Let's play some Atomiswave games on Dreamcast!

As discussed in a recent article here at The Dreamcast Junkyard, Dreamcast-Talk forum members megavolt85 and yzb have been porting Atomiswave games to the Dreamcast. While many people reading this will no doubt get a lot of joy from playing these esoteric titles on an emulator - as did I initially - we thought we should get these titles running on an actual Dreamcast and see how they play with a standard HKT-7700 gripped in our mitts. So that's what we did!

Below is the fruit of our labour, which in reality was no more difficult than grabbing the various GDI files for games such as Dolphin Blue, Maximum Speed, King of Fighters XI, Samurai Shodown VI, Faster than Speed and Metal Slug 6, and dropping them onto the Compact Flash card which slots nicely into the side of the Compact Flash modded Dreamcast. Booting through DreamShell allows you to navigate to the files on the storage and simply boot them as you would any other game. I'm pretty sure this would work with any other type of solid state storage device you may have in your Dreamcast too, so let us know in the comments if it works with things like MODE or GDEmu. If you have any specific questions though, be sure to head to the FAQ on Dreamcast-Talk. Enough waffle, enjoy the video below!

Have you tried any of these games? If so, what are you thoughts? And are there any hidden gems on the Atomiswave crying out to be ported to the Dreamcast? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to head to Dreamcast-Talk, join the forum and thank megavolt85 and yzb for their stirling work.

Four SD Reader Indie Gems

Dreamshell and its uses are well documented on various sites around the internet, and for me it represents one of the most interesting facets of the Dreamcast. If you aren't familiar, Dreamshell lets you boot the console into a PC-like Unix GUI and allows for the loading of various applications. Dreamshell can be burnt to a CD-R (or installed into the BIOS of the Dreamcast if you really want to) and then used alongside an SD reader to access all manner of fantastic homebrew and indie software. I did have a look at Dreamshell in the recent past, but with this post I just wanted to give some exposure to games that have been kicking around for a while but that you may have missed.

None of these games are particularly new, but if you're a recent adopter of a Dreamcast or have only recently decided to dip your toe into the world of homebrew games for Sega's final system, this article may be of interest to you. Possibly even more so if you also happen to own an SD card reader, as these games are all readily availible in ISO format and can be played simply by dropping the files onto the SD card and then executed through the Dreamshell loader interface. The internet is a fast-moving place and people join the Dreamcast community all the time, learning of the many uses for the console that Sega never intended. With this post, I really just wanted to give a mention to the games that are out there, but that rarely get a mention when people discuss this awesome machine.

Once Upon A DreamShell

I bought a DreamShell SD card reader for about £5 from an eBay seller some time last year. After a few days, it turned up in the post (in surprisingly good condition too, considering it was sent wrapped in a folded piece of A4 lined paper) and I had a quick glance at some forum posts regarding ways to use the thing. All I could fathom was that I needed to burn some disc or other, and put some files on the SD card that should be inserted into the device before implanting it into the serial port on the back of the Dreamcast. And I won't lie - it looked like too much work; my mac wouldn't burn discs that the Dreamcast would see as anything other than a music CD and I couldn't really see what the point of the contraption was anyway. And so, the SD reader went into a box and was never thought of again...until now.

The Light Fantastic

Today's post is a bit of a cop out, as it has required minimal creative input from me. Other than, y'know, browsing Youtube, watching people fire M&Ms out of their belly buttons into cups, realising what the hell I'm doing and then looking for proper stuff...like this:

Yeah, a guy with a blatantly obvious talent for electronics (and a truckload of patience, I'm guessing!) modded a VMU so that it has a cool backlit screen. Reminds me of the Game Boy Light...only smaller, and I would probably buy one if he was making them to order as it looks fantastic when plugged into the controller. I was actually planning on doing a post about this:

Please ignore the dust on the TV. The butler hasn't been in yet.

It's a Dreamcast SD card reader I managed to acquire through a very odd series of events that I won't go into here, but after wasting a shit-load of CD-Rs and trawling various forums I still can't actually work out a) how to use it; and b) what the point of it is if you've already got 90% of the DC's game library and enough VMUs to fill a quarry. I understand it can be used to run other operating systems and games from, but to be honest I'm not really overly interested in that kind of thing...so it shall remain in my box of Dreamcast-related paraphernalia as an odd little curio, alongside the tissue holder and the jar of pickled eyeballs.