the GameCube, so instead we wrote a transparent proxy server that let us mess with the packet stream instead.
PSO for Xbox is what led to GameCube homebrew, and eventually sped up GameCube piracy. In the Dreamcast days, because of our cheating and bugs, Sega added a packet in "version 2" known as RcvProgramPatch that would tell the client to execute arbitrary SH4 assembly code. The GameCube version had this feature too. Because the GameCube packet encryption was then unknown (to homebrew; we knew it) and the disks were unreadable, there was no obvious way to break it without disassembling the game. The same encryption algorithm was used in the Xbox version of the game - big mistake. Xbox disks were readily dumped, and by disassembling the Xbox version's encryption they got the GameCube version's encryption. From there they simply sent PowerPC assembly code to the GameCube via RcvProgramPatch and it was all over.
We actually cracked the encryption before the Xbox version came out using an elaborate trick involving misuse of stream ciphers by Sega. They violated two rules of stream ciphers and cryptography in general: always have both the server and client provide pieces that hash to the session key, and never let the server session key equal the client session key. This led us to get about 1 MB of the encryption stream for a particular key that we could repeatedly use. From there, we tried RcvProgramPatch, but it was broken. (We later figured out that it didn't flush the instruction cache before executing code. We later worked around that, as did the homebrewers.) Instead, we took advantage of another feature of RcvProgramPatch: the ability to request a CRC32 of an arbitrary chunk of memory. We asked for the CRC32 of every 2-byte word of memory, and from that we were able to get a copy of the game's RAM, and thus the assembly code containing the encryption. It was just disassembly from there to get to the algorithm.
I spent waaaay too much time in that game, to the point that I've heard its lobby music far more than any other song in my life. Maybe someday I'll write the story of PSO hacking.
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Re:My PSO hacking days (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, although the damage I did to the game was mostly indirect. I did far more damage by giving out our cheat codes than in anything I did myself.
However, when some cheats went too far, like with the hack to break into password-locked games, I emailed Sega with information on how to fix it. Sega Europe had some people who spoke Japanese and were willing to translate my emails for them. That hack was one of my regrets - I was the one who made it.
That's nice. Statistically speaking, your wish probably will be granted, but not likely for a few decades.
Parent
Re:My PSO hacking days (Score:4, Informative)
Cheating and the game itself were separated. Although I ran around the game like a goddess, my own play character wasn't cheated. I had a character image on my hard drive that I would play with when I wanted to play the game as opposed to cheat in it.
The cheating was a game in itself, to me. I actually found it more fun than the game itself. I didn't like ruining the game for other people.
As for item duping, I can't be completely blamed for that. There's actually a bug in the game's UI windowing system that allowed you to dupe items [youtube.com] without any cheat programs or hardware at all.
Parent
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm, ok.
That was Hard... [ebay.com]
And to think, I own this game and it is collecting dust somewhere. Perhaps I should list it on ebay and retire to some faraway country.
Here you go (Score:4, Informative)
A quick google:
http://www.racketboy.com/retro/sony/ps1/2008/04/the-rarest-and-most-valuable-playstation-ps1-games.html [racketboy.com]
That wasn't hard.
Parent
Scratching the surface (Score:4, Informative)
For such a short lived console, it's amazing how many great games there are for it. You can't forget about Ikaruga, one of the finest top down shooters ever. Or Rez, one of the finest rail shooters ever. It's got a couple world class JRPGs, Skies of Arcadia and Grandia II, and one of the best adventure games ever released for a console, Shenmue. Then there's Crazy Taxi, Bust-a-move 4, Powerstone, Ecco, Typing of the Dead, Virtua Tennis (so much fun with 4 players), and that's just off the top of my head.
Ataris later consoles were also underappreciated (Score:2, Informative)
Other good consoles that also were under-appreciated were the Atari Lynx [wikipedia.org] and the Atari Jaguar [wikipedia.org]. The Atari Lynx was truly ahead of its time, a full color portable console in the day and age when the Nintendo Game Boy had all of four shades of gray for its games. The games were excellent, including the fully three dimensional Stun Runner and a 3D fighter shooting video game; no other portable console could come close.
The Jaguar was also ahead of its time, with textured 3D graphics in an era when the SNES
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree on the Atari Lynx being ahead of its time, but the Jaguar had lousy graphics, especially when compared to the PS1 released just one year later. No wonder it flopped.
Also despite Atari's last-ditch attempts to rename Jaguar as "Jaguar 64", nobody was fooled. Everyone knew it was a 32-bit 68000 CPU - same thing that ran the five-year-old Sega Genesis and the 10 year old Macintosh or Amiga. The Jaguar has a better GPU, but that was its only advantage over those other machines.
And you mention Super N
Skys of Arcadia (Score:3, Insightful)
Was probably one of the funnest games I ever played through. I wish they'd make a new version for the PS3.
Re: (Score:2)
Was probably one of the funnest games I ever played through.
Agreed.
Skies of Arcadia is definitely one of the top 3 console RPGs for me. Terrific game. Great gameplay mechanics... Fun characters... Some innovative elements...
Exploring the skies in your very own airship, discovering uncharted territories... Using the beeping of the VMU to track down those shards... Airship combat...
Wow. Seriously wish I still owned a Dreamcast and a copy of that game.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Those are some rose tinted glasses (Score:3, Insightful)
The Visual Memory Unit was completely gimmicky as well.
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, the DC had good games, that's for sure, but it was also plagued with one of the least comfortable controllers since the awkward devices of the 8 bit era. I can't be the only one who couldn't play a DC game too long before my thumb felt like it was shredded to ribbons. That was the sharpest D-Pad ever to grace a controller AFAIK.
Meh. I never found the Dreamcast controller all that unweildy. Lots of folks complained about it... But I just never had that hard a time with it.
The N64 controller, however, drove me up the wall.
The Visual Memory Unit was completely gimmicky as well.
The VMU had some real possibilities... But with the exception of one or two games (Skies of Arcadia) it was completely neglected. Definitely some wasted resources there.
When I bought a Dreamcast (Score:2)
Chu Chu Rocket sat there unused for days while my roommates played Soul Calibur. Then we pulled it out one Saturday morning and discovered that it was probably the best game I had purchased. Even people who
Funny that you mentioned (Score:4, Interesting)
Lack of BBA (Score:2)
If it had been possible to find a broadband adapter for less than I paid for the console (on closeout), I'd probably still have it hooked up as a hacktoy.
Using the modem (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't remember the exact specifics because this was in 2000 but I used a USR modem in my Linux router and attached the DC modem directly to it. I configured pppd and mgetty there to accept a blind "dial" from the DC to get internet access through my cable connection. I guess using the DC broadband adapter would have been easier but they were too costly at the time. That was probably the last time I ever used pap-secrets file.
You can still buy them (Score:4, Interesting)
Think Geek still sells brand new Dreamcasts [thinkgeek.com]. Maybe I should pick one up now there are some "new" games ;).
Re: (Score:2)
Only thing I didn't like about it was how the cord came out the player's side and had to be run under it to go out where it was supposed to.
WTF?