5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Buying a Dreamcast

the Sega Dreamcast what more can be said about it it was a revolutionary console way ahead of its time killed too early by the PS2 but had tons of incredible games and lives on forever as an icon in the minds of Gamers but here's the thing actually owning a console and looking back on it with rose tinted glasses are two very very different things I've had a Dreamcast for almost two years now and I can tell you there were a lot of things I wish I knew about it before I made the purchase and no this video isn't trying to warn you away from buying a Dreamcast I still think it's an excellent console the goal is to educate everyone out there so that you can make the best decision for yourself hi my name is Murph and today we're going to be taking a look at the five things I wish I knew before buying a Sega Dreamcast let's go when you first get your hands on a Dreamcast the first thing you'll probably notice is that it uses a lot of hard plastic on the console on the controller everywhere oh and let's talk about that controller the layout isn't that different from an Xbox controller but the ergonomics are kind of screwed up your thumb doesn't naturally rest on the control stick and the stick itself doesn't have a rubber grip or anything like that like later controllers do these two issues make your thumbs slide off the stick way more often than I'd like so much so that I actually hold the controller with my middle fingers on the triggers just so I can get a better grip if you do want something more modern I'd recommend the striker DC as a pretty good third-party alternative your thumb lands in a much better spots and it feels much more like an Xbox One controller or something like that personally I've gotten used to this controller even with all of its quirks after using it for so long but it can be a potential turn off unfortunately the hardware issues don't stop with the controller the controller board is known for blowing out especially if you plug something in while it's powered on do not do this the system also sometimes random resets because of a power supply issue due to the pins not properly making a connection with the board I had to deal with this and it was annoying and yes Sega used one cheap laser assembly in this thing because even in perfect condition the laser really is that loud speaking of which the Dreamcast doesn't actually use CDs to store its games it doesn't use DVDs either so what does it use it uses a custom disk based solution called a gd-rom called that because these discs store about a gigabyte of information compared to a CDS 700 megabytes seems great right well data is packed more tightly on these disks so imperfections are more likely to corrupt data scratches damage these things so much worse than the regular CD so when buying games try to get ones that have very little damage on the disc and remember just because the game boots doesn't mean the disc is fine this copy of Sega rally 2 works great until I try to open up multiplayer at which point the system refuses to read that part of the disk and sends me back to the main menu uh well oh and when buying games you gotta watch out for piracy look at the bottom of your Dreamcast if it has either a zero or a one in this little circle here your system can play burned games from a CDR without the use of a mod chip and some sellers prey on this fact to pass off fake games as real and you easy way to tell the difference between a burn game and an official game is if you flip the disc over a real gd-rom has this small ring on the inside whereas a regular CD doesn't but what if you want to burn games for use for yourself you might ask well this might be a good option for some of the more expensive games in the Dreamcast Library I'd recommend against it for the most part because again real gd-roms hold one gigabyte of data and CDs only hold about 700 megabytes so all the data has to be compressed down to fit so you're more likely to get audio glitches gameplay stutters and other issues due to the compression plus the laser usually has to work even harder to read Burn games as if that grinding sound wasn't bad enough let's talk about this thing the Dreamcast memory card also called the vmu the visual memory unit it's pretty cool it's got buttons on it you can download little games to play on it on the go you can even have little pictures and stuff appear on it during games which is kind of neat the biggest problem with it the spider's cool factor is that it fundamentally fails at being a memory card you all remember constantly running out of space on your PS2 memory cards yeah vmus only holds 1 8 of the space of a PS2 memory card it's dismal you want to save your game of NFL 2K boom there goes almost half your memory card plus the games that you download to the vmu also take up quite a bit of space themselves oh and did I mention that these need a battery two watch batteries in fact you technically only need these batteries to play the games on the vmu but if that battery runs dry and it will run dry you get this wonderful beep on Startup that I'm sure most streamcast owners are very familiar with so what should you do well let me introduce you to the 4X memory card it basically acts as four vmus in one but the Dreamcast has a weird Quirk where it can only read 200 blocks of memory at a time so in order to cycle between those 200 blocks of memory banks you have to press a button on top it's kind of annoying but it does save you from having to buy a bunch of memory cards and the best part no battery so it will never beep on Startup ah sweet silence the Dreamcast was made in a time when TVs looked like this if for some reason you still have an old tube TV just plug in the Dreamcast with the yellow white red composite inputs you're good to go but my guess is that you don't have one of these TVs anymore and haven't for quite some time so how are you supposed to hook this thing up to a Modern Display well assuming your HDTV still has the yellow wet red composite inputs you could just use that problem is composite video is pretty ugly and blurry on flat panels and the 4di output has to be de-interlaced by your TV causing either a flickering effect or combing artifacts depending on how your TV handles the interlacing thankfully the Dreamcast also offers another option VGA this can provide much better image quality but you will need a VGA box in order to take advantage of this a great option I'd recommend is the get-go which is a newer VGA box that converts the signal and outputs to HDMI for you it's pretty Plug and Play now granted it is about sixty dollars so a lot of people will gravitate towards the pound or hyperkin Dreamcast to HDMI cable people which are about half the price they do a decent job and are definitely better than composite cables but don't give nearly as nice of an image as the gecko or other higher quality options but you want to know what's really annoying regardless of what cables you get most TVs will incorrectly interpret the Dreamcast VGA signal and apply the wrong sample rate making the Dreamcast output looks slightly squished the image is supposed to look like this not this make sure your circles actually look circular unfortunately there's no great way to fix this except for using your TV settings to manually correct the aspect ratio it's not ideal but to my knowledge this is the only workaround that exists unless you have a scaler like the framemeister or the Retro Tink but that's a conversation for another day the trimcast is technically considered to be part of the sixth generation of consoles that is the generation with the PlayStation 2 Xbox and GameCube but the Dreamcast was discontinued before the Xbox and GameCube even came out the PS2 killed it right out of the gate so when looking for games to buy you can't really expect the Dreamcast to have anything like Devil May Cry Grand Theft Auto 3 Halo or anything like that those were genre defining titles that came out after the Dreamcast had already bit the dust if those are the types of games you like playing the most this console might not be for you instead you gotta treat the Dreamcast like the ultimate home for great 5th generation games so expect things more like character Platformers and arcade ports that you saw more often in the late 90s than during the early 2000s games like Crazy Taxi Sega rally 2 the Sonic Adventure Games Soul Calibur all really great on the Dreamcast plus it's got definitive ports of classic N64 and original PlayStation games like Rayman 2 Star Wars Episode 1 racer even awesome ports of Tony Hawk 1 and 2 made by Trey Arc of all people yes that Treyarch these games run at a higher resolution and have a much better frame rate than their fifth generation counterparts so if you like these games a Dreamcast is definitely worth a look so after all that is a Dreamcast worth buying well only you can determine that for yourself but hopefully this video has helped you in making that decision even though the Dreamcast is far from perfect I'm still glad I got one it legitimately does have some great games that despite as many quirks are still best enjoyed on original Hardware the system really does feel unique in a way that most consoles today just don't I think that's why people have such fond memories of this thing there just isn't quite anything like it foreign

Channel: Red Blur Studios

Views: 43,067

Keywords: Dreamcast, Sega, Video Games, Sonic, Sonic Adventure, Buy, Purchase, Top 5, Top 10, Top Five, VMU, Visual Memory Unit, Retrotink, Scaler, 1990s, Genesis, Nintendo, Playstation, Console, System, Best, Lo-Fi

Id: GG-KQmVYljM

Length: 8min 44sec (524 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 26 2022