Great article by Wired why the dreamcast won’t die 🙂
Author Archives: dcroms
The Dreamcast could be immortal
Nice article by Polygon about new games still releasing for the Dreamcast.
Worth a read:
http://www.polygon.com/2016/9/9/12863124/dreamcast-new-games-homebrew-vmu
GDEMU
I finally got my GDEMU, i was on the waiting list for 6 months now.
Installation is pretty easy, you just remove the gdrom drive and plug in the gdemu.
Insert a sdcard with games and it will play them immediately.
I will write a more detailed review later.
Toy_Commander_USA_DC-KALISTO
This game is with CDDA but not selfbootable.
Once you make it selfbootable the image will be too big to fit on a 80min CDR.
Luckily DCRES released a version with some duplicate movies removed, which will fit fine.
Revolt_USA_DC-KALISTO
Great game and good release with CDDA (music) tracks included.
Unfortunately you will need to dummy it and make it selfbootable.
I used autodummy to create a dummy file.
Then used bin2boot cdda to create a .cdi file.
There is also a Re-Volt [DCRes] version, also works perfect i suggest getting that one.
It’s ready to burn as a .cdi file with optimized loading times.
Best Dreamcast games according to Metacritic
- SoulCalibur 9,8
- Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 9,7
- NFL 2K1 9,7
- Jet Grind Radio 9,4
- Quake III Arena 9,3
- Test Drive Le Mans 9,3
- NBA 2K1 9,3
- NBA 2K2 9,3
- Marvel vs. Capcom 2 9,0
- Tennis 2K2 9,0
Full list is here: http://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/release-date/available/dreamcast/metascore
Selfbooting games
In the early days of the Dreamcast scene every game was released in bin/cue format.
You had to use Nero or CDRWIN to burn it. Then you needed the Utopia Bootdisc to launch it.
After a while the selfboot releases came out, this was a .cdi file and you needed Discjuggler to burn it (now use ImgBurn).
So you have one of these old releases (most probably by Kalisto) and you want to convert it into a .cdi file? The solution is to find a program called Bin2Boot CDDA, this will ask for the .cue file, and then automatically build a .cdi file for you that is selfbootable.
Bin2boot will only work on 32-bit systems, i’m still looking for a solution for 64-bit systems.
VGA patching
When you use a VGA box with your Dreamcast to get the best possible picture, be sure to patch in support for it in your games.
The best way to do this is get a free hex editor.
Install it and open your .cdi image file.
Search for “JUE” and next to it you see some numbers.
These are winCE settings, peripherals/controllers support but also vga support.
So if you got a game that got that string: 0799A00
Change the BOLD byte to 1: 0799A00 -> 0799A10
And vga is working, don’t change anything else!
Burning Dreamcast games
Alot of guides you find are old. The Dreamcast is an old console of course.
However you can still burn games today using new programs.
The tool to use is ImgBurn it has an addon so it can burn .cdi files.
This is the format that selfboot dreamcast games were released in.
Always burn at 8X speed max.
Don’t forget to check if there are any RGB or VGA patches needed for your game.
Sometimes game creators block the use of certain type of cables.
Bleemcast!
The PC emulator Bleem! was very popular at the time, you could play PSX games like Driver on your PC even with better graphics than on the official PSX console. The creators soon realized they could write a PSX emulator for the Dreamcast. Some people called them crazy because there wasn’t even a fullspeed Snes emulator at that time. but they told it would be programmed directly on the hardware without using any existing library.
First they tried to create bleempacks that supported 100 games at a time. But the testing was very time consuming, so they abandoned that idea.
They decided to create a release that only supported 1 title. Of course they choose the best games at that time: Gran Turismo 2, Tekken 3 and Metal Gear Solid. At the time i bought the Tekken 3 version and it worked perfect and looked great.
Eventually a beta version of bleemcast was leaked, it would boot alot of games but ran pretty horrible because it was an early beta (30% complete). After testing by the community they found out it supported around 100 games, just like they promised before. But very buggy without saving and choppy movies.
The protection for the offical releases was very good. It took along time to crack it but a russian hacker did it. Later on he also disabled the disc check, so you could boot any psx game even with the offical release. But compatiblity was very poor, most likely because of specific hacks for that 1 game.
If you want to check out bleemcast i would recommend the 3 official releases, they work perfect and even now the graphics are still amazing.