Sega Dreamcast
Titles in this collection: 411
Tested with an actual Dreamcast using TerraOnion MODE
File count (uncompressed): 3,890
File size (uncompressed): 494.85 GB
Format: .gdi and .cdi with required files
The Sega Dreamcast was a system way, way, way ahead of its time. It was affordable arcade power, right in your home!
Sega desperately needed to hit the console market hard after the Saturn had lackluster performance against the Nintendo 64 and Sony PlayStation worldwide. This machine was definitely the one to do it, but alas... Sales fell flat, mostly due to the continued popularity and widespread support for those other two consoles and the birth of the almighty PlayStation 2. A few years into its life, it also had to fight against the Nintendo GameCube and Xbox - It just didn't have a chance. Sadly, this would be the beginning of the end for Sega's console efforts and even a partial bowing out of the diminishing arcade sector.
Sales be damned, though! The Dreamcast, as I said earlier, was ahead of its time - an extremely powerful machine. Its lean towards Sega exclusive properties, flawless arcade ports, and Japanese game studios made for a really unique, well-developed library and set of physical accessories. One of them, the VMU, was a memory card with a built-in screen, d-pad, and buttons, which let you play minigames from your save files on the go. Not only that, but the screen could show important info during gameplay while plugged in! It was also the console of choice for 2D fighting game fanatics, featuring the most definitive home ports of such games. It's the little quirks and exclusive gems that really made the Dreamcast popular in niche circles, giving the console and its roster of unforgettable characters a cult status, even to this day.
I saw the future when Dreamcast was coming, and I ended up with a launch edition and every game released at the time. How was I able to afford that, being a broke kid in their first semester of college? Well... I was so broke that I qualified for the Pell Grant. And you can guess what I spent it on instead of food... and soap... and supplies... and bus passes... and clothes. With my horrible skills at math and not having enough money to survive, I had to fold any college aspirations and move back home. However, that year of my life was chock full of some of the best experiences I ever had in the 6th generation of videogames. Worth it!
Special items included:
Unreleased prototypes, games not in English (but only if they were easy enough to play without being fluent in another language), English-patched translations, plus these extras:
"DC Checker for MP (Version 2.150)," "DC Checker for Repair (Version 2.050)," "Dreamcast Web Browser (Version 2.62)," "Dreamkey 3.0," "GD Drive Repair Program (Version 0.1)," "Middleware Conference Demo Disc," "NetLink Custom Web Browser (Version 3.0)," "Tower of Babel," and "Utopia CD Loader (Version 1.2)."
None of these extras are "games" in the typical sense - They contain multimedia programs and Dreamcast applications that I believe are important to preserve. If you're only after the actual games in this set, feel free to delete those titles named above.
Items removed:
Non-working dumps, duplicates, demo discs of games that eventually saw a release, prototypes of games that eventually saw a release, versions not in English when English was available, Japanese and European versions of titles when a North American version was available, hacks, homebrew games, and titles not in English that require proficiency in another language to play - Those can be found in my "Sega Dreamcast Language Pack."
The "Skies of Arcadia" version here has the uncensored patch, which returns various items and images from the Japanese release that were removed or changed in the NA release.
Finally, I included the JP counterparts for these games rather than their EU versions, as they are in full English and run at 60hz rather than 50hz: "Fighting Vipers 2" and "Rez."