👃🏻 🎿 🍙 Sega Dreamcast Anatomy: Console Second Life 👩🏻‍🤝‍👨🏾 🔊 🎪

In this article, a researcher from the SonicRetro website , a hacker of games about Sonic and the owner of more than 400 games for Dreamcast Doc Eggfan will present an amazing post- mortem about Dreamcast and find out what happened to the devices that were supposed to go to store shelves, but ultimately turned out to be the most interesting way. Doc Eggfan, you have the floor ...

Reflecting on the greatest injustices in my life, I asked myself the question - when exactly did the life of Dreamcast expire? What was the exact hour of death, doctor? We know that even the most enthusiastic indie developers continue to support the old woman, but when exactly did the official support end? Sega officially announced the completion of Dreamcast equipment on February 1, 2001, and the latest Dreamcast was due to roll off the assembly line in late March (late Japanese fiscal year). Some reports said that at that time, the remnants of 2 million unsold and useless Dreamcast lay sadly in some kind of dusty warehouses.

Or they were neatly folded in Yukawa-san’s office

Around May 2004, rumors circulated on the Internet about the ultra-rare gilded (or gold-painted) Dreamcast, which were the last machines made. It was believed that they were created as the last tribute to the console. They were tied to the Pro Yakyuu online competitions held a few months earlier, in August 2000. If you want to find one of them, then keep in mind that according to rumors, there were only five copies of them.

The shining console

A little less rare were the really last consoles of the special version of the Gundam RX-78 Custom. Only 78 pieces were created, sold only through the Sega D-Direct online store from April 11, 2002 (the release of the console coincided with the advent of the online game Gundam: Renpou vs. Zeon & DX). If we assume that the 2001 statement was true, it is very likely that the RX-78 Custom were modified from ready-made devices, but there is little uncertainty. Perhaps then the company last launched a production line?

Gundam! What a beautiful version of Dreamcast ...

Anyway, what happened to these 2 million unsold Dreamcasts? Perhaps they were just dumped at some landfill in Arizona? While some of them continued to be sold over the past 12 months of retail support, I found more pleasant options for the future of our beloved Dreamcast (read: conspiracy theories). In 2003, Sammy's Atomiswave game began appearing in arcade arcade halls. Despite Wikipedia claims, Atomiswave’s specifications were pretty much the same as Dreamcast’s (not NAOMI’s, as it’s mistakenly claimed). If you put them side by side, it even seems that Atomiswave ROM cartridges are inserted directly into the empty space that the GD-ROM drive used to occupy. Perhaps in the end, Dreamcast did not die at the time, which is considered the moment of her death. Perhaps she just sneaked into the new shiny red case, hoping that no one would notice. Filled with the spirit of investigative journalism, I decided to open both devices in order to compare what is hidden inside them.

We’ll remove the case from them and proceed ... To begin with, Atomiswave ROM cartridges are not a solid replacement for the Dreamcast GD-ROM drive, as I thought at first. Their connectors are similar, but not exactly the same in size. In addition, their location is different, since the ROM cartridges are inserted into the bottom of the upside-down Atomiswave circuit board, and the GD-ROM drive is connected to the top of the Dreamcast motherboard.

Unfortunately, plug 'n' play will not work here.

Although they are not completely identical, they have many striking coincidences, and the same or almost identical components are located almost identically. But most importantly, both devices use the same Dreamcast Hitachi Super-H SH4 processors and PowerVR2 GPUs. I hastily decided to compare it with one of the first generation Japanese Dreamcast, and when I opened it, I did not want to go to the end and tear off the entire complex cooling system from the heat pipes to look at the components hidden under it. Fortunately, the Dreamcast motherboard is well documented on the Internet with all the snapshots you need to compare.

One of these devices is not like the other ... Although wait a minute, they are almost the same.

So it can be said that either a) the corpse of the last Sega console donated its vital organs to Sammy's first arcade game project, or b) Atomiswave is actually a disguised Dreamcast that underwent plastic surgery to fool death and continue to live under a stranger by name, away from bright spotlights, criticism and the dirty royal battle into which the terrifying wars of the sixth generation consoles have turned. (I decided that I prefer the second part of this far-fetched analogy).

This mutually beneficial collaboration between Sega and Sammy was probably an important incentive for their merger in 2004. Although I can’t find any information on the production cycle of Atomiswave’s equipment, the software continued to support the system for many years until the release of its last game in 2009. It also fits into the picture that it was an updated version of the Dreamcast classic - the Sega Bass Fishing Challenge game, developed by Sega Amusements USA. Oddly enough, the game uses a trackball instead of a fake fishing rod, so I'm not entirely sure how comparable it is to the original.

Last game for Dreamcast? (Around 2009.)

There are many other games for Sammy’s little red box, mainly due to exclusive support from SNK Playmore after the company ended its own Neo Geo MVS system. Games such as Metal Slug 6, Dolphin Blue, Guilty Gear X Ver1.5, Fist of the North Star and Samurai Showdown VI are definitely worth your attention, and many of them have not yet been ported to any other system. It is easy enough to purchase a board and modify it for home use, since it is based on the JAMMA arcade standard, and fans have been using SuperGuns for decades without visiting arcade machine halls.

Go and look for games for yourself, it's all mine.

You can even buy modified “console” versions of Atomiswave, which will take no effort to run on the TV, and some even use Neo Geo AES controllers. However, I always thought they were a bit pricey. But even if you are a hardcore fan of Dreamcast, there are much more terrible ways to spend your money than collecting a secret library of games for Dreamcast (it's much more fun than collecting all 6 chapters / cases of Grauen no Tarikago!).

I think this is cheating - it’s much more interesting to connect everything myself (the author is not responsible for any accidents)

But our story does not end there. What about these missing GD-ROM drives? Following the principle of "useful on the farm," they had to find a new home in the Sega Arcade / Amusement division.

And I’ll talk about this in the next part ...

Gd-rom

In the first part of the article, we found out that the statements about the death of Dreamcast in 2001 were somewhat exaggerated, and that the spirit of the system continued its long and fruitful existence in Sammy's Atomiswave arcade system. So, we revealed a part of the fate of the hardware legacy of Dreamcast, but there is another side related to the use of GD-ROM drives and the carriers of the proprietary GD-ROM format themselves. Did Dreamcast live another second life after its death ? Let's find out ...

Separated at birth?

Gigabyte Disc, or GD-ROM, was developed by Sega and Yamaha in 1998. The design of this new media resembles the parameters of a standard CD-ROM, but the information contained on the tracks is packed more densely, so the capacity is increased from the usual 700 megabytes, as the name suggests, to just over 1 gigabyte. Therefore, GD-ROM drives should read these discs a little slower so that reading could keep up with the increased density of information, but still have the ability to accelerate and read ordinary music CDs and other CD formats. The idea was to create a new format with increased capacity, an alternative to DVD-ROMs, the costs of which could be reduced through the use of recalibrated standard CD-drives. In addition, this avoided exorbitantly high licensing fees,required to connect DVD playback support. Also, the new format had a low risk of piracy due to the limited number of recordable GD-R discs, system boot GD-R discs, and GD-ROM read / write drives.

However, perhaps in order to make up for the inability to watch DVD movies, Sega has made enormous efforts to ensure that Dreamcast has the greatest possible multimedia capabilities. It was probably guilty that made developers go too far in creating and advertising completely new CD formats specially made for Dreamcast equipment, one of which was the MIL-CD format. Similar to the cryptic CD + G karaoke format mentioned in the Mega CD user guide, the MIL-CD was supposed to expand the capabilities of Audio CDs by adding navigation menus, Internet functions, and video to them. Only eight official MIL-CDs were released, but the format became famous because it circumvented Dreamcast's anti-piracy protection. [You can read more about this here .]

Boot disks, emulators, home brew games, and modern indie publishers all use the alternative Dreamcast download process, available through the MIL-CD format. In the very early stages of the development of the console, it facilitated the appearance of mediocre pirated versions of software from the Dreamcast catalog. Personally, I have never been attracted to truncated games for DC with pinched or missing sounds and FMV necessary to fit games on a standard CD-R with a capacity of 700 megabytes. This led to my obsession with acquiring only genuine copies of games; I wanted to enjoy the games in their entirety (however, I felt stupid when later SD card adapters appeared for the console).

Innocent collection of official MIL-CD music discs. She did not suspect how many problems would bring.

Despite this setback, GD-ROMs continued to be used with far greater success in Dreamcast's renowned closest relative, the NAOMI arcade circuit board series. The NAOMI series is legendary - only the venerable SNK Neo Geo MVS overtook it in terms of the total life expectancy, and not least because of the release of the GD-ROM system in late 1999 or early 2000. Initially, NAOMI games were produced on interchangeable ROM cartridges, but it took a lot of time and money to produce them. The addition of the GD-ROM system made it possible to replace ROM boards with reprogrammable DIMM boards, onto which games could be downloaded via an external GD drive.

Consequently, games for NAOMI could be sold on much cheaper GD media, which was attractive to arcade machine owners because of the reduced price and ease of replacing games. This system was attractive to Sega, as the company had exclusive control over the licensing and production of GD media, which were also simpler and faster to manufacture, and also reduced the threat of piracy. Protection in the NAOMI system was stronger, since game discs came bundled with protective chips; In addition, NAOMI checked for the presence of a drive in the drive at boot time, so that owners of arcade machines could not install drives on multiple machines.

Just like upgrading a Mega Drive with a Mega CD

It’s probably not surprising that the external NAOMI board’s GD-ROM system uses the same GD drive as Dreamcast — I even opened both of them to compare and make sure. It seems likely that the surplus of GD drives originally made for the stopped Dreamcast assembly line found a new home in the Sega arcade department, where it either got into the new NAOMI board GD-ROM systems or remained as spare parts for the Sega repair and maintenance service .

Perhaps due to the desire to find a place for surplus stocks of Dreamcast homeless drives, the GD-ROM became the carrier for most Sega arcade games in 2000-2005. Configurations with DIMMs and GD-ROM drives appeared for both the Chihiro based Xbox and the Triforce based on the Gamecube. Both of these systems had two main types: Type-1 and Type-3. Type-1 boards were compatible with the original NAOMI DIMM boards and were intended for machine owners who wanted to upgrade existing equipment, and Type-3 boards were a complete solution in which the DIMM board was built into the system case.

Nintendo and Sega collaboration? Who would have thought?

In December 2004, the satellite terminal versions of the Naomi 2 and Chihiro boards (these are multi-user systems running on local networks) received firmware updates that provided compatibility with games and update discs released on standard CDs and DVDs. Did this mark the end of Sega's novel with a modest GD disc?

First releases for NAOMI and Chihiro on CD and DVD. I don’t know for sure whether they were separate installation disks or just updates of previous releases, but it’s obvious that this is not GD-ROM.

For GD-ROM, the situation didn’t look very good - on July 2, 2005, Sega released the Lindbergh arcade system for limited testing. This was Sega's first major independent step forward from the legacy of the successful NAOMI series. It was also the first step that spawned the tendency to use PC-based arcade cards using cheaper standard components. Lindbergh lacked support for GD-ROM, it was abandoned in favor of the good old DVD-ROM; this was probably due to the need for increased capacity provided by DVD-ROMs.

, HD-DVD Xbox 360 Lindbergh, , DVD Sega.

In retrospect, we can say that Sega, it seems, has become a victim of its own success. Despite technological improvements, owners and developers of arcade machines were more than satisfied with the use of NAOMI equipment, which was already seven years old. Almost no one wanted to invest in such new systems as Chihiro, Triforce and Lindbergh, because a new game for NAOMI could be purchased for a small fraction of their price and still provide approximately the same income. However, from Sega's point of view, the profit margin in this case was not as profitable as when delivering new equipment to the hall owners. In addition, costs began to accumulate to support the repair service of aging GD drives. Despite the fact that the drives were designed for minimal use during operation, nothing lasts forever,and dust lumps became a serious problem for Japanese entertainment centers (almost all the equipment that I purchased and restored for several years was covered with a layer of dust).

Rabbits from the dust: a threat to all Japanese arcade equipment

But we have not yet revealed the fate of Dreamcast itself in this period. Despite the completion of the hardware and retail support cycle, for Dreamcast, games continued to be released even in 2006. After an abundance of passing and unforgettable games and dating simulators from 2002-2003, in 2004-2006, excellent ports with NAOMI (mostly high-quality shooters) came out from time to time. The Dreamcast hardcore fan community of that time was collecting rumors, actively signing petitions, and putting pressure on NAOMI developers to port more games to Dreamcast. Especially curious was the beat-em-up Melty Blood seriesType Moon / Ecole companies, which underwent countless portings, sequels, balance and gameplay changes, moving from PC to NAOMI, then to PS2, then again to NAOMI and PC. Despite the fact that it was ported several times to NAOMI equipment based on Dreamcast, not a single version of the game reached the Dreamcast itself, which was very frustrating for gamers, given the variety of shooter ports.

Schoolgirl vs Maids, Round 1, Fight!

On January 18, 2007, Sega announced that by the end of February, much to the dismay of arcade game owners and game developers, the company would no longer release new GD-ROMs for them. It also meant that the company would no longer give licenses to use the GD-ROM format, which essentially marked the end of official support for the GD-ROM system in arcade machines and future official releases of software for Dreamcast itself. All future NAOMI games should now be published only on ROM cartridges; it can be assumed that the additional costs associated with this decision were an attempt to push owners and developers away from supporting this relatively ancient system. The following is the epitaph for all the last fallen heroes of that past era:

2006 — Naomi 2 GD-ROM: Initial D Arcade Stage Ver.3 — Cycraft Edition, Rev.B [GDS-0039B]
2006 — Triforce GD-ROM: Virtua Striker 4 Ver.2006, Rev D [GDT-0020D]
2006 — Chihiro GD-ROM: Sega Network Taisen Mahjong MJ 3 Evolution, Rev.A [GDX-0021A]
2006 — Naomi GD-ROM: Noukone Puzzle Takoron [GDL-0042]
8 2007 — () Dreamcast: Karous [T-47803M]
27 2009 — Naomi ROM-: Star Horse Progress Returns (satellite) [840-0186C]

The latest GD-ROM for Naomi, Compile Heart’s Noukone Puzzle Takoron (released on Wii in 2008 as Octomania)

It’s hard to separate the rumors from the facts, but I seem to recall that the president of Triangle Services expressed interest in porting the company's future game in 2008 for NAOMI Shooting Love. 2007 with Exzeal, on Dreamcast in honor of the tenth anniversary of the console. Unfortunately, without Sega’s license and support for printing new official GD-ROMs, this plan was not destined to be realized. Unlike other independent developers of the time, Triangle Service could not simply release an unofficial MIL-CD game with self-loading, as this developer did not want to jeopardize its fruitful cooperation with Sega, which continues to this day. Ultimately Shooting Love. 2007 was released as Shooting Love. 200X on the Xbox 360, and celebrating the promise of a decade Dreamcast was carried out informal game of Wind and Water Puzzle Battles of Yuan the Works (anyone know what happened to these guys?).

Unfortunately, the Triangle Service was unable to “recycle” Shooting Love resources for release on Dreamcast

Despite this, a year later Sega officially supported the limited re-release of Border Down on Dreamcast on December 17, 2008; the game was only available in Japanese stores Messe Sanoh. According to rumors, the last remaining stock of GD-ROMs from Sega's warehouse was used for this, although some people think this is illogical. Physically, GD and CD are the same and are made almost the same. As long as CD printing factories exist, there are no barriers to the production of new GDs. The only obstacle is Sega's control over the release of new licenses.

Dreamcast commercial, circa 2008

Two years after the official “completion” of GD-ROM production, Sega demonstrated the ability to revive the format by printing in March 2009 a fresh batch of official GD-ROMs for NAOMI, Chihiro and Triforce. To drive the final nail into the coffin of the Giga Disc media, Sega launched the Compact Flash device to replace the still-functioning but outdated GD drives. For the devices to work, the DIMMs needed the latest firmware update through these new drives. The company did not want to bother repairing faulty disk drives anymore, so CF devices essentially replaced them completely, and games already purchased by owners of arcade machines could be transferred from an optical disk to CF solid state cards. Some games have even been officially reissued on CF cards,and the most notable of these was the Initial D series of racing games. Compact Flash cards had the added benefit of increasing the data transfer rate when the new game was first installed on the DIMM board, and later Sega adapted Compact Flash systems for its Lindbergh series of equipment.

Sega's Official Compact Flash Reader: GD Slayer

At the end of this epic saga, I will return to the original question: when did Sega finish supporting its youngest and most gifted child? There are several answers to this question - 2001 was the year of completion of equipment production, in 2007-08 software support was completed, and in 2009 the arcade system built on the basis of Dreamcast officially died. If you look at the situation optimistically, then we observed a little less or a little more than a dozen years of life - a pretty impressive achievement for the little Dreamcast that could.

Historical revisionism?

But perhaps the most interesting (or sobering) lesson is that, in fact, there were no technical obstacles to reviving the “official” software support. Would Sega lose anything by issuing an open access license for GD-ROM technology for the indie game market? In principle, I do not see any problems in that enthusiastic independent developers would be able to print their games in GD-ROM format again. And that would reduce the load on our fragile, fault-prone drives, now spinning disks are a little faster than they should.

I love you, DC

But, in the end, all this is not so important, because we continue to receive new games from the developers.

Sega Dreamcast Anatomy: Console Second Life

Gd-rom

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