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//by blu3flame November 20th 2003
On November 27th '98 Sega unveiled to the world the first 128-bit console, the Dreamcast. Sega, still suffering badly from the failure of the Saturn to its rival Playstation, had aimed to beat Sony in the race to push out the first next generation console. The Dreamcast came spluttering onto the scene a whole year before Sony's PS2, from where Sega stood this seemed like a huge advantage giving them the edge over Sony. Unfortunately many people were reluctant to fork out the money for the Dreamcast until they had seen what Sony had to offer, especially with the promised backwards compatibility of the forthcoming PS2. To some the Dreamcast wasn't the huge leap in technology everyone was waiting for, Sony had already begun to selectively release exaggerated statistics and figures making claims that their console would be this huge step everyone was anticipating.
Despite the backlash the Dreamcast soon picked up quite a following, armed with impressive range of launch titles such as Sonic Adventure, HOTD2 and Soul Calibur. Although the launch did have its problems the promised out of the box online play was delayed and even when it did show it didn't take off like expected. Europeans also met further disappointments as Sega had downgraded the modem to a slower 33.6k and many were worried about how this would effect play.
Unfortunately it did not take too long before the Dreamcast was exploited. A group of people under the name Utopia soon discovered a security hole in the Dreamcasts bootstrap, one which Sega foolishly overlooked allowing the machine to read standard CD-ROM data opposed to their proprietary GD-Rom format. On June 22nd '00 Utopia released a bootdisc which could be burnt using any standard CD writer, allowing you to bypass territorial lockout code and run a number of pirated games.
This opened up whole new world of bootlegging without need for mod chips or extra devices. It wasn't long before the bootdisc was already obsolete and the pirated games themselves included the bootstrap code to eliminate the need to swap cd's.
Although this obviously was a contributing factor to the ultimate demise of the Dreamcast, its significance was not as great as many claim. It although had worried Sega significantly enough to "buy out" KALiSTO, one the major groups releasing the games, its claimed that Sega had offered KALiSTO stock options to stop releasing DC games. This barely held off the new pirate releases and it wasn't long before new groups came to fill the void left by KALiSTO's absence.
A fortunate side to this complete oversight by Sega was the ability for budding programmers to start writing and porting over programs for the machine. A version of the PC game quake was ported over to the Dreamcast relatively quickly, along with ports of Nester, and Snes9X (NesterDC and DreamSnes respectively), It wasn't long before bigger and better projects were announced, the biggest of all, a fully functioning PSX emulator, developed by the Bleem! Team.
Bleemcast! Was announced at the '00 E3 event taking everyone by surprise; even Sony who shortly after tried to shut the stall down. If successful this would have taken away one of Sony's major selling points, backwards compatibility. Not only would the Dreamcast be able to do this, it would be able to achieve it better and faster, running games at 640x480 resolution opposed the PSX's dreary 320x240. The original plan was to release Bleemcast! in packs, each emulating 100 games. Although on the 4th of May '01 what eventually came to surface was the first of 3 individual packs each running one game (Gran Turismo 2, Tekken 3, and Metal Gear Solid) far from the estimated 100 game per pack that was promised. The reasons for this soon unfolded and were more than understandable, Bleem!'s original concept to have 100 games "perfectly" emulated was a lot harder to achieve than first thought, due to the sheer scale of the project and ongoing court battles with Sony for the prior bleem! PC Release, no one had the time to thoroughly playtest that many games to perfection. Not wanting to release something, which may ultimately crash in the final minutes of 20+ hour game, Bleem! chose to concentrate on individual game packs; even so the three released packs where a technical marvel and came to show just what was achievable on the Dreamcast.
Long after the official release of Bleemcast! an early beta was leaked to the general public showing the emulator in a state of 30% completion displaying 4 months worth of hard work. Despite it being buggy and having no save support it is by far the most impressive emulator on the Dreamcast to this date, and gives you a glimpse into what the Bleem! team had original planned. Bleemcast! was extremely well received, and was inspiration to others in the homebrew scene, encouraging many people to turn their talents to coding for the machine.
Jan 1st '01 was a sad for all when Sega announced that the Dreamcast was to be abandoned, promises were made that all currently in development games would continue and still see a release. This was a sceptical claim and it did not take long before developers to start to shift their projects over to the forthcoming Xbox. Many events had led to this final outcome but they weren't as black and white as many seem, Sega had made a huge loss on the Dreamcast, largely attributed to people waiting on the false claims of Sony for the PS2. Although pirated games had played a significant role in the demise of the Dreamcast, they shifted huge quantities of the consoles for this and homebrew games alone.
Fast forward to the current day, it's been a good couple of years since the official death of the Dreamcast yet it is far from abandoned. The homebrew scene is thriving, we have seen new releases of DreamSnes, A more capable Divx/VCD player, ports of games like Duke Nukem 3D and Rise of The Triad and emulators for many more systems. With support from companies such as Lik-Sang working together with the homebrew community we have been fortunate enough to see commerical releases of a few exceptional homebrew games. Probably the biggest to date was Feet of Fury, a dance game to rival DDR. This trend doesn't look set to stop with the upcoming Tryptonite from the Feet of Fury team and recent release of Chikugoyaku.
It's not just the homebrew scene who is still dedicated to the Dreamcast, there is still an ever growing interest from commerical companies. SNK/Playmore are still avidly releasing games on demand, with the forthcoming SNK vs Capcom Chaos set for next year, and with the more recently developed Border Down by G-Rev things don't look set to stop.
Over the past year Sega have finally begun to note the dedicated following and support from the underground community and have slowly started to re-release many of the more popular and sought after titles. It's coming up to the 5th anniversary of the Dreamcast and Sega/Sonic Team now have a new game in development, Puyo Puyo Fever.
Sites such as Lik-Sang and Dreamcast-Scene (formerly Dreamcast-Petition) are currently helping to make more and more people aware of the importance the Dreamcast still has in today's gaming community. Exhibiting new games and hardware at The Games Convention 2003 in Leipzig, such as the recently released Treamcast, a bootleg portable version of the Dreamcast with LCD screen and in built MP3/VCD playback. There is already rumour of the Dreamcast being re-launched in some countries, and many more announced upcoming games, lets hope with support from companies as strong as this that the Dreamcast continues to live on.
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