Things to do with a old DreamCast
 

I heard you can do alot of Crazy Crap with your old dreamcast, including installing linux and playing VCD's. Anyone do anything cool?

Well since there was no built in protection from just playing "Imported" (hehe) games on it you could do that I guess!! No mod chip required - But that would be wrong!!!:D

I laugh at those who wasted money on Sega's attempt of a system. Shame Shame.

I have heard of people using it to install OSX on it and using the keyboard to use it as a Mac.

Wow, me being a "MAC GEEK" I am going to have to try that, although, the dreamcast ONLY has a 200mhz chip. Although OS X CAN run on 200mhz G3, thats a G3 not a "Intel-like" chip...... Will have to look further into this............

i'm going to have to GREATLY disagree with you, seeing as how the Dreamcast is still a superior system when compared to Xbox or to that sorry excuse for a system, PS2. Sega is by far the best developer, just look at all the arcade boards, you'll find the sega name on them. the problem was that sony had to become involved, and as you have see with microsoft comming in, sony did the same and bought up developers and wasted tons on money on advertising, to bring about the end of the sega line of consols, and almost get rid of nintendo too, from the spot they deserve with the console market. sony really needs to stop with thier horrible excuse for game systems, and go back to home audio electronics and tv's. but now if you look around at all the best looking games on any console, you'll find the sega name there. they are just working now, very closely with nintendo, and will soon topple sony together, then sega will release there new system, already being worked on

the dreamcast was also a very versitile system, as far as add ons go, you could put just about anything in that spot where the modem goes, and various addons such as a dvd decoder and the bleem for dreamcast were made for it, so i'd assume you could just throw anything in there, and it wouldn't even have to run off the power that slot pulls from the dc, just needs its own external power. and who could forget the fact that the dc came with its own version of ms windows ce

Just so you know, I got this Dreamcast for $50 and it came with 3 games.... the whole thing was new too!

People have turned the dreamcast into their own webserver.


Basically: You can load Linux onto the dreamcast. Once you do that, you can do a whole host of things with it.

does anyone know of any tutorials or other things which tell you how to load linux onto it? Turning this somewhat useless now piece of equipment into a nice little webserver would be so awesome.

A simple Google search yields:

http://www.fivemouse.com/dclinux.html
http://www.m17n.org/linux-sh/dreamcast/


It was on Slashdot a long, long while back. This is, providing that you have any expierience with Linux.


***EDIT***

The webserver was NetBSD.

http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/dreamcast/


Of course, you'll need the Sega Dreamcast broadband adapter. It would've been cheap had you bought it with the dreamcast, but finding one now is hard. You can look, I'm not sure how cheap they will be though.

My friend has a dreamcast it is so awesome, all he has is Xmen vs Capcom and Daytona USA two awesome games that by themselves make up for the system. The Wait on the dream cast for loading is comparable to the waits that came with the Playstation.

HAHA! Nice pun. That's the most leet thing to do. DO IT! Yes I know.

any technical info on this would help me
college + time + dreamcast = fun

i've seen mod chips and stuff but i don't wann spend money

There's a great website with a whole lot of information on it...

www.google.com

Go DreamCast!
 

I agree with Nataku. I love my DreamCast...its really the only thing I use anymore (aside from my computer). I refuse to touch the PS2...XBOX is ok, and so is the GameCube...but the problem with those is that in my book, I'm not going to buy a new system for only 3-5 games. The DreamCast was (and still is IMHO) the best system availble - not in terms of graphics (though you have to love high res everything...and the colors just seem so much brighter compared to everything else), but in terms of quality. There were so many great games for it (and some really bad ones too...hehe) and you didn't have to do anything to play imports (SNKvsCAPCOM is so awesome...just wish I knew what they were saying). I didn't even mind the VMU and its tomagotchi type Sonic add-ons.

Kev


BTW, this is being said by a loyal Nintendo fan from day 1 - someone who dispised everything SEGA did...until he played Crazy Taxi!

You actually don't need a mod chip for sega dreamcast to play imported or copied games. Take a game you have and copy it onto a cd and then play it and you'll see what I mean. As for the good ol' PS1 you do need a mod chip, Trust me!!

I didn't say SEGA was bad, I just don't like Dreamcast. Many of them are just poorly made, parts will break in them within a year of purchase. SEGA makes great games, just not great systems, but I like the idea of them making games for other consoles. That sonic game for gamecube isn't very good though, they try to jam it up with all this "cool" music and stuff, I don't like it.
I'm now a huge resident evil fan, the remake for GC is just awesome, and Resident Evil O is gonna be the coolest thing ever (that is, until RE 4 comes out).

Unless I am a total retard, you can't copy Dreamcast games with a regular cd drive. Somehow, you need to mad hack a special cable to dump the contents of the GD-ROM into a burnable ISO, and do it all via serial, which is slow as hell, for what you're sending through it, I believe, but that's only if you want to rip games yourself. I think the DC Gamez scene has died down a lot over the past few months, but you can get self-booting ISOs of games (as opposed to the mad old-school gamez that you had to use the Utopia BootCD to start up [I think I still have a few copies of it around, in some odd corners of the house :p ]) which you can burn to a standard cd-r (some cd-rws work, I believe, but I'm not going to say they definetly will/would), and play.

As for non-piracy related things for the Dreamcast, a while back, there was a lot of buzz about DC user-development.

I believe the GypPlayer was the original VCD/MPEG1 player that was written for the Dreamcast. You burn the given files onto a cd, along with whatever mpeg1 movies you want to watch, and voila, you have yourself a VCD player from your DC. Originally, I burned the promotional video from Bungie about the GeForce 2 GTS and showed my family what I could do with the DC, back when Halo wasn't Xbox only (I still hate Microsoft). It was officially hilarious, I'll see if I can find a link to it a bit later.

As for websites: www.boob.co.uk has a lot of stuff, including the GypPlayer, DCDivx (beta), DCLinux, MP3 players, Ogg Vorbis players, and JPEG slideshow programs. A vast majority of these programs have been released under the GPL, so you can really do anything you want with the system. The website also has emulators for the SNES (yes, turn your DC into an SNES!), homemade games, homemade demos, development tools and documents, and even a forum, if you want some more information. Keep in mind that this is all just one website, and there're probably a lot more at your disposal, if you look for them... As I mentioned to Ogre, google is your friend...

Have fun.