Why is the Sega Dreamcast so beloved? Was it really ahead of its time?

>>105893815 (OP)
Not for its anti piracy methods kek

It's a console with a lot of potential and not a lot of games worth playing since it tried to be the quirk chungus Playstation.
>>105893834
I'm like 3 feet from my old bunt games kek.

I remember people saying how great it was a few years after it was discontinued. I played some of the games that were ported and they were all mediocre.

>>105893815 (OP)
It's aesthetic was peak
embraced technological interconnection
modem
memory card that doubled as a take-along pocket device
gaming for it's own sake

I only played one game on it and it was the Gundam, game. It WAS really good and it felt different from the PS ones.

It was a pretty good console but not enough people cared because it was released after Sega already shat the bed with the Saturn. Then when the PS2 came out it doubled as an affordable DVD player and brutally raped everything else in sales.

>>105893815 (OP)
what did the little display on the controller show?

>>105894021
Depends on the game. The VMU it popped out had its own controller, you could play mini games on it.

>>105894010
Not to mention that because it launched two years later, the PS2 benefited from having more powerful hardware, and was backrwards compatible with PS1 games and accessories. I feel like the Dreamcast would've done better if it could play Saturn games and use Saturn controllers.

>>105893815 (OP)
it was ahead of it's time but ps2 was even better and it killed dreamcast

>>105894045
>>105893880
So what games could you play on the VMU?

>>105893846
>it tried to be the quirk chungus Playstation
What is that supposed to mean?

>>105894064
I remember Chao Adventure for Sonic Adventure

>>105894064
Some games had mini games.
https://consolemods.org/wiki/Dreamcast:VMU_Games_List

>>105893815 (OP)
you could run pirated games without modding the system right after it was released which was unheard of at the time, you could also browse the web on it. During the dot com bubble when all my schoolmates were buying computers and going on the internet, i begged my parents to get a dreamcast because it would be the cheaper solution to get online instead of buying a desktop. My stupid boomer dad obviously didn't get it and eventually bought me this really expensive ibm desktop. We used dial up at the time and it was pay per minute or something, and I remember my dad freaking out one morning when he saw the $300 internet bill lol. I think I would have been happier as a kid if i had just got a dreamcast with seganet. 20 years later I eventually bought a used dreamcast for 10 bucks, burnt whatever games since it would run them unmoved, and played the shit out of it. could also go online with it with dreampi. it was peak comfy.

>>105894333
unmoved -> meant to say unmodded

>>105894333
You could play burned games in a stock PS1 via disc swapping.

>>105893815 (OP)
it was my first console, before that i was playing at friend's house. so for me it is the best console simply because of that. mine lasted 2000-2008 before drive died, was a pretty good run for the time.

>>105894557
pretty sure that came years after the playstation release.

>>105894964
That was day one, anon. It didn't need any mods or action replays. All you needed to do was stick a q-tip in the drive tray mechanism to make the console think the tray was closed and then swap your genuine disc for a fake one after it displayed the logo.

>>105893815 (OP)
yes, while it was a good console, its execution was flawed, They burned alot of people, famously nvidia , customers and publishers , and that directly effected the outcome. abandoning the saturn overseas early was also a mistake

It blew out PCs at the time. It wasn't until the Geforce that they could compete by virtue of hardware T&L.

>>105895236
the gpu did but the rest of the specs were obsolete. by the time 2000 rolled around pcs could easily do dreamcast games like pso and such.

It was ahead of it's time, like the saturn, but ps2 basically killed everything other than ps2.

>>105895089
Oh, Maybe all my friends just got their psx modded anyway to avoid the inconvenience of swapping discs. For the dreamcast though it seemed like you could pre-patch cd's so you wouldn't have to do a disc swap. that's just how I remember it and how I've played it on my DC.

>>105895289
By 2000, the PS2 was out, so it didn't matter either way.
Sega zealots will try to convince you that the Dreamcast was still competitive by quoting obscure articles about polycount claims in Le Mans.
It's not even a contest.
https://youtu.be/k2vHUt5JlIM
https://youtu.be/Nsoc1hH1ha0

>>105895461
Disc swapping was bad for the discs and the drive. It could wear out the motor, scratch your discs, and even potentially damage the laser. Plus it was a hassle. So most people who were serious about piracy got their console chipped. Casual pirates usually just used a game they didn't care about or a demo disc and lived with the disc damage.

>>105893815 (OP)
It had a few games that people really love.

The only games worth playing from that generation were mgs and n64 titles. Maybe shenmue, i guess.

>>105894072
Maybe read the fucking image.

>>105895503
>Disc swapping was bad for the discs and the drive
Lies.
My 1001 PSX still works. ... maybe. Haven't taken it out in like 20 years.
Just put a bit of tape on the lid button and it was super easy to swap the disc.

>>105894058
PS2 didn't kill anyone.
Dreamcast died because SEGA was already dying before the Dreamcast was released and the lack of publishers backing the console hurt the stream of revenue they had been hoping to get after the Saturn's failure. The Dreamcast launch itself was one of the biggest ever at the time and they also dominated game sales for months and months, yet that wasn't enough to keep SEGA in the console industry.
SoA releasing the Dreamcast with a modem included bit them really hard, because that was another added cost and a source of revenue that they were expecting to get.
Plus, the dotcombubble was beginning to whobble and sega.net wasn't all it was cracking up to be.

All this happened before the PS2 was release. Even if the PS2 hadn't sold like gangbusters, SEGA couldn't support its own console anymore. SEGA met its sales goals and still killed the Dreamcast, because their arcade business was failing too.

>>105893815 (OP)
nope, it's only because of the "old good, new bad" mental illness

>>105898107
I've killed a few discs doing the swap trick. That's why I quit doing it.

>>105898673
If you owned the original release Playstation (serial number ending in 1001), you load the game from the music player and you swap the disc easily, because the disc isn't moving when you load from the music player.

So it doesn't kill the disc or the motor any more than just playing the game like normal. I understand that anything after the 1001 release, it gets harder to do the swap trick.

Of course, the 1001 PSX was notorious for breaking down and people needed to flip their console upside down to get it to work, but that happened just from normal use. But my PSX was still working all the way until i finally didn't have space for it and put it back in its box in 2008 or whenever i got my PS3.

>>105898735
the early psx's had an all-plastic cd mech, which warped and stopped working eventually. they later added some metal parts to it. they never anticipated games like crash bandicoot which streamed in level data as you play a level which really gives the optical drive a work out. a more typical early game would load a level then maybe play an audio cd track, so only occasional seeking
>>105898673
i've never scratched a cd doing it, but i can understand how you could, namely if you under/overshoot and drag the cd over the spindle. i've done the double swaptrick hundreds of times over the years. i really should just get a modchip already... but i've gotten really good at a swaptrick so every time i go to play it i just do that

>>105893815 (OP)
It was actually too early, it had just 16mb of ram so even with its good gpu chip everyone targeted the ps2 32mb of ram as the bare minimum.

>>105898804
it had twice as much vram as the ps2 however
it's interesting that it's normal for a dreamcast game to run at 640x480 progressive, while your typical ps2 game was instead 512x448 interlaced. the ps2 was better in just about every other way, more ram, dvd's (both for movies, which was a HUGE selling point in 2000 and also games could be up to 8x bigger than dc's gd-roms), faster cpu, etc

>>105898777
You know you can run games with a modded memory card these days. You don't need a mod chip anymore. All you need is something to put the FreePSXBoot bootloader on a memory card like a PS2, one of those SD card to memory card adapters, or one of those memory card to USB adapters. Or you could probably just get on pre modded on ebay.

>>105898914
neat, haven't heard of that. looks like it's only a few years old

>>105893815 (OP)
128-bit CPU. Only faggots use lower bittage, btw. Don't inb4@mefgt

>>105898107
What's amazing is they didn't lose money on console sales. I think the PS2 was sold at $100 loss.

>>105899196
>128-bit CPU
Nope. 32-bit.

>>105893815 (OP)

>Its own fanbase killed it

>>105893815 (OP)
Great games. Lots of arcade ports.

>>105899212
I don't think that was all that amazing, because SEGA was very price conscious from the get-go. SEGA knew that they were walking a thin line to keep from going under and produced a console that would be make them money as fast as possible. Like mentioned, they didn't even want to give the modem away with every console and is part of the reason why Bernie Stolar (head of SoA at the time) was fired.
They were super fucking penny pinching, to the point that they didn't want to ship their consoles out to retail stores and instead rely on online sales.... and this is another reason that Bernie got fired, because he worked against SoJ in that too. So Bernie was fired like a week before the Dreamcast had the biggest console launch at that point in the gaming world.

What is amazing is the fact that they met most of their goals and still failed. The hype for the Dreamcast was pretty huge back then and nearly every online community back then was pro-Dreamcast. Every gamer in my HS was getting a Dreamcst. It was hyped as fuck and blasted on TV for months before launch. First time that gaming seemed mainstream. And once released, it was a big draw at game stores and Best Buy on their demo kiosks.

Yeah, this hype was basically only with the gaming community, because SEGA lost its casual audience back with the Saturn, but traditionally, that casual audience isn't important for the first couple of years. Of course, the PS2 had that casual audience day one, thanks to its DVD player. That allowed kids to conivince their parents to buy them one sooner rather than 3 or 4 years down the line, since DVDs was also a hyped product back then (i got my first DVD player before the PS2's release for cheap: $300, same price as the PS2).

>>105899567
my ps2 was the first dvd player in the house. the ps2 didn't cost much more than a dvd player, so if you were looking at consoles, and wanted a dvd player, which back then, you did, the ps2 was a two-in-one deal. it also played psx games so if you didn't have a playstation already, you had 6 years worth of games for that which you can play right away as well. also the playstation kicked saturns' ass (in the west), along with other recent sega failures like 32x meant that the public had higher hopes for another playstation than another sega console

>>105899196
If you're counting having 128bit registers to use in vector units as being a 128bit processor, then most consoles of that generation were 128bit and consoles now are like 512bit.
But that would be stupid.

>>105900262
I don't think the 32x had much to do with SEGA fumbling in popularity.

IT had everything to do with the Saturn costing $400. SEGA was dominating the 16bit generation in the west with its marketing and was outselling Nintendo until SEGA shifted over to focusing to the Saturn/32x. If they had priced the Saturn at $300 like the PSX, I don't think the Playstation brand would have taken off like it did. The price tag was a huuuge mistake, akin to the PS3's price tag had been 2 generations later, except SEGA never recovered.

I think it's telling about how well SEGA did in the 16bit gen, because parents were just blindly buying their kids Saturns instead of Playstations when the Saturn finally came down in price and parents wanted to surprise their kids with a gaming console. SEGA absolutely dominated the 16bit generation with their marketing that even parents were still recognizing the brand 3-5 years later. They had the casual market locked down and fumbled that shit so badly.
The Saturn being exclusive for the first few months at EB (Software etc?) didn't really help either, but that's so minor in terms of affecting its sales.

The PSX's popularity had everything to do with just being there at the right time and place. It didn't do anything better than the other consoles (Saturn had better 2d, N64 had 3d), but was there to catch people falling off from Nintendo and SEGA consoles. $300 console (middle price, with N64 being $250 and SS being $400). CD media, which meant games cost $40-50 games instead of $60-80 like on the N64. More than just KIDDY SHIT, which was a carry over attitude from the 16bit generation SEGA marketing.

>>105901475
i do wonder how much competition sega thought sony would be. i was too young at the time to have seen that.
like sony was a well-respected consumer electronics brand i believe, but they were known for tvs, radios, cameras and walkmans, video games were new to them, and new does mean good (*cough* 3DO *hack* CDI). maybe it's more a question of how the playstation went so /right/ rather than the saturn going wrong, does that make sense? like sega had a good reputation from the mega drive, and sony didn't have a video game reputation at all, so the playstation must have just been that much more appealing

>>105901543
>and new does mean good
doesn't*

>>105901543
i suppose i could ask, are there any oldfags who remember choosing a playstation when it was new? while the first console i picked myself when i was old enough to actually weigh them up somewhat was a playstation (1) as well, the playstation had been out for 5 years at that point. i wonder what it's like to pick a new major console from a company who hasn't made one before. i'm old enough to have seen that with the xbox, but by the 6th gen most games were on basically all platforms and were basically if not the same game. and even then microsoft already had a gaming reputation, just not with their own hardware, so people already knew they could do it before they made the xbox
idk, it's just hard to imagine why someone would have bought a playstation day 1, sure it was a killer price, but you're still gambling on a new player, and there were many failed new players in the immediately preceding years, even old players like atari...

>>105901543 >>105901635
Early on, most people viewed Sony's Playstation the same way we viewed Panasonic's 3DO and Philip's CDi. Just another wannabe console trying go into Nintendo and SEGA's territory. A periphery console with nothing going for it.
BUT, magazines were hyping the Playstation way up as it came closer to release. Games like Twisted Metal, Loaded, XTREME SPORTZ XXX, Battle Arena TOSHINDEN, and others were also used to give the Playstation an edge that aging children audience wanted to see. A natural evolution of SEGA's edgy teen marketing was pushing for in the 16 bit age.

I don't really remember what SEGA was saying about Sony/PSX, but Nintendo (Howard Lincoln) also treated Sony's attempt for consoles the same way everyone did with the 3d0. Nothing but a technical demo for the future of consoles, with no real games that enticed audiences. And they weren't wrong ,because who even remembers Loaded (actually a good game, btw) or Battle Arena Toshinden? Twisted Metal was untried and could have been shit like the Crash N Burn or Quarantines games on the 3d0. The PSX didn't really become great until later, when Squaresoft and Konami really started pumping out games for it.

Magazines really couldn't hype up the Saturn like they could with the PSX, because the surprise launch pretty much killed the hype and everyone could actually play its games, instead of building up their marketing. Nevermind that fucking $400 price tag.

I was in high school by the time the Saturn and PSX came out, btw. I was a spoiled kid, so i owned pretty much every console at/near launch except the 3d0 and Jaguar. Kids my age were the first to grow up with consoles and video games were maturing (edgy shit anyway) with us too. I got suckered in with the PSX hype and wasn't really all that impressed for years. I was online too during this time and most people seemed to reflect my view too, instead hyping up the N64, which did live up to the hype.

>>105893815 (OP)
For context, I was born in '94 and my dad bought a Dreamcast pretty early
For me a part of it is that 90% of people only played Nintendo, Playstation or Xbox games - So whenever someone mentions a Dreamcast game like Sonic Adventure, Rez, Samba de Amigo... My immediate reaction is "Yes! At last, someone else who shared my childhood!"

Also anecdotally I remember a lot of unique and fun games like PSO, Rez, Samba de Amigo, SEGA Bass Fishing with the fishing rod controller, all the VMU games...

Maybe it's rose tinted glasses, and I'm too young to remember if it was actually "ahead of its time". But it was an underrated good console with a lot of fun exclusive and creative games and I think it's sad that so few people got to experience it.

We do actually still have 3 functioning original consoles and all our old games which is pretty nice

Someone broke in while I was at work and took all my physical collection, even my Dreamcast. Police said they couldn't do anything. I've been 100% software ever since.

>>105894661

You can buy cheap replacements that slot right and replace the disc drive with an sd card reader anon. Play all the Dreamcast Games

>>105902197
>who even remembers Loaded?
i've heard of battle arena tonshinden and twisted metal, but loaded doesn't ring a bell
>The PSX didn't really become great until later, when Squaresoft and Konami really started pumping out games for it.
i don't know of any console whose best games came out early on. now my first experience with a playstation was crash bandicoot on my neighbours playstation, that was pretty early on but not at all a launch title. by the time i got a playstation myself, practically all the best psx games were already out, like the first games i bought for it, iirc, were spyro 3 (at the time i didn't realise it was "3", it just said "year of the dragon", how should i know?) and final fantasy VIII.
>I was in high school by the time the Saturn and PSX came out
i entered high school about 10 years after with the 6th consoles. i was not spoiled. i bought my playstation with my own pamphlet run money, for the ps2 i paid for some of it and that was a christmas present... in 2004. nothing against my parents of course.
>instead hyping up the N64, which did live up to the hype.
perhaps i'm too drunk atm, but you reckon the n64 lived up to the hype?

>>105901475
> It didn't do anything better than the other consoles (Saturn had better 2d, N64 had 3d)
PSX is quite capable at 2d, Saturn supports classic 2d gimmicks like line scrolling, but PSX is quite capable at 2d in its own style
As for 3D, PSX takes the crown of having the best 3D out of the three.

Please judge me for spending money on the VMU Pro.

>>105903407
Who spends that kind of money on a memory card? Cancel your order so that mine comes faster, you retarded faggot.

>>105893815 (OP)
it has good games but they are not the ones people mention
crazy taxi is shit. it's a boring arcade game made to steal quarters

>>105903407
>>105903440
VMU Pro? Kino bro.

Don't forget the GDEMU