It plays Dreamcast games, too!

Shhhhhh! It's thinking!

So last week I went and bought a Dreamcast from my local thrift store. It's also my first Sega system. Back in the days of the great Nintendo/Sega console wars, I was firmly on the Nintendo side of the name-calling fence. Luckily, a friend of mine has a pretty good collection of Dreamcast titles that she lent to me while I work on building up my own collection. Good games like Shenmue, Chu Chu Rocket and Soul Caliber. But I've actually been much too busy seeing what else I can make it run to really get to playing any *actual* DC games!

First I went and burned NesterDC SE, a rich Nintendo emulator with a slick visual GUI. You can browse titles by their title screen, cartridge or box art. It has an NSF player built into it, so you can listen to any of the games' soundtracks. The emulation is pretty much 100%, so it feel just like you're playing the real deal. You can make custom playlists to organize your massive ROM collection into any categories you'd like, for instance, a favorite list of the games you actually *own*! I mean...er...of course I own all of these! You think I'd download ROMs to titles I don't own? Don't let's be silly!

I totally have all these games. Totally.

Next I downloaded a Dreamcast port of SCUMMVM, a utility which lets you play your old Lucasarts adventure games from the PC on your DC! Day of the Tentacle and Sam and Max playing on my TV screen while I relax on the couch with controller in hand? Yes please! SCUMMVM is still being tweaked, and while all the older games work just fine, newer games such as Full Throttle or Curse of Monkey Island don't play too hot or at all yet. Still a great program, and I will be keeping on top of when they update again. Maybe now I can finally beat Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, the only Lucasarts game out of the 11 I own that haven't completed. And I call myself a fan. *hangs head in shame*

My only real complaint about these great titles so far is that there is sometimes very little in terms of documentation of what you should do with the files, or even where to get the proper ones. NesterDC SE is great, it pretty much walks you through every step and even does a lot of it for you, but concerning the SCUMMVM, it took me over a day of searching, downloading, burning, and throwing away the newly burned coaster to actually get the files I needed. Very surprising given how great of a program this truly is.

I feel like I could take on the world!

With all the playing around I've been doing, I've gotten very little actual playtime with any Dreamcast games, save for Chu Chu Rocket, which so far is a blast. I remember when they re-released this title on the Game Boy Advance and I thought about picking it up, then never did. Too bad I didn't know how much fun I'd be missing. To celebrate my newfound appreciation for Sega consoles, I've video captured a Sega tribute that played on Extended Play for TechTV back when Sega announced they'd be leaving the console business. It's good to know that even though they backed out of the hardware, they are still going strong with great games.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzwCXg--GVg]