Groovy Kid Stuff

Just before we took our trip to South Carolina, the local Goodwill got in a stack of Sega Dreamcast games and put them for sale at three bucks a pop. The only thing I really knew about the system was that it was beloved by longtime gamers. Went home and did some reading at Racketboy, a simply amazing retro game resource, and decided I should probably pick up a few in case I ever came across a Dreamcast. I put together a list of recommendations from that site and bought:

• Crazy Taxi
• Tennis 2K2
• SoulCaliber
• The House of the Dead 2
• Resident Evil Code: Veronica
• Sega Rally 2
• Cannon Spike

After a couple of weeks of monitoring Dreamcast auctions on eBay, I saw what looked like an awesome deal. For $41 including shipping I got a Dreamcast, two controllers, one VMU memory card, two rumble packs, and three games: Quake III Arena, Silver, and Shadow Man. All of this stuff plus the initial games I purchased are my Christmas present. I figure we’d gone a little crazy with the retro systems since June and another one now would be a bit much. Plus it gives me something to look forward to.

I have been sneaking it out after the kids go to bed however. Again thanks to Racketboy and this article, I have discovered the seedy underworld of emulation and ROMS. The Dreamcast will read CD-R discs without any chip modifications, making it possible to play NES games on it. Pretty darn cool. I’ve tracked down all of the necessary software and figured out how to burn a self-booting disc consisting of an amazing collection of NES games.

There’s also a homebrew scene in which people have developed their own Dreamcast games. DCEvolution has free collections of these games where you simply have to download an image file and burn it to a disc. As recent as last year there were commercial releases of homebrew games. Kind of crazy, considering the Dreamcast came out in 2000 and has been out of production since 2001.

And if great commercial games, emulation, and homebrew weren’t enough, techno smarties have long since figure out how to rip backup Dreamcast games. I found a little group that shares torrents of impossible to find or prohibitively expensive games like Ikaruga and REZ. No, it’s not even close to legal but I’m not losing sleep over it. Instead I’m counting down the days until Christmas when I can break this awesome system out permanently!