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Games Entertainment

Sega Supports Emulation 120

Posted by Hemos from the going-old-school dept.
rapett0 writes "Sega of Japan has decided to take a much welcomed step and support downloading and playing of Genesis/Mega Drive and PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 games on the Dreamcast via a service called DreamLibrary. Apparently they will cost $1.50 per download/per day and you lose the game after you turn off your system, but can redownload if you still have rental time left on the game that day. The same article makes mention that Bleem! might be released for Dreamcast as well. " Granted, this is only for Japan right now - but it's a cool step.
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Sega Supports Emulation More

Sega Supports Emulation

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  • the convenience of paying $1.50 *every single day you wish to play it...*
  • divx. definitely. first thing i thought of when i read this, and i ended up posting it, not noticing you said it...

    "spare the lachrymosity when the fulminations have inveighed"
  • Put Bleem CD in, boot it. Bleem plays nice little tune, tells you to put your other CD in there, you do it. Away you go.

    Though I dunno if we're totally understanding this Bleem/DC concept. It'd be *cool* to be able to play PSX games on the Dreamcast with Bleem, but I think it's more likely that Bleem are doing a DC emulator of their own, a la Bleem PSX.

    Still, if we do get Bleem for the DC (instead of Bleem *of* the DC), that'd give me more console space in my game system - I could sell the PSX, keep the PSX CD's for use with Bleem on my DC while I wait to add a PSX2 in the meantime.

    It'd be great to see this sort of 'cooperation' between console giants, heh heh ...

  • But Bleem^TM for the Dreamcast console? Is it even fast enough to run PSX games at full speed? I'd think only PSX 2 has enough juice for that (binary compatibility is one of PSX 2's selling points).

    Probably it is fast enough. The reason that bleem! on a Pentium II 233 sucks and psx games on the 4x33mhz run fine is timing. Your cpu has to pretend to be four seperate processors all at the same time. The DC would be able to do it, but it would be a LOT of work.


  • Already people hacking the DC have figured out how it could be used more many other reasons other than a gaming console... Check the old /. thread [slashdot.org] and as soon as this service is available, someone is gonna figure out how to save the games to disk, and circumvent payment (I give it 3 months). Sega is gonna have a major piracy problem on their hands. Not only that, but if they port Bleem! to the DC, Sony will have Sega's ass on a platter!

  • Re:The Next Step... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sega has to support Bleem! because it was ruled a legal application by the courts. Of course, Bleem! faces Digital Millenium, and may lose the next round.

    Sega doesn't have to support it. Nintendo is still saying that emulators are illegal. Of course, when the courts have already ruled it legal, it would be a good idea for Sega to try to make money from it, rather than fighting it.

  • "Maybe the price will go down with time."

    You mean like the price of CD's and VHS tapes went down with time?


    --

  • Why can't I own it? (Score:4)

    by kniedzw ( 65484 ) on Thursday May 04, 2000 @08:02PM (#1090855)

    I'll accept that this is an interesting development, and perhaps even a good one, but in truth, it really scares me.

    Perhaps I'm being old-fashioned here or even a classic trained-monkey consumer, but ... I really want to own it, rather than rent it.

    Our economy today seems to be moving more and more away from individual ownership to centralized ownership where our rights to use an item or a service are doled out on a per-item basis. Consider the fact that almost no one leased a car twenty years ago; it was something of a right of passage to own one. ...but these days, it's far more likely that one of us will lease rather than buy. ...and consider the new "hot area" of the Internet: ASP (application service providers, that is) and thin clients. Will I be able to buy my proprietary software in the future, or will I have to rent a timeshare in a server?

    I think this is certainly a cool development, but every time I think about the possibility of not actually owning something that is a significant part of my life, I get chills. Am I alone here, folks?

  • Re:Duh. Disk swap. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think it's more likely that Bleem are doing a DC emulator of their own, a la Bleem PSX.

    Does a PC have enough power to emulate a Dreamcast? It usually takes about 5 years before PCs are able to emulate consoles. IIRC, the PSX has only a 33 MHz processor. The DC is a lot more advanced, in terms of processor speed, graphics hardware, etc. But it may be possible to emulate a DC on a PS2 or Nintendo Dolphin system (or a PS2 on a DC, etc.).

  • North American gamers won't go for the daily charge.... but if they were to tie it in to their ISP, Sega.Com, it'd be a pretty good incentive to join up...

    Wiwi
    "I trust in my abilities,
  • Remember the service is for japan only. And japanese people are nice persons who play it fair. Not your average cheating occidental.
  • ... but how hard would it be to get the connection hooked up to a PC and download the games, and somehow play em on the dc off a burned cd? (I know that sounds so tech-stupid) But, could that happen? Pirated PSX games is a big reason people buy the system ( trust me, I used to work at Babbages--questions like that fly by 2-3 times a day)...and I think that might be a possible selling point for some people

    so my question is

    is it possible/economical?

    djsw
  • It reminds me of Nintendo's Satellaview system, where you could download games via satellite and then play on your SNES. This, a cooperation with Bandai and only available in Japan, had similar features (i.e. limited playtime, pay-per-play). It is probably best known in the West for its 16-bit remake of Zelda I as well as the game that would inspire Square's Chrono Trigger series. In fact I'm a little surprised that Sega didn't have something like this earlier like Nintendo. Sega was always the one experimenting with networking and such.

    As far as emulation goes, this too is nothing new, emulators for Sega's systems have existed for free since console emulation took off in 1996. Nor is the fact that a large gaming company decided to no longer ignore its collection of old games really innovative. The PSX has seen many old SNES games being re-released on an emulator.

    The only way this could be considered significant is if Sega will allow this to operate for a long time. One important aspect of emulation is the preservation of classic games and this could help Sega's classics to survive in legality....
  • Two words: Sega Channel. Genesis games broadcasted over cable.
  • And it would be cheaper to buy a Dreamcast and the VGA converter box than a GD-ROM drive for your PC (assuming you can find one).
  • Developing on the dreamcast system using the real tools is actually not very expensive. Sega even sells the development hardware at cost. I looked into it when I was poking at the OpenBSD/SH3->SH4 hacks. BTW anyone know what happened to that project? Might should ask /.

    What is almost impossible to do however is obtain a development license. You must build a fairly reputable software company and demonstrate your ability to provide high-quality game releases (read: profit potential) before they will even read your app.

    Then there's all kinds of exclusivity rights and things that cost you extra $$$ to get taken out of your contract (e.g. if you want to produce the same game for both the Dreamcast and the PlayStation)

    On one hand, this leads to very good (or at least 99% bug free) games for any console. Imagine if Microsoft licensed windows application developers this way -- it probably would never crash.

    On the other hand it makes it almost impossible for a small company to afford to develop console games and games notwithstanding, developing software for said system that is NOT A GAME is almost unheard of. Look at what happened to the "Game Genie" people that made the first "game enhancer" product for the NES - Nintendo threw them for broke with lawsuits. Luckily the GameShark guys handled development through the console manufacturers so they aren't out of business.

    As far as I am concerned, software that is not games needs to make it down to consoles; and soon. The Dreamcast has been a very good step in this direction with Sega embracing applications other than games.

    ~GoRK
  • It's not $1.50. It's 150 YEN, guys. This is a different market. A CD in Japan costs way more than the equivalent 15 bucks that we pay. That's why very few people actually own CD's. They rent them for what we would consider to be a ludicrous rental price. It's actually a lower rental fee when you base it on a cost to buy/cost to rent ratio than we pay to rent movies here in the states. Video games also fall under this same umbrella over there too. 150 yen is a bargain even for the old games.

    If they were ever to make this service available here in the US, I think that we'd see more reasonalbe rates probably .50 - 1.00 day instead of ~ $1.51

    ~GoRK
  • Just a side note for those of you who are hailing this as such a "big deal" and "finally they get it" etc.

    Nintendo developed and released their "super gameboy" product that allowed you to play GameBoy games on your SNES probably 5 or 6 years ago.

    ~GoRK
  • Yeah. It'll be even better if someone figures out how to download the memory of the DC. That way we could rip out the emulator and use it with roms that are already out there on the internet.

  • The c-64 carries a 6502, the c-128 carries a 6510... But still, what are the real differences between them?


    When the pack animals stampede, it's time to soak the ground with blood to save the world. We fight, we die, we break our cursed bonds.
  • Some more info on the Gameline is here:

    http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Lair/9260/g ameline.html

    A bit of trivia: The company that made the service, Control Video Corporation, became AOL.

  • You might be interested to know Military Madness is available for the PSX as well. It goes under the name Nectaris: Military Madness. I haven't had the opportunity to pick it up yet, but as it was just about my favorite TG16 games I plan to some time.
  • "Why don't they just sell you the game for $10 and let you be happy?"

    In what format? If you mean selling a burned roms for use in a actual Genesis, I doubt they could do it for $10 a game. The cost of making roms is rather steep, and making a small batch of games that only a few people will buy will drive up the cost. If you remember the NeoGeo system, one of the reasons the games cost so much was that the games needed alot of space (about 10 Megs in some cases) that had to be burned into roms. Sega has none of these games in stock any more, and new copies would have to be made.

    If you mean downloaded roms, where would you store them? The dreamcast has no hard drive. And having to download the same rom that you bought over and over would be rather annoying, unless you had good bandwidth.

  • You can do it with a Linux box acting as a PPP server...but you might as well wear a giant bullseye because Sega's lawyers will be knocking... ;)
  • I heard once, somewhere, (I'm a big emulation buff, myself) that interpretive cycles can be matched, with optimization, at about 1 to 4 or so.

    The reason so few emulators manage that is because consoles have excellent graphical and sound subsystems (ie, self-contained, very little overhead, etc.). Computers on the other hand are very centralized. ('cept maybe for the Miggy, I don't know much about that.) We're starting to see a bit of an attempt at a paradigm switch over to the console system in several areas (Some sound cards, such as the GUS, and some video cards with GPUs rather than just your typical 3dfx chipset or whatever), some of which don't do so well.

    The DreamCast, on the other hand, is a rather extensive, well-thought-out video game console. It adheres to the typical decentralized paradigm, and as such, could probably easily handle PSX games. I don't know a lot about either system, but I assume that both are rather similar when it comes down to it, except that the DC is much more advanced.

    What I'm saying is, hell yeah, the DC can handle it blindfolded, IMO.

    -=Canar=-

  • I don't think it's impossible that in the future some of the more popular word-processing/spreadsheet/etc software might not be available to buy but only to lease.

    The major reason that application service providers might be more successful in this area is much lower costs. At the moment, selling individual packages means actually getting them produced, distributed, manning technical helpdesks, etc. ASPs, though, can both capture some of the revenue which at the moment goes to distributors, and provide a smoother environment and automatic upgrades to the software.

    If leasing software worked out to be cheaper and just as (if not more) reliable for the average consumer than going out and buying the package, you can see leasing really growing in popularity. People actually selling a whole package wouldn't be able to compete and would have to stop producing the software and/or start leasing it online...

    I don't see a big problem here. After all, I use electricity every day but I don't feel the need to go and buy a generator just in case the power company doesn't want to give me any.

  • It would appear so and then some. Looking at the screenshots, Dreamcast is powerful enough to render Playstation games at higher resolution. One assumes that they wouldn't sacrifice full frame rates for this. Remember the reason PCs need so much grunt to emulate is their lack of custom chips.

    tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose
  • But Bleem^TM for the Dreamcast console? Is it even fast enough to run PSX games at full speed? I'd think only PSX 2 has enough juice for that (binary compatibility is one of PSX 2's selling points).

    Probably. The DC uses a 200Mhz Hitachi SuperH processor and has a much more advanced graphics system than the PSX. The original PSX used a 33Mhz MIPS R3000 variant processor and a very simple 3D chip.

    So basically the DC would have 6 clock cycles to emulate each of the PSX's clock cycles... Is this possible? I think so. Probably not by doing simple interpretive emulation... probably techniques like dynamic recompilation and just-in-time compiling would be necessary for full speed.

    Using the more advanced graphics system of the DC, they could also add graphics features to the rendering of old PSX games (e.g. perspective correct textures).

  • ..is what the music industry needs to start doing. Realizing that the digital medium doesn't mean they can't make money. Just maybe look for new ways to make it. And per-song would be a good solution.
  • Ah, but bleem! is 800k. When you run it, bleem! just reads some encrypted stuff off the disk (ever looked at it? It's got like 7 tracks, seperated by blank space. Those tracks show up as audio in all my cd players). It would live in the DC ram on boot.
  • Nintendo has had their "Nintendo Power" system in Japan for years. You'd take a blank SNES/SFC cartridge to a kiosk and download a game of your choice to the cart. The only new thing here is that you can do it from home with the DC's modem. Plus this particularly announcement was made quite awhile ago. :P
  • I used to have a TurboGrafix-16 (my class in grade school had a very vocal TG-16 lobby and I decided to forsake the Super Nintendo in it's favor) with the CD drive. Firstly, I hope that Sega decides to release some of the CD games like Y's Books I & II [risingsun.net], Monster Lair, and Fighting Street. Also, the game Military Madness (turn-based strategy on the moon) was insanely fun but it's not a game you sit and play straight through for 24 hours (like Final Fantasy *). The rent-to-own or games library on CD options would be more appropriate.

    FYI: I still have my TG-16 with CD drive and the system is still way rad.

  • yeah, that $1.50 per day part would be annoying. I'm not saying I would use the service... only that it would be cool to have a comprehensive library of ROMS.

    I would probably use it if it were a $1.50 to use it forever type license. But of course, that's not what they're suggesting.

  • Go down to a Funcoland (if you can still find one) and for around $20 you'll get a SNES, Genesis, or NES with about 10 games, 2 controllers, all cables and stuff and even a few game guides and magazines. The original Mario Brothers on NES is $0.02!!! In fact, almost all the 8-bit games can be had for under $5, and the 16-bit ones for no more than $10 (usually much less). This is because of all the kids who sold off their classic systems so they could buy a $400 Playstation or something back when they were new.

    Keep in mind though that it would be stupid to go there with $100 just to get every game for the system. Not every game on these systems are classics (in fact, there's only about 20 or so). But sure, if you dont already have one of the old systems, this route is much better. I'd much rather have a peice of hardware sitting next to my TV than the right to access some bits on my VMU.

  • I gotta agree with that. I can go down to Hollywood video and get them cheaper than that... Hell, I can go to most any ol Used Console shop and get the real thing for about $25... And Some of the games for LESS that $1.50! It sounds like a good idea, but I really think that, with prices like that, it's pretty horrible... I don't want to wait for 10 minutes for it to download on my LT Win Modem if I have to reboot my POS windows side either.

    -Dusty Hodges
  • Why bother with all that when you can play Genesis/Mega Drive games for free, as much as you want, by grabbing ROMs off the net? Anyways, wouldn't it be possible to tap what's incoming so you _can_ save the ROMs you've paid for, so you can continue to play them (after moving them to your computer)?
    I think it's a waste of time...


    When the pack animals stampede, it's time to soak the ground with blood to save the world. We fight, we die, we break our cursed bonds.
  • What sucky lyrics! Must be a lousy band.
  • I seriously doubt that Sega would use this to make bug fixes. First, they don't make most of the games, so they couldn't do it for those. Second, the games are so old that the coders are probably long gone from the company, if not the industry. And even if they could be contacted and were paid, there's always the fact that if you haven't seen code for 6 months, it's as if you had never written it.

    And of course, we'd have to make sure that they were only collecting the gameplay data in aggregate... ;)

    Walt

  • Re:Actually they *licensed* KGen (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    (moreso actually if you apply the MP3.com ruling - now the "it's legal to download if you own the cart" argument is gone).

    AFAIK, the MP3.com ruling said it was illegal for MP3.com to rip the CDs onto their servers, but it didn't address existing ownership.
  • >You mean like the price of CD's and VHS tapes went down with time?

    EXACTLY like that. Remember old great movies like "The Terminator"? Remember how the ONLY way you could ever enjoy then was to either rent them or pay the $70 or so price that the rental store had to pay for it? Now, $13 will get you a copy.

    And if you add inflation to the original cost... wow... VHS has truly changed.

    If the same would happen to CDs. :-)
  • i find it pretty odd that sega would be authorizing a port of bleem! to the dreamcast. sega loses money for every dreamcast they sell. they make the money back again when you buy games. the same is true for sony and nintendo incidentally.

    so what i don't get is why the hell sega would want a psx emulator on their platform. if people buy a dc and bleem, they can buy psx games and play them on their dc. the money for the psx games lines sony's pockets, not sega's. sega winds up losing money on the dc, and never recouping it on the software sales because people are buying psx games.

    this doesn't make a whole lot of sense...
  • i bet that a buch of linux wiseasses didn't know that most of the money to be made is not in linux, but in proteomics for next few years(decades). (Besides Microsoft after it regroups and puts Linux where it belongs) good luck anyhow. Biggy (I own a really big fire extinguisher)
  • read the link you provide. there is no open telnet port on the dc, the person who thought they discovered the hole in fact discovered the widely known netcom telnet proxy.

    read the story before you quote it.
  • I think this is certainly a cool development, but every time I think about the possibility of not actually owning something that is a significant part of my life, I get chills. Am I alone here, folks?

    Maybe you are in a minority -- at the end of the day, the market will decide. If a sufficient number of people like you want a box and a physical medium and an instruction booklet, and are prepared to pay for them, then someone will be there to sell you those things, and make a profit.
    --
  • >Sega has to support Bleem! because it was ruled >a legal application by the courts.

    ermm.. no. sega doesn't have to license anything it doesn't want to. to make a dreamcast game, you need to get a license to create the game. this is true of the psx, the n64, etc. this is one of the primary reasons the dc used the GD-ROM format. you can't get a GD-ROM without going through sega. so if sega doesn't want a particular game on their console, they just don't license it, plain and simple. the court ruling said sony can't stop bleem! from being produced to run on other systems (like the PC or mac), which is a very different thing.
  • Pedantic nitpicking, but I'm fairly sure that the Super Gameboy contained a gameboy CPU (Z80?), rather than performing emulation.

    Likewise, the PSX versions of some SNES games mentioned by another poster are likely to be ports, as opposed to being the original ROMs running emulators.

    Whether this is relevant or not, I don't know :)
    --
  • I didn't realiz that, but there were more suggestions for use of the DC than just that, but I'm too lazy to look through all those threads and find hard evidence, so you win this round ;)

  • I already have all the turbografx games i wanna play, being one of the few people who actually owned the system. This might not apply to cartrige games, but can i just pop my very legally obtained copy of Dracula-X, or Ys, into the Dreamcast and play all i want for free? My Turbografx CD broke a long long time ago, so this would be pretty sweet.

    side note: i remember when i got my Turbo-CD and my friends all excitedly informed me that i could play Japanese games on it. Me: "Well, a CD is a CD, right? Why wouldn't you be able to?" Siiigh. =(

  • Sweet now I can fire up nhl 93 for sega and make little Wayne's head bleed just like in Swingers.

  • 150 yen is nothing. A can of coke was 120 yen the last time that I was in Tokyo.
  • The PS2 does not have binary compartibility. The IO in the PS2 is in fact handled by the old PS chip. All the PS2 uses to play PS games is run it through that -- circumventing the Emotioan engine, VU's, CPU and the like.
  • The gameboy runs off of a Z80? Isn't the Z80 a 8080 clone? Hrm... I heard there was a Z80 cart for the Commodore 64, would it be possible to run Gameboy games on the C-64?


    When the pack animals stampede, it's time to soak the ground with blood to save the world. We fight, we die, we break our cursed bonds.
  • Secondly, this seems not much different to what Sony is doing with PSX2 - except Sony don't expect the owners of original PSX games to pay the extra to play them on their new console.

    That, and you don't have to have owned them in the first place. Like, if you rented it, liked it, never bought it... now you can rent it again. From home. :)
  • so sega is providing ROM's over the internet and charging for it? huh, i wonder how long it will take to find a way to just save the information perminantly to yer disk.

    unless they really thought this out. it'll be cracked by some japanese kid by morning.

    -Jon
  • It's cool. I just hope Sony decides to compete =). I mean, PSX2 + Linux Box + this kind of service == Happy Me. This way you can still sit on your couch...

    ---
    script-fu: hash bang slash bin bash
  • That's a neat concept. PC emulators are nice, but let's face it: console games are made to be played from a couch.

    --

  • Go with it (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sega should go with releasing Bleem (well a 3rd party anyway) It would be a huge move but a great one... Some other interesting Sega news is that they will just be calling it "Dreamcast" this way 3rd party developers can release games in the $30-$40 range without using "Sega" to save them the fee just to put the word "Sega", which is a great step towards success, im glad I bought a dreamcast, its a great gaming system.
  • But expensive for such old games. Granted, they have nostalgia value, but that's it.
  • Sounds like a ripoff to me. I'd rather just go out and buy the old consoles + games used at pawn shops or garage sales. And (depending on how often you play) it will also be a lot cheaper: I've seen SNESs and Genesiss (Genesii?) for $20-$50, and games for $5 or $10.

    Anyway, it'd be fun having a half-dozen consoles, ranging from 8 to 64 bit, sitting near your TV. (Though personally I prefer Nintendo's games anyway, so an N64 and an SNES are all I need).

  • Cool! I can play Sonic the Hedgehog on the Dreamcast console. But there should be a "purchase" option or a "rent to own" option that after 20 rentals ($30) licenses the game to a user permanently.

    But Bleem^TM for the Dreamcast console? Is it even fast enough to run PSX games at full speed? I'd think only PSX 2 has enough juice for that (binary compatibility is one of PSX 2's selling points).

  • $1.50 a day?!?!?!?!??!!? (Score:3)

    by Ferzerp ( 83619 ) on Thursday May 04, 2000 @01:50PM (#1090908)
    For these old games? For a service that isn't costing them near that much? Umm, no thank you. It would be cheaper in the long run if you like these *old* (therefore cheap if you can find them) games to buy an old system and the games. Old consoles go for practically nothing.

  • Good for game developers (Score:3)

    by El ( 94934 ) on Thursday May 04, 2000 @01:51PM (#1090909)
    The best thing about this is it give Sega nearly instant feedback as to what games the kids are actually playing, so they'll have a much better idea what kinds of games to steer their future development to.

    A secondary benefit, of course, is that they can provide bug fixes in internet time (provided they set it up right.

    In the long term, I think playing against "artificial intelligence" will always be less interesting then playing against flesh and blood other players. Obviously if you got connectivity for online game rentals, you've got connectivity to multiplayer servers. Now if we could just do something about those network latencies...

  • Anyone remember "Snapshot" for the C64? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It defeated all but the periodically checking dongle forms of copy protection. You load your game. It does all its checks for special bad sectors, etc. Then you press a button on the Snapshot card, and it dumps an image of all RAM, CPU registers and state, to its internal buffer that you could then save to disk. Then to play, you load the image back, CPU state is restores, and the machine thinks it loaded the game properly and already did all the copyprot checks. Wheeee!

    Do the same with the dreamcast!

  • $1.50 is alittle steep for what you get... considering most games are less than $40, that means if you play the game for more than 26 days, you're losing money. I don't know about you, but I kinda like being able to pop in a game from time to time.. certainly more than a mere 26 times!

    It would be *much* more attractive if it was, say, $0.50 per day.

  • I mean, its cool and all, but $1.50 each? I know places that'll rent for a day for that much, and that's new games, not old emus. Who'll play one old game all day? I've always thought that the fun of Emu games was dling a whole whack of them then trying them out, one after another, all day. That way, you could really find the ones you liked and were worth spending a few hours on (like Subterrania, or Star Control I). With that sort of flat-rate, you won't be able to root through the library very well. Still, nice to see Sega taking an interest in this cool field. Maybe the price will go down with time.

    Still, if they've got on-console emu support, maybe collection CD's of 50+ old games will come out. That I might be more interested in. Or the old "Order a custom-made CD" thing, but with roms, at ooh, say $4 each. Idunno.

    Doesn't matter anyways, I'm still going PSX2, not Dreamcast. Sony is evil, yah, I know, but I still want Armored Core II.
  • Sega has supported emulation for a _long_ time now. One example of this is that the Sega Smash Pack used KGen (obviously it was licensed from Steve Snake).

  • That is definately quite a bit for one day, especially when (at least around here) you can rent then at the video store for about that much and keep them for up to a week. Of course, this is japan, which has a much higher standard of living.

    Ah, you have a point there. Didn't think of that.

    The notslgia is definately great, but a day is about all I could tolerate of about 95% of those games... Of course, given the extreme numbers of them, there are some really exceptional games for "obsolete" systems, which except for the graphics are better than games today!

    Oh, definitely. Shadowrun for SNES is probably the best console game I've ever played (though Zelda: The Ocarina of Time comes fairly close). I tend to only get games I'm really likely to want (or, for older systems, ones that I already played and liked a lot). Otherwise I'd be spending too much money (not to mention time).
  • The emulation of other older systems is a good thing. (Any word if Sega plans to have the DC emulate the Saturn? It may have been a bust in the US, but there are some pretty cool Japanese games, if you can understand Japanese or fake it.)

    But the idea of the Dreamcast running Bleem! had me laughing out loud. I can hear Sony's people gnashing their teeth from here...

    --

  • Depends on whether or not there is any quality degridation in the games...my big problem with DIVX was that the discs often botched the quality on the movie...

    Electronic rentals, as a medium, has been slow to catch on...interesting, considering we now trust the internet with our communications, stocks, credit card numbers, CDs, grocery shopping, etc. But when it comes to movies, people seem to want to be able to touch it, feel it, chew it, swallow it, and pass it through their lower intestine. I guess some technologies are still a long ways away from being accepted...

  • Gameline (Score:1)

    by toh ( 64283 )
    It's interesting to see Sega finally catching up to the connectivity available with competitors like the Atari 2600 (via Gameline [tripoint.org]).

    Now all they need is a game as fun and addicting as Kaboom! [newbreedsoftware.com] to download. ;)

  • emulators are only good for older systems. with a playstation you need a cd. (either way you can get a copy but modchiped playstations play them too). with the upcoming nintendo you will need a cd. with the upcoming sega you will need a cd. So emulators are just not going to put you out of business. N64 emulation just sucks.
  • ... in intellectual property is that no one will ever be allowed to own anything. Just as the next step in TV will have encryption to prevent you from taping your favorite shows, the DVD people are still thinking of bringing back the Divx idea, even Stephen King's latest eBook can only be read using licensed viewers.

    Of course, you can still buy a CD of some of the great old Sega games (for Windows, I haven't been able to get it to run properly in Wine though I suspect it can be done) that'll be it.

    Sega has to support Bleem! because it was ruled a legal application by the courts. Of course, Bleem! faces Digital Millenium, and may lose the next round.

    Y'know, I remember a time when, if I bought a game I could put it on my hard drive. These days, it seems like few of my games will run unless I actually have the CD-Rom disk in the drive.

    Prediction, one of the first events following Sega's "generous" offer will be someone hacks a way to keep the game on their machine as long as they want... and, of course, Sega goes after them with a bunch of nasty lawyers.

    I've been thinking of getting a Dreamcast (I still may) but I will not support this form of emulation because it is a threat to having games released in ownable format.

    The companies can sell me their content, but if I can't own it, free and clear, I don't want it!

  • This was actually decided in the 80's. *IF* you are *NOT* a legitimate game developer, you *MAY NOT* dump the ROMs and use the dumped version. The backup clause says you may make *EXACT* copies of computer software, so yes, you may dump the ROM to burn a backup ROM set. But you cannot use the dumped ROM for any purpose otherwise (Unless given permission to do so, of course).

    Game developers can use the dumped ROM legally, simply as the "reverse-engineering" way (how did this game accomplish X, Y, and Z?). This dumped ROM for game developers satisfies "intermediate medium" criteria, which is how Bleem! and Virtual Game Station managed to get rulings overturned (of use of the Sony BIOS - the intermediate file analysis of a dump of the BIOS is allowed to write the program).

    Which, unfortunately, means all ROM sites are illegal. But, unlike Nintendo (which does not want to license old game ROMs at ALL), at least Sega is attempting to right that wrong by letting people legally use their ROMs.

    Reference: http://www.emuhq.com/emufaq/mod2_pt2.htm (the parent to this file is an excellent source of legality information)
    U.S.C. 17 Section 117 (Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs)
  • Because you don't own the original rom.

  • atari 2600 gameline (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    All legal/piracy considerations aside, even if
    Sega brought this service to market (unlikely)
    it would probably not be popular, and almost
    certainly not profitable.

    The atari 2600 had a similar service available...
    the "Gameline" was a combination modem/storage
    device that let you download a game over your
    phone line. You could play it until the machine
    was either turned off or the reset button was hit
    six (?) times. IIRC, the service, like so many
    atari accessories, was canned.

    Of course, the atari 2600 didn't have a built-in
    modem (you had to buy extra hardware), so the DC
    has at least *that* advantage. I still don't see
    this being a profitable venture for Sega. With
    the gameline, at least you were getting "modern"
    atari games... games that would otherwise cost you
    $40-50 for the cart. Mastersystem/Genesis games
    are not modern, and are practically free nowadays.

    Oh well.
  • I think it's more likely that Bleem are doing a DC emulator of their own, a la Bleem PSX.

    I doubt this. It takes a minimum p2 233 w/ mmx to run Bleem PSX. This is to emulate a console that runs on a 33 mhz processor with what, 4 mb of ram? The DC has a 200 mhz processor as well as a 3d chip, and it has much more ram than the psx. Even if team Bleem had managed to make an emu for the DC this quickly (and remeber, the DC is a more complicated system in many ways... modem, vmus etc...) there is only an install base of 2 million or so users compared to the PSX's 70 million+. Why bother making a new product to emulate the DC? Especially if only the highest end PCs could run it? It make more sense they would simply port their existing product over. Especially since this would probably severely piss off their nemesis, Sony. Backwards-compatibilty is a big deal for Sony, and it would hurt them a little, just in terms of PR, if the DC was the first console to be backwards compatible with the PSX.

    Personally, I think it would be cool if Bleem came out for the DC. I don't think it'll hurt ps2 sales much, though...

    Josh Sisk
  • I can just hear the Warez groups wetting their lips for this little baby. It'd better have amazing security features in it.

    Why? This is for the DC, not your PC. What will the warez groups be able to do to/with it? If you mean somehow extracting the roms for use on the PC, aren't there already dozens of sites with all the roms you could ever want?

    Josh Sisk
  • I am drooling over the vaporous pictures of a Dreamcast Ethernet adapter. You do know what this means, right? Once you get your console on a LAN, you just sniff the packets and reverse engineer the protocol. Shouldn't be too terribly difficult if a few people worked together. Then you save your own copies of the games, and server them to your console from your PC.
  • Those were *AWESOME*! I could basically save my game ANYWHERE.... Very nice for shooters like Menace (Psygnosis)... (which were virtually impossible w/o it ;)

    Also built into that cart was a live memory hex editor, disk hex editor, sprite catcher/saver, sid catcher (you could scan the c64's memory for sound files of various types, and save the associated area of memory to floppy) as well as a few other options... I remember spending like 80$ for that thing, best $$ ever spent on the c64 :)

    I guess my favorite use for it tho was to get around the copy protection for games like Druid, Mission Impossible, Raid on Bungling Bay (very cool one) and Airwolf.... all of which had really nasty floppy based copy protections, AND completely loading the base code in ram... (they had associated data disks with the other levels on them, w/o the crazy copy protection....)

    man i miss those days
  • Seems to me that Sega are desperately trying to catch up with all the cool features of PS2.

    Not really. If they were, they'd be making the DC backwards compatible with the Saturn. I think this is more like they're trying to milk the Japanese market, which is very different from our own. The Japanese consumer will pay those prices to play the games... If this makes it to the USA, expect it to be a feature of the Sega.com internet provider... Either free with subscription or an extra charge monthly to access all games. If they try to bring this system over without price drops or a major change, it will fail.

    I don't think they ever will. If Sega can put Bleem onto Dreamcast, Sony can certainly put some Master System emulator onto PS2!

    There is no way they could make the PS2 a Master System emulator. I think it'd be really hard to fit the cartidges in the cd-tray. They could emulate the Master System, sure, but Sega owns the game library. And thats what this is about. They have a huge library of games, doing nothing for them, so they are trying to put it to use, make a little spare change and add one more attractive feature to their online aspect and their console as a whole.

    Josh Sisk
  • Sega doesn't have to support it. Nintendo is still saying that emulators are illegal. Of course, when the courts have already ruled it legal, it would be a good idea for Sega to try to make money from it, rather than fighting it.


    And they would fight it why? Anything that harms Sony helps Sega, and an emulator which removes the only remaining reason to buy a Playstation (great library of old games) helps Sega enormously. One of the PSX2's big selling points will be that it can play PSX games. If the Dreamcast can do the same it will be a major coup for Sega.

  • Back in my youth you could get a service called "Play Cable" from Cablevision (at least on Long Island). You got an Intellivision with a cartridge that plugged into your cable TV line, and had a menu of maybe 10 games you could choose to play. As far as I recall they were full versions of the games (of course, back then a full game was probably 8k).

    Don't remember what it cost, and it wasn't around for too long, but I still think it was a great idea.

  • so what i don't get is why the hell sega would want a psx emulator on their platform. if people buy a dc and bleem, they can buy psx games and play them on their dc. the money for the psx games lines sony's pockets, not sega's. sega winds up losing money on the dc, and never recouping it on the software sales because people are buying psx games.

    How many people, once they own a next gen system, will buy last gen's games? very few.

    If it is true, thsi is a ploy to try and get some of the PSX owners to move up to Sega instead of PS2. One of the big selling points of PS2 is that you can still play your old games. If You can play the old games on the DC as well, for half the price, the PS2 suddenly looks less appealing. This, of course, only applies to mass market consumers, not hardcore gamers.

    Once those mass market gamers get a DC, they will buy DC games, because those games are new, and are prettier than the PSX games they already have. It's all about gaining market share.

    Josh Sisk
  • Well they could just burn it to CD or whatever Sega is using now (I think it's CD). Certainly you can burn a CD for under $10. Using an entire CD for a single Genesis game might be a bit overboard, but oh well :).
  • Wow! I had one of those too. It was awesome! There was another cartridge "snapshot" type product also called the "final cartridge" (I think) I never had it, but it was supposedly better. I had a copy of Elite (Best game I ever played to this day) that was copied from that and it was phenominal; it only took 30 seconds to load the game on my old 1541 disk drive. It also made load times WAY faster. It was great!

    Sigh....I kinda miss those days too. Games were lame as heck most of the time, but there were also a bunch of very original games. Even the crappy ones were at least usually original in concept.

    Anyway, I just recenty got a copy of Elite 2 for the PC from a guy in England....YAY!! It is sooooooooo fun. It's ancient, as far as PC games go...but it is easily my fave at the moment. ^_^ It brings back such fond memories too....I just wish it didn't have that lame MIDI music....lol

    OK...I feel like I'm wandering off-topic...but it was fun to remember those days. :)

    <> Kat ^_^
    • The Gameboy didn't have a Z80, it had a 6502. Not even a custom 6502, I am pretty sure.
    Are you sure? I was under the impression that the GB has a customized Z80.

    • In theory, if you could deal with the mismatch in graphics res and color depth, clock speeds, memory reqs, etc., etc., you could design a perfectly functional Gameboy emulator for a 64 out of the box. I even started on such a beast...but didn't get very far.
    It would be either impossible or horrible-looking, because the only way to emulate the GB's graphics mode properly is to overlay sprites (to get 4 colors) and that only works for 48 pixels wide. One could use multicolor mode but then the pixels are twice as wide...

    • Side note: Commodore 128's have Z80s already on the board, if you needed one. I can believe there was a Z80 cart for the 64, but I don't remember ever reading about one.
    Yes, there was. It was a CP/M cartridge, I'm sure you could find information on it somewhere.
    _______
    Scott Jones
    Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
    Commodore 64 Democoder
  • If they figure out a way to emulate PS2, count me in! :P

    "There must be something on this thing for that thing!" -Homer J. Simpson

  • Well, that's where you'll be downloading and playing these things. The service is only for the Dreamcast, from what I read.

    The PC thing is from the old NEC PC Engine console. Sega apparently acquired the rights to the games for it.

    They're cool about emulation, as long as it's on their systems and you pay a bit much for it.
  • How can the dreamcast run Bleem? It has one CD drive, so wouldn't the game disc need to be in there? The Dreamcast doesn't have a hard drive, right? so where is Bleem going to live? In ram, and you have to download it every time you want to use it? Blah. Anybody know the real deal?

    __________________________________________________ ___

  • pay per download?

    remind anyone of divx?

    I don't think this'll last long...
  • This just means that Sega is going to step up its anti-piracy campaign. (get paid [8m.com]) Nintendo of America Inc., for instance, doesn't even want players having ROM images of cartridges they own and even discredits freebeerware [zophar.net] ROM development [parodius.com] by claiming [nintendo.com] "emulators only support piracy."
  • But there should be a "purchase" option or a "rent to own" option that after 20 rentals ($30) licenses the game to a user permanently.
    Good idea, but I think $30 is a bit steep for a Genesis game nowadays. Maybe something in the $5 to $10 range would be more appropriate, considering that 1) Genesis games wouldn't go for that much in stores anyway, and 2) you wouldn't be paying for packaging, manuals, etc.; you'd just be paying the license fees.


    =================================
  • This is a definite good thing - it shows that there actually /is/ a company that gets it :) After the whole Sony/Connectix deal a while back, it's good to see that someone does. Regardless of the pricing scheme of it, it's a good thing that they're embracing it at all.
    Somebody needs to get the contact information for Sega, and send it to the RIAA. :) Perhaps some clue could be transferred that way.
  • I'd like to see other emulators ported to Dreamcast. Since Dreamcast can run Windows CE, any Win32-based emulator that doesn't use CPU-specific techniques such as dynamic recompilation would be relatively easy to port.

    And while we're on the topic, why can't Sega release a public SDK for the Dreamcast so public domain stuff can be ported? There's a pretty decent effort going to port the Linux kernel to SH [embedded.cl]. It'd be really cool to see it on Dreamcast. No need to release the GD-ROM info to prevent pirates...all I want is to hook a hard drive/ethernet to it so I can roll my own Dreamcast software.

  • ... like the attention span of the generation after you sucks. And after all, these are the ones that Sega are going to be targeting.

    (I'm not saying your attention span doesn't suck, btw. It probably just doesn't suck as much as Generation X2.0, though...)

    Sega will probably make, on average, about $10 per game, per user on this system, and it won't be coming from rational, attention-span-of-an-old-gnat types like you or I ...

  • Firstly, how many of the old games do Sega per se have the rights to? Have they bought licenses from all their 3rd-party developers, are they going to just offer Sega-brand titles, or is someone getting ripped off here (besides the consumer - $1.50 a day is a lot of money for old rope).

    Secondly, this seems not much different to what Sony is doing with PSX2 - except Sony don't expect the owners of original PSX games to pay the extra to play them on their new console. Would I get a rebate for owning an original cartridge of Space Harrier for the Master System, or would I still have to pay?

    Seems to me that Sega are desperately trying to catch up with all the cool features of PS2. I don't think they ever will. If Sega can put Bleem onto Dreamcast, Sony can certainly put some Master System emulator onto PS2!

  • Steve Snake got paid for his work. Given that he actually works for a Sega licensed developer (Probe, now part of Acclaim) and Sega could have raised a legal stink about it, the fact that they instead paid him for a custom version *and* let him continue distribution of the free KGen98 is very cool.

    Contrast this with Sony and Nintendo's shrill claims that emulation itself is illegal. Sega does act to shut down ROM sites, but regardless of how you try and weasel around it those sites are 100% illegal (moreso actually if you apply the MP3.com ruling - now the "it's legal to download if you own the cart" argument is gone).

    Of course, I'm damn biased - I write console games for a living, and my continued ability to buy cool geek gear depends on piracy being shut down :)

  • Oh, you want to play "been there, done that" do you?

    Try this [colostate.edu] one for size:

    Gameline was a service offered by Control Video Corporation that admitted the downloading of games to the the 2600 over regular phone lines. The Gameline used a variable 800-2000 baud modem, according to Kevin Horton's Gameline Page. The Gameline Master Module originally sold for $49.95 and there was a one-time membership fee of $15. Charges were about $.10 a game or $1 for up to an hour of play. Contest games were $1 and there was a $.50 charge to enter a score. On your birthday, not only were you given free play for a day, but you also received a Happy Birthday screen, complete with cake, candles and music. Atari 2600 trumps... well... anything else you can throw at it. It's the oldest, man!

  • That is definately quite a bit for one day, especially when (at least around here) you can rent then at the video store for about that much and keep them for up to a week.
    Of course, this is japan, which has a much higher standard of living. Is this 1.50 a simple conversion from yen to dollars, or are they taking this into account?
    BTW, I do have over a half-dozen consoles near my tv, from the know stuff like NES and a pair of SNES's to the obscure stuff like turbo-grafix and 3do, and it's quite a pain keeping it organized :-) The notslgia is definately great, but a day is about all I could tolerate of about 95% of those games...
    Of course, given the extreme numbers of them, there are some really exceptional games for "obsolete" systems, which except for the graphics are better than games today!

  • a modest proposal (Score:4)

    by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Thursday May 04, 2000 @02:05PM (#1090964) Homepage
    so where is this going to go eventually..?

    ROMs are small. Emul [emulation.net]ators aren't large. CDs are huge. you could probably fit every worthwhile N.E.S. game ever made into fifty megabytes. You could probably fit most of the worthwhile SNES and Genesis games into the 600 megs or so you'd have left.

    I don't know how public the Dreamcast development process is, if you have to buy some expensive liscence or just grab a compiler or what, but if some *cough* third party could put together a couple emulators for the dreamcast.. just port the emus already out there, maybe throw in some debuggerish or game genie cheat modes..
    well..
    that would be one kickass CD-R, is all i have to say.

    Too bad that the closed-minded game developers will never, ever allow such a cd to be published legitimately at any price, despite the fact they haven't made new copies of these games for years are no longer getting any money off them. Their loss.
    Such a shame that copyright law is going to continue being extended until those games never reach the public domain..

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