For at least a year, the Dreamcast ruled.
Then this day happened:
Yo! That is the coolest anchor I've ever seen on tv how the hell he got on to report. That's so different than anyone I've seen. Lol.
For at least a year, the Dreamcast ruled.
Then this day happened:
It wouldn't be Sega if it didn't have some baked-in flaw despite the forward-looking technology.SEGA went down swinging with the Dreamcast. Honestly they should have put more effort into getting a DVD player/reader in it. Lots of people were buying the PS2 just for the cheap DVD player at launch.
Yo! That is the coolest anchor I've ever seen on tv how the hell he got on to report. That's so different than anyone I've seen. Lol.
Lmao right. Damn we've come full circle lol.Love that one guy who hyped the PS2's backwards compatibility as one of the things he was so excited about.
No problem! Chris is great, I recommend watching all of his 'Launch' videos.Thanks for sharing this, it was great!
Man...thinking about the Dreamcast always gives me those sad "what could've been" feelings. I'll never forget playing that Sonic Adventure kiosk for the first time at the mall.
It wouldn't be Sega if it didn't have some baked-in flaw despite the forward-looking technology.
Yes, DC was sold at a loss from day one in US.They must've been selling in the red, to have not been able to weather storm with 2 mill-ish install base
I don't think it did, unless that was a regional thing.This, so much. The jump from PS1/N64 to Dreamcast in terms of image quality was incredible. The sharpness and high(er) resolution were a huge step up, same for the vivid colors.
Even with the early PS2 games, that's true. I think this was also very noticeable because the Dreamcast shipped by default with an RGB cable, as opposed to RCA for PS2.
Comparison videos on youtube (DOA2, Headhunter...) clearly show these gaps in image quality, it was pretty jarring.
Also worth noting, for PAL 50Hz users, the Dreamcast was the first console with 60Hz signal for most (if not all?) games, and it made a massive difference (and also something the first PS2 games did not have here).
It's crazy thinking about this now, but until 1999 all the console games we played had black bars and a relative slowness because of this limitation.
No thank you friend for supporting the Sega Dreamcast, the true next gen console.
It's definitely a regional thing, but I don't know if it was limited to France (where I bought my Dreamcast in 1999), or Europe, or PAL region.I don't think it did, unless that was a regional thing.
RGB SCART cables were very scarce near launch, as the majority of PAL TVs required one to use the 60Hz mode. Without it, the image would be displayed in black and white.
I don't think it did, unless that was a regional thing.
RGB SCART cables were very scarce near launch, as the majority of PAL TVs required one to use the 60Hz mode. Without it, the image would be displayed in black and white.
I remember being on a family trip -more of a business thing, so my sister and I were stuck in the hotel room a lot of the time- not too long after getting my Dreamcast, and being really happy that I was able to find an RGB cable in one of the stores there; because the "hotel mode" on the TV locked out input selection - so we weren't able to play it at all until I got one (RGB SCART overrides everything on older CRTs).
I could probably pinpoint exactly when that was by going through magazine archives, as I had just picked up the first Official Dreamcast Magazine which contained SEGA Swirl on the disc, and we spent hours playing it and the other demos.
But you're absolutely right that it was a giant leap forward. Compared to other systems at the time, the Dreamcast felt like it came from the future.
It had pristine image quality, most games targeted 60 FPS, and the hardware itself was tiny and sleek. On top of that, it was affordable!
It's the first time I was able to get a console anywhere close to launch; prior to that was a second-hand SNES with Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country that I got for Xmas in '95, and I only ever got games for that from the clearance bins.
The timing was great too, as I got my first job in 2001 and nearly everything I earned went toward games and hardware for it. Those were the best times, when SEGA was bringing the arcade experience home, and the games were affordable enough that I could buy something new every week or two. I never got bored with that system.
…and I deeply regret selling it; my library of, I think, almost 200 games; and accessories like the light guns, fishing rod, keyboard etc. to buy an Xbox.
Not that I didn't like the Xbox - it felt like a successor to the Dreamcast in many ways due to SEGA's support, and I had a great time in split-screen co-op/multiplayer and hosting LAN parties; but I wish I had kept it all.
I keep repeating myself on this thread and elsewhere: Piracy was not the cause why the Dreamcast failed in the market. If it had lasted a couple more years, every publisher/developer would have bailed by then because of piracy, yeah, but the Dreamcast went under in 2001, just when piracy for the system became mainstream. That was two (three, if you count Japan) whole years of no piracy causing any impact on the system's sales. It was a split between the ridiculous hype of the PS2 and Sega's previous bad decisions catching up to them.
And zero piracy protection? I know this is the Internet and people love to spout things that they have no clue about, but zero piracy protection is what systems from the early 90's like the Amiga CD32, the PC Engine CD, or even Sega's Mega CD system had. The Dreamcast had two big counters to piracy:
1) its proprietary CD format which was completely unreadable on any device that wasn't a devkit. Only by exploiting a late hardware device, the broad band adapter, could pirates find a way to rip games out of the system because nothing could read them
2) even then, they couldn't do anything with those ripped games, because the Dreamcast has an encrypted bootloader program that doesn't boot any non-official software... except some jackass working on the Sega Smash Pack (a compilation of emulated Genesis/MD games for the Dreamcast) released the bootloader information to a piracy group, thus giving out the keys to the kingdom
Even with all these pieces, early piracy on the Dreamcast was a mess of boot discs, data discs, and whatever releases being completely unavailable to the general public, until the system was in its death throes in 2001. Hell, if anything, the piracy should have helped sell more systems, yet when stores were basically giving them out at a mere $50, people weren't picking them. Nobody cared. The fucking Wii U, considered one of the greatest failures of Nintendo, sold 4 million more units than the Dreamcast.
It's definitely a regional thing, but I don't know if it was limited to France (where I bought my Dreamcast in 1999), or Europe, or PAL region.
I could have sworn the RGB SCART was included in by default, and this is the feedback I'm reading now in most forums from different owners (but it's no hard evidence. I should probably go get my old Dreamcast at my parents' and inspect the SCART myself haha).
Yo! That is the coolest anchor I've ever seen on tv how the hell he got on to report. That's so different than anyone I've seen. Lol.
That's so wild he so casual with it lol.That's Larry Pickett! He later had his own show on local television in NC and then went on to produce Hip Hop Nation.
IIRC, there were two hacking groups competing with each other. One got confidential information from a Sega contractor (that jackass from Smash Pack). The other had to do the work the "hard" way, reverse engineering a (probably stolen) devkit.Wasn't there also something about a dev kit being stolen in Germany? I could have sworn that's how the MiL-CD exploit was discovered.
Dreamcast is the best console in History IMO*
it's fact, not opinion.
IIRC, there were two hacking groups competing with each other. One got confidential information from a Sega contractor (that jackass from Smash Pack). The other had to do the work the "hard" way, reverse engineering a (probably stolen) devkit.
Honestly, wish they all had been arrested. In an ideal scenario where the PS2 hype wasn't such a big thing or Sega wasn't bleeding so much money, trying to keep the Dreamcast in stores and well advertised and funding crazy stuff like Shenmue, we would have had a couple more years of the system's super creative games -- only for that to be destroyed by pirates. I guess the system never stood a chance, whichever way you look at it. Too good for this world.
Can you list some examples, I know Resident Evil: CV and I think Blue Stinger (is that horror?), but that genre is kind of a mystery to me on Dreamcast. DC had such an incredible multiplayer catalog that I didn't really delve into the single-player stuff, minus the Sega stuff.Best thing about the Dreamcast was the Survival Horror library - tons of games, some of which are still exclusive.
Can you list some examples, I know Resident Evil: CV and I think Blue Stinger (is that horror?), but that genre is kind of a mystery to me on Dreamcast. DC had such an incredible multiplayer catalog that I didn't really delve into the single-player stuff, minus the Sega stuff.