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(Dreamcast users with a vibration unit should feel some complimentary vibrating while accessing this page! BONUS! Look out for stuff scrolling along on your VMS also.)

Welcome to the Dreamcast page! Here you’ll find lots of reviews on games I have, from the classics like Sonic Adventure, to the newer releases like Puyo Puyo Fever and Radirgy. Despite the end of Dreamcast manufacture back in 2001, it’s amazing how we still got Radirgy and Under Defeat in 2006 and Karous plus Trigger Heart Exelica for 2007. Now in 2012 though, things have slowed up of course. There still seems to be the odd home made game now & then. Although that seems to be about it. But anyway, make sure you pop back from time to time, ’cos who knows, perhaps there’ll be something here that wasn’t before. Be sure to check out the Daytona USA 2001 page to read the notes on how to change the music to that of the arcade version. (Although you’ll need a way to “back-up” your own copy.)
Plus if you have an Aussie Dreamcast related site, I’d like to hear from you too. :-)

Send in what your fave Dreamcast game is, and I’ll compile some kinda list deal, or something.

• Jeffrey Taylor’s fave Dreamcast games are Skies Of Arcadia followed by Rez.

Does anyone have any information on how to modify an optical mouse to work with the Dreamcast?

Please select a game to read about:

(More Cool Dreamcast Reviews Coming Eventually! [When I could be bothered.] The House Of The Dead 2, Confidential Mission…)

Check out my little Dreamcast Guide thingy.

My 10th Year Of The Dreamcast In Australia Wallpaper. (bexfop )


Please note that I only use original screen shots that I’ve taken myself. If you see anything on another site that’s the same, that means someone else has nabbed it from here! Hey these images don’t capture themselves you know.

Other Cool Dreamcast Games: It’s certainly not easy, or cheap to collect every cool game there is, so here’s some other Dreamcast games that I recommend you look into, if you happen to find them: • Headhunter • Virtua Tennis 2 • Jet Set Radio

The Dreamcast Main Menu.	The music / audio playing section.
The Main Menu with the Puyo Puyo Fever extra background file present on a VMS.	Like the previous image, this shows the music playing area with the new background and reflection, which you get if you press Start.

What’s the deal?
“We all play games, it’s one of the most natural things in life. It’s how we learn to think on our feet and take our chances. It’s how we get to know our friends and understand our opponents. This is Dreamcast - It’s time to compete together.” — from the box.
The Dreamcast is Sega’s next console following the Saturn. With the Nintendo 64 & the Atari Jaguar (didn’t it?) already having a “64 bit” CPU, Sega decided they’d double that for the Dreamcast. With the Model 3 hardware running truckloads of new arcade games, from Virtua Fighter 3 and Sega Bass Fishing to Sega Rally 2 and Fighting Vipers 2, the Dreamcast was the new hardware capable of running these games perfectly, or better. Initially there was some concern about how powerful the hardware was, and if it could actually run Model 3 board games, but Sega’s staff reassured everyone that it was indeed more grunty. Infact it was one of the pre-requisites of Sega that the Dreamcast be more powerful than their Model 3 board. However, despite the initial assumption that the console would be playing a big fat wad of these games, there were only around 5 Model 3 board games that were ever converted. Although Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram was on the Model 3 board, it was also on the NAOMI board. As the NAOMI version is a slightly higher revision, (5.66 as opposed to 5.45,) it may have still been the Model 3 version that came to the Dreamcast.
Sega’s NAOMI board, which is of similar specifications, had more RAM to handle such things as audio, which initially wasn’t streamed from GDs in the arcade, but from cartridges. Later a GD-ROM drive was added also.
The Dreamcast is also Sega’s 3rd console to have “online” abilities. The 1st being X-Band for the Mega Drive, and 2ndly the Netlink modem for the Saturn. Although it’s the 1st console to include an inbuilt modem.

Specs & Stuff:
The Dreamcast is one pretty potent console. It runs on a Hitachi SH-4, running at 200 MHz and can clear 360 000 000 instructions per second, and do 1.4 GigaFLOPS, (1 400 000 000 floating-point operations per second,) making it 3 times faster than a Pentium II 450 MHz CPU. It also uses the 2nd generation Power VR accelerator to pump out all those lovely effects and 3 500 000 fully shaded polygons per second. The Dreamcast has a theoretical speed of 5 000 000 - 10 000 000 polygons per second, but it has never been officially stated, and can not perform such a speed in most game environments. It has a triangular quad engine, maximum texture resolution of 1 024 × 1 024 texels and can do per-pixel fog, bump-mapping, MIP mapping (point, bilinear, tri-linear, anisotropic), texture mapping, real time lighting, alpha blending, super sampling anti-aliasing, FSAA (full scene anti-aliasing), ARGB gouraud shading, environment mapping and specular effects.
The lovely sound is brought to you by a Yamaha “Super Intelligent Sound Processor,” (?) which is a 32-bit RISC CPU with 64 ADPCM channels.
It has 16 MB of system RAM, 8 MB of video RAM and 2 MB for audio. (26 MB all up.)

The operating system is a customised version of Windows CE and is optional for programmers. The OS is located on the Dreamcast GDs to cater for upgrades. Finally, the disc drive is a custom manufactured Yamaha 12 × speed “GD-ROM.” The discs can hold somewhere around 1 GB.
Back up memory comes in the form of the Visual Memory System. Basically a small 8-bit memory cartridge with whopping big knobs on, so to speak. This thing, which weighs only about 45 or so grams contains two 3V button type batteries, (CR2032 - the same as the Saturn’s backup battery) which last about 5 seconds, a small 48 × 32 pixel LCD, 4 buttons and a mini d-pad. All in all it holds about 128 KB in 200 blocks, and has the ability to play mini games transferred from the game you’re playing, or from the Internet. You can view the contents of the VMS without having to plug it into the Dreamcast, (hence the name,) and it also has a clock & calendar with little animating animals. Oh, how cute - but completely useless. The VMS also has a handy groove type thing in the bottom, where you can attach a piece of string or a chain, so that you can hang it round your neck. Plus it doubles as an aid to remove it from the control pad. Not only does it do all of that, but it provides useful and sometimes useless information on the LCD while you’re playing a game. Soul Calibur for instance has mini pictures of the fighters doing various actions as you play. In Skies Of Arcadia it beeps and provides info for finding chams.
You can also plug 2 VMSs together to transfer save files from one to the other. (I’m not sure if there were many or any 2 player games that could be done this way.) The Dreamcast can also be linked with the Neo Geo Pocket, for those of you who didn’t already know, and during the last stages of Dreamcast production, Sega & Pace Micro Technology developed a “set top box,” which had an internal hard drive, instead of the GD-ROM drive, and allowed downloading of files through a digital cable connetion.
As well as coming with a 33.6 kb per second modem, Sega also released a broad band adaptor for the console, and if you had money to burn for a broad band connection, then this was the way to go for some ultra fast gaming and web browsing, although it’s a rather rare item to get your hands on.
A lot of the Dreamcast games also feature a 60Hz option also, which gives you a faster frame rate if you have a newish type of T.V. which supports it. The PAL 60Hz mode isn’t supported by all T.V.s so, you to need to check yourself whether or not the display flickers. Despite that, the Dreamcast still only renders the image at 640 × 480 pixels, so the only advantage you get with PAL 60Hz over 50Hz, is obviously the refresh rate, even though the image maybe stretched vertically somewhat. The difference is sometimes noticeable, like in Sonic Adventure, and other times not at all, like in Daytona USA 2001. (Someone said it apparently could do 800 × 600 pixels through the VGA box thing also.)

(All the screenshots in these pages are used for review purposes only, so don’t go nicking them!)

Please send me e-mail if you think I have any of these facts wrong. I went to a great deal of trouble to ensure that they’re correct though!

My Comments:
The Dreamcast is one of the most awesome consoles I’ve ever seen. Right from the first pics and news about it, I was hooked. I couldn’t wait for it’s release, and when it finally came out, I went straight to the midnight launch at Electronics Boutique in Penrith Plaza.
What I like most about it, graphically, is that it can so easily play so many of the arcade games without any sacrifice. Daytona USA 2001? Oh, yeah! (Drool.) Virtua Fighter 3 tb? Now you’re talking. Plus Fighting Vipers 2, Crazy Taxi, Marvel vs Capcom, Ferrari F355 Challenge & Street Fighter Alpha 3, all perfect arcade conversions. These a worth thousands of dollars each, and yet I can get to play them at home for less than $90! Woo, hoo!

Once again, $ony figured they could make some dosh, and they popped out the PlayStation 2, which didn’t take long to win most of the general public over. Despite that its supposed to produce something like 66 000 000 polygons per second, plenty of “statisticians” and “tech-heads” (— hey & I’m not knocking them —) soon found out that it couldn’t do anywhere near ½ of what Sony claimed, due to limitations in the design. As it turns out, it’s quite hard to program, plus it didn’t have any of the edge anti-aliasing or texture compression like the Dreamcast does, resulting in games that looked initially like they were from the previous 32 & 64 bit generation. This unimaginatively named, over-hyped, paperweight, looked like a weird kind of amplifier, and for some odd reason - possibly Sony’s advertising, it’s still hanging in there, despite it’s crusty games, the all powerful next generation XBOX & GameCube consoles, and now the XBOX 360, Wii and PS3. Infact, and I was surprised, quite a few of the PS 2 specs actually come out in an inferior way to the Dreamcast. If you want all the information on this, check out the specs page where I’ve collated some information together. It really is quite interesting.

Are you a bit of a statistician? Check out the specs on the Dreamcast & the PS 2 here:

Also, you may want to check the specifications of the “new generation” XBOX & GameCube consoles: