Remembering the Dreamcast

Spent some hours today investigating what it would take to develop a game for the Dreamcast.  How feasible that would be.  Seems like it's more work than it's worth.  I shall stick with Godot as my first real attempt at making a game.

Nevertheless, that got me in the mood to turn on my Dreamcast again and play some Sega Bass Fishing.  I've been trying to hunt down a Dreamcast fishing controller and remembered that I don't have Sega Marine fishing.  More on that later.  But when I booted up Bass Fishing I noticed that there were some severe slowdown issues.  I don't remember that being the case back in the day.  Also, it's been years since I last played this game, probably over a decade.  One real possibility is the game always ran like that.

I couldn't help but worry that this disk was having some kind of issue.  The game disk is more than 20 years old at this point.  That got me curious about burning Dreamcast games into CDRs.  A friend mentioned last week he used to do that.  I decided to look more into how that is done.  After a little bit of research, it turns out the process is surprisingly easy.

All you need is to download imgburn and a few extra files from their website and find a CDI image for the game you want.  I burned Sega Bass Fishing since I legally own a copy and made the disk.  It took about 7 minutes and I so excited to see if it would actually work.  The CD I used is from an old batch I bought like 15 years ago, so I had very little hope of this whole thing working.  And to my astonishment, it did work - at least initially - and I was thrilled.

I played the whole Arcade sequence, but I noticed that when the time would run out on the game, pressing Start took a while to load and it made the Dreamcast spin more than I would like.  My suspicion is the CD is not good enough for this thing to work like it should.

From there, I proceeded to finally order a GDEMU from AliExpress.  It's something I've been meaning to do for a while.  And I will be performing the mod in my OG Dreamcast which I bought on release day.  The console died in 2005 or so.  It stopped reading disks.  This project is one that I'm super excited to do as I would be able to have a backup of all my games.  Maybe I'll do a post about the process once the part arrives and the results.

Anyway, going back to Sega Marine fishing.  I looked at some playthroughs on Youtube and it looks somewhat worse than the original two Bass fishing games.  Like the graphics are off, and the fishing mechanic seems more rushed than the originals.  What I saw kind of made me hesitant to buy my own copy.