Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lostgame | Hacker News Reader

The Dreamcast is by far and large one of my all-time favourite consoles.

SEGA’s level of innovation here was extreme.

From great developer support, online play (even if the Broadband Adapter for Ethernet was extremely rare); the VMU, and an extremely impressive library of quality titles (Skies of Arcadia, Crazy Taxi, Soul Calibur 2, etc) - it was literally a situation that seemed geared to greatness.

If it had a DVD player, I think it literally could’ve saved SEGA, after the awful litany of repeated terrible decisions they made in the mid-90’s. (Here’s looking at you, 32X...)

I was just at A&C games here in Toronto, lamenting to an employee of the demise of SEGA’s consoles - but the Dreamcast, in particular, deserved better than it got.

The Saturn will always have a special place in my heart, though, as an extremely early example of multi-processor architecture (the Saturn technically has 7 processors, each for a different task - 2 GPU’s, CD I/O, sound, etc.)

Sega was already bleeding money so bad by the time the Dreamcast launched I am not sure they could have done anything to recover at that time. The fact that they missed their first sales target in the US (they wanted to sell a million units by a specific timeline but were 40% off) marked the end of the party.

About dev support dont forget that EA pulled out of supporting Sega since they did not want their sports games to compete with Sega's own line of sports games. That may have be a big deal not to have games like John Madden in the US.

There is a hack that you can do (soldering on an IDE cable) that allows you to connect a DVD drive and boot games and access files from DVDs. The Dreamcast modding community is still very active to this day. A lot is known about the internals which I find fascinating.

Say what? The Dreamcast used a GD-ROM which was 1 gig, hence it's name. The was an alleged specific model CD-Rom drive with modified firmware that could have read the GD-Roms directly from a PC. Rippers used a DC with the Ethernet adapter to rip games however.

Now you can also mod the Dreamcast to use an IDE hard drive with Dreamshell and modified bios since the Dreamcast used and IDE bus for the GD-Rom.

There are 2 drive emulators for the Dreamcast where you replace the GD-ROM with a device that allows for either SD card storage or USB.

I have not seen this DVD rom hack you are talking about though

The DVD ROM hack works exactly as the Hard Drive Hack does. Just swap out the IDE HDD for an IDE DVD ROM Drive.

The Dreamcast was an amazing console. The fact it had Capcom VS SNK 2 faithfully running, Ikaruga and Power Stone immediately makes it one of my all-time favourite consoles. I'm praying SEGA releases a "Dreamcast Mini" one day.

A&C Games is an absolute gem of a retro store, and if anyone reading ever makes it to Toronto and has an affinity for old videogames, make it a point to stop in to the shop.

Because the Dreamcast was _basically_ a consolized/stripped/cheaper Naomi.

> and an extremely impressive library of quality titles

Rez. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rez

> If it had a DVD player, I think it literally could’ve saved SEGA

It was released just as the PS2 was announced, back in an era when people only bought one game system. I think it was the timing more than anything else that killed it.

> It was released just as the PS2 was announced

I think that's the point. A lot of people bought a PS2 because it was also a DVD player (same with the PS3 and Blu-ray).

At least among myself and friends, we didn't care about that - we had to decide which system we wanted because our parents would only get one, and went for the bigger name/more familiar games.

(To my and my brothers' initial disappointment, my parents didn't understand why we wanted a PS2 and got us a Dreamcast instead, then refused to get a second game system. One of my brothers still has and plays that Dreamcast.)

But the PS4 never got a UHD Blu-ray player, some think it was an obvious candidate for the 4K pro model. Or perhaps we've gone the other way again and discs are dead, streaming is king.

You have to keep in mind that when the PS2 was released, the DVD was also just released. I remember a stand alone DVD player by itself was ~$200 during the PS2 launch. So part of the argument of it being $299 is that it was a bargain to get it and then not have to buy a DVD player on top of it.

The Xbox required the IR remote controller to play a DVD (So you had to pay $300 plus that price), and the Gamecube could not play a DVD at all (but it was $150 at release).

I love the window displays they have at A&C. I picked up Patapon 2 there a while back.

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