Online with the Sega Dreamcast in 2022 | MVG

[Music] I've been a big fan of the Sega dream cars from the moment that it came out all the way back in 1998. for me it was the first system that I could afford that truly brought the arcade experience to the home in the form of arcade perfect gaming coupled with online connectivity the Dreamcast was a fantastic system which seemed like it would hang around for a long time but unfortunately its life was short-lived and its full potential was never fully known the dream cars came bundled with a built-in modem for online play but the Dreamcast launched right in the middle of a transitional period you see by 2001 customers in many parts of the world were switching from dial-up modems to broadband internet in their homes as demand grew Sega wanted to be at the Forefront of online gaming so they would release a network adapter known as the Broadband adapter or BBA this launched in January of 2001 in North America and retailed for sixty dollars this would simply be a swap in replacement for the dial-up modem and would offer up to 100 megabits per second internet speeds and this would be a significant update from the 33.6 dial-up modem speed but because the Broadband adapter released late in the Dreamcast lifecycle only a handful of games actually supported it this is because up to that point all the existing online games would only take advantage of the Dreamcast modem this meant that these games would need to be patched to support the Broadband adapter and unfortunately this was not something that would ever happen as it stands only four games were ever compatible with the Broadband adapter they are Quake 3 Arena Fantasy Star online toy racer and pod SpeedZone historically the Broadband adapter was a very rare item that was quite expensive to buy in the range of 200 to 350 US dollars but in recent years the price of one has dropped to just over a hundred so I decided to pick one at that price and see if we can still surf the Internet and play online games in 2022 let's go ahead and find out now for those people that may be wondering I did Cover the dream pie back in 2018. dream pie is essentially software coupled with the Raspberry Pi that allows specific Dreamcast games to be played online by effectively masquerading the dial-up modem features and for all intents and purposes this is still probably the best way to get your Dreamcast online to this day but unfortunately as good as the dream pie is you simply do not get the same speeds as you do with a dedicated Broadband adapter it's also very difficult to find a Raspberry Pi these days for a decent price due to chip shortages so before we do anything we need to connect the Broadband adapter to the Dreamcast simply remove the modem adapter then connect up the Broadband adapter and that should be all now plug in the ethernet cable to the back of the Broadband adapter now the next thing that we need to do is configure the Broadband adapter to work with our Network and there's a few ways we can do this first we can use a game such as Quake 3 Arena this allows you to configure your network settings by selecting internet game then providing the Dreamcast with a static IP that's on your network and don't forget to add your gateway and subnet for the DNS I found that leaving them blank works fine but you can also use a public DNS these settings will get saved to the vmu which means the next time you log in these settings will be retained alternatively you can also set up your Broadband adapter using a web browser disk but keep in mind there are only two options to use our web browser that support the Dreamcast Broadband adapter Planet web 3.0 is the most well-known one to use but it's difficult to track down in 2022 it's also quite buggy so I ended up going with another option which appears to be the most useful and most stable and that's to use a disc known as XDP xtp for all intents and purposes is a modified version of dream passport 3 that supports the Broadband adapter and it's the best web browser that you can use in 2022 xtp can be downloaded easily and burnt onto a blank CD and I'll leave a link to that in the description below so let's say this running in action once we've set up our Broadband adapter and got it on the network with XDP we can point to some websites now the reality is that 99 of sites that you try to hit simply will not load due to things like SSL cloudflare and other protocols that the XDP browser simply doesn't support so then why should we even bother with it well there are still some useful things that you can do for example the website known as dreampipe.net is probably the best reason to connect your Dreamcast and browser to the internet this site pretty much contains everything you need for the Sega Dreamcast for example it contains an archive mirror of websites for quite a few Dreamcast releases there's also dedicated sections that contain vmusa files that you can download directly to your vmu there's no security around this so all you need to do if you want to grab a saved game is simply click on the link download that game to your vmu and enjoy it there's also Dreamcast forums that you can browse and even participate in and overall browsing the web on a Dreamcast in 2022 with a Broadband adapter is quite a nice experience albeit limited it's pretty fast given the hardware and its limitations and coupled with a mouse and keyboard it's even better both peripherals are fully working with xtp and even the mouse wheel on the Dreamcast Mouse to scroll down Pages Works totally fine xtp also features additional tools such as an IRC chat client given that Twitter is about to implode IRC could see a Resurgence in users and once again this works right out of the box the Dreamcast browser can also play MIDI files natively and there's a section of different MIDI files that you can select and play now of course for copyright reasons I can't make them audible here but this is pretty neat but overall with a Broadband adapter you can indeed do some very basic web browsing on your Dreamcast in 2022 and I'm glad to see that it's still available and that there is a community out there that still supports it with Dreamcast browser supported websites but to be honest the main reason why I got a Broadband adapter is to play games I heard that Quake 3 Arena still works in 2022 so I had to investigate Quake 3 Arena on the Sega Dreamcast is an interesting Port it allows you to configure your network settings and take full advantage of the Broadband adapter and then by giving the Dreamcast a static IP that's on your network you can easily connect up and start playing the thing is however while the game does run with the Broadband adapter it's 2022 and who's actually still playing well hardly anyone is but the servers for the game are still online looking at the master list there is still a handful of players connecting up and I was able to get into a few matches but I quickly realized that these are Bots and not real players overall however uh it does play really well especially with the mouse and keyboard which Quake 3 Arena takes full advantage of and getting into matches is pretty easy now at this point you're probably wondering why even bother with this well of course this isn't anything really that most people would do but the fact that you can still play Quake 3 Arena on your Sega Dreamcast with a Broadband adapter in 2022 makes it quite awesome there's also a forum where Dreamcast users meet up and regularly schedule online Quake 3 matches so there is still some reason to do this but of course we are only talking about a handful of players foreign but I think if there's indeed one real reason to pick up a Broadband adapter for the Dreamcast in 2022 undoubtedly it's for Fantasy Star online the game takes full advantage of it and thanks to the PSO private server known as silver ant you can easily get connected and start playing now for this to work you'll need to download and burn a boot disk which patches the game so you can connect to the private server once you've done this boot the disk and it will prompt you to insert your PSO disk when you load into PSO and you'll know it's making mention of the Broadband adapter so how can you actually tell if anyone's playing PSO well there are a few ways to do this but for me the easiest way is to go to the silverrand.net website and look at the server status on the left hand side as you can see there are some people that are playing on the Altamira server selecting into Altamira in the game means I can see and join other people's games now unfortunately I can't join these games because I'm too low level but at least there is a small group of people that are continuing to play PSO on silverant.net and this is pretty awesome I believe that this server also allows for other clients to get connected in other words those people coming from a Nintendo GameCube can also connect to silverant.net and play with Dreamcast players which in of itself is pretty awesome so yeah having a Sega Dreamcast a Broadband adapter a keyboard and a copy of PSO means that PSO lives on forever and that's pretty damn cool so in conclusion getting online and playing games with a Broadband adapter for the Dreamcast in 2022 is fun it's pointless but it works and the fact that you can still do this is quite awesome the community that continues to support the Dreamcast and provides the means to play games online with the Dreamcast is incredible I personally would love to see patches come out that enable Broadband adapter support for more games but of course I do understand that this requires research and reverse engineering and in some cases it's just not feasible and finally the Broadband adapter has other uses that we will cover in a future episode it's a handy tool not only for Homebrew development and pushing code directly to the Dreamcast it's also a very useful tool for ripping Dreamcast games directly from disk to your PC but that's going to be all for today's episode what do you think about the Broadband adapter and online gaming on the Sega Dreamcast in 2022 do you think it's a pointless exercise a passing curiosity or something that you may be interested in taking a look at let me know your thoughts in the comments below but as always if you like this episode don't forget to leave me a thumbs up and I'll catch you guys in the next video bye for now [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 463,241

Keywords: sega dreamcast, dreamcast, retro gaming, bba, broadband adapter, dc, sega, mvg, modern vintage gamer, xdp, web browser, quake, quake 3, arena, pso, phantasy star online 2, internet, broadband, retro, gaming, video games, online in 2022

Id: tQFrIhwT4Cg

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 07 2022