I'd been wanting to play Soul Calibur so I found one with it on ebay for $20, not to bad me thinks. I went to GameStop to see if they had anything and the guy laughed and told me that i could just download the games and not waste my money. So does that mean straight to the system or would I have to burn them off my computer? Where would I find them? Anyone have any experience with this?

On a side note, I masked off the lid and painted it to freshen it up. It was scratched all to hell and had about 9 years of dust on/in it.

Yeah, you can't download directly to the DC (it only has a dialup modem and no HDD), but whatever weird format discs it used are apparently very easy to pirate. There are ways you can download DC ISO's and burn them to playable discs using regular CD-R's, but I'm not really familiar with the process. Try browsing the DC message boards on Gamefaqs or checking out some of the bigger ROM sites for more info.

PS: I the Dreamcast

Dreamcast? Hmm. I never even knew you could "download" games onto a console. Is the Dreamcast a PC game program? I never had one but I did have a SEGA CD console once. I'm mad cause I had so many good classic games with it but my mom threw it away.

Only the 360, PS3 and Wii can you 'download' games to the console.
The Dreamcast was the last console that Sega produced before going Software only. It had some games on it, and was the first to be widely playable online. (and the VMU was awesome. Shame Sega never got a chance to release all the other goodies for the system, like the MP3 Player VMU.)

The Sega CD was also rather easy to burn games for. (Though, I've only only burned the Sonic CD beta.)

Try this site out http://dchaven.com/

I remember downloading some games through bittorent. I think I remember having to look for the ones that were ready to be burned and that didn't need a boot cd. I know I have some laying around the house somewhere.

You should call the manager or corporate and tell them that one of their employees laughed at you and suggested that you download games.

Yeah, just search for ones containing "self boot" in the description like Optics said. Also, try searching for the "Utopia" boot cd if you can't find the game you want as a self boot version. This will help you boot any games that aren't self boot versions.

Pirating is part of what killed the Dreamcast. Dreamcast games were easy to pirate since the console could boot from standard CDs, and most games would fix on normal CDs with little effort. The cool thing about this is the homebrew scene for the Dreamcast is rather large due to the Dreamcast being rather easy to program and how easily you can just burn your program to a CD and pop it in. If you want to run homebrew and the like on your Dreamcast, you first need to check the manufacture date on the bottom, any produced after October 2000 cannot boot from CD. Then you need to find the Utopia boot loader and some homebrew, there's countless sites out their, so just search Google.

i got the black sports edition, don't have it in front of me, when was it made? so could you just take a game and make a copy of it, if you have the right programs?

The black model is one of the older ones. You can't just make a straight copy of a game since Dreamcast games are not on CD, but a proprietary GD format. Part of the disc is the CD standard, but the rest of the disc isn't. I'm not certain what was used to make the disc rips in the past, but I would assume it used the serial modem for the Dreamcast that was only available to developers legally.

self boot in title, check. i can do that. fall break is this week so hopefully i can figure this out and have some fun!

thanks guys for all the help!

You know, I've been hearing this claim for years and I still don't buy it. How many people really had the ability to download games and burn games back in '99-2000? I was still trying to figure out how to get MP3's to play back then. Most people were on dialup and had ridiculously small hard drives, not to mention there were no torrents or anything of that nature. Even getting one game would've been a major PITA. I knew a lot of people with DC's back in the day, and I never even heard about the whole piracy issue until several years after the system's demise, which was only after the technology was there to bootleg games en masse.

The DC has some of the coolest, most fun games with brilliant graphics that stand up well even today.

My gaming buddies & I still regularly meet up for some great 4-player matches of Power-Stone (1 & 2), Sonic shuffle, Bomberman (one of the best party-gmaes EVER.), then Soul-Caliber, Tech-Romancer (legendary mech-combat fighter),
Bangai-O (crazy 1-player shooter), Sonic 1-2 et.

Should be rather easy to find, DL & burn titles still (especially through BT).

I never did finish Sonic Shuffle. I still think ST screwed up by not making the game online. My favorite Dreamcast memories was playing Phantasy Star Online. I liked it enough to continue it to the Gamecube, and then with PSU on the PC. (Though, my PC doesn't handle PSU well enough to play it online...)

Also doing a marathon play-session on the Evolution games. (I felt kind of gyped that Ubisoft didn't translate the ending to the first Evolution.)

Did anyone play Seaman? I bought it when one of the shops near here closed down for about $30(I think.) I'd play it for a few days, then forget about it and my fish-guy would die. (I'd love it if they did a port or something for the PC.)

Gawd, that fish/man was hella creepy.

So, let me see if I got this straight...

If you have one that was made prior to October 2000, you can literally download the image, burn it to a CD, throw it in the unit and it will automatically play without any help?

And, if it's made after October 2000, you need the Utopia Disc to force it to load burnt game?

Either way...that explains how my cousin had such a huge collection back in the day. I never could figure out where he got so many games. O_o...now I know, and knowing is half the battle.

More people than you think, I personally knew several people who did this while the system was live. Hard drive space wasn't that small back then unless you had a POS machine, most Dreamcast rips were around 200-300mb. Many of the people I knew downloaded those even on dial-up. The way it would work usually is person A would download game 1 and burn several copies, while person B would download game 2 and burn several copies. Those two would then trade their extra copies with each other an anyone else that had a different game.


If you have a perfect image you are correct about the prior to October 2000 models. If you had a non-booting image (which most distributed back during the DC's lifespan were to save space.) it requires the Utopia boot disc. Models after October 2000 cannot read any burnt discs including the Utopia boot disc.

Ah. Okay, I wasn't sure if I was reading that right. Thank you for the info.

Well the site is pretty much dead, but for around $60 "donation" I can get dvds with all 120+ games that I can put on my comp and then burn. I only want about 15 of them but that's almost to good of a deal to pass up.

Hmmm, I pretty much thought that the DC died because Sega burned out most of their core users with the Saturn dud and by the time they came back with the DC, the PS2 dominated.

But I could be full of it.

I actually did have a DC and Crazy Taxi was the shiznizzle for it. My roomie and I at the time spent hours on that game trying to outdo each other.

Bulljive. Piracy was not by any means what caused the DC or Sega to fail.

I completely attribute Sega's loss to it's short attention span toward it's hardware and fanbase. They were always so quick to jump to the next thing while simultaniously dropping support for the last system they most often just released. I never bought another Sega product after the Genesis for this reason. Not only this but Sega really didn't have an interesting catalogue of games. Not to mention thier akward three button controller.... I was enticed by the Dreamcast and when it finally became affordable for me..... they opted out of the console market.

Additionally:

http://alive.atari.org/alive5/sega.php

Please leave your empty accusations at the door.

The Dreamcast beat the PS2 to the market by an entire year. And the Saturn was a great system, it was Sega overextending themselves (Genesis, Sega CD, 32X, and Saturn) at the start of fifth generation of consoles that hurt the Saturn the most.

I never claimed piracy was the primary reason the Dreamcast failed, it was just one of many. Other than piracy, it was Sega's image in the mind of many consumers after the 32X/Saturn mismanagement, Sony's dirty marketing tricks (I wish I could find the article anymore outlining all the things they did such as requiring stores to remove or relocate Sega advertising if they wanted PS2s), and their former partner Microsoft releasing the Xbox.

Another thing about the death of the Dreamcast, it wasn't SOJ who pulled the plug on it, like initially believed. Peter Moore(who now works at EA) had mentioned in an interview that he was given the choice to discontinue the Dreamcast. (While I'm not fond of the idea, I still like Peter Moore for the fact he had the balls to tell Yuji Naka "F*** you." )

True, he did kill it in the States. The Dreamcast continued on for another year in Europe, and wasn't officially discontinued in Japan until 2006.