October NiGHTS

Well, it's October - tenth month in our slightly flawed Gregorian calender, and the one which heralds the drawing in of the cold, the wind, the rain and the early nights. Of course, if you live anywhere near northern England, the cold, wind and rain is something you're probably already well accustomed to, as it's always fucking pissing down. Also, October sees the Dreamcast Junkyard's 10-month anniversary! Yep - 10 whole months of DC related guff - hard to imagine it all kicked off as a hideously geekish way of cataloging my fledgling collection, only to explode into what it is today: the Inter-Dimensional Hub of Slightly Surreal Dreamcast Related Ramblings (tm). Or IDHSSDRR (tm) for short.

Speaking of hubs (not to be confused with either 'humps' or 'lady lumps'), I recently came across a rather special Dreamcast related site: Dreamcast Scene. Here's their opening statement:

"Dreamcast-Scene (abbreviated as "DCS") is not only the world's largest database for every Dreamcast related subject, from games to merchandise to home development, but we also are a publisher with bureaus in Germany, USA, Canada and Japan."

And they're not lying either my unsweetened porridge-shunning friends. I understand that this may be old news to many (all 3) of you reading this now, but I bring DCS to your attention simply because they appear to still be bringing new...er...news on Dreamcast development to the fore - indeed, their pages give details on several recent homebrew game ports - namely a conversion of Jetpak, SDL Lopan (unfortunatley not a game about Jack Burton's nemesis from Big Trouble in Little China; but rather a Mahjong game), and most impressively a brand new DC title called DreamChess - which, in a feat of crytographic naming not seen since the discovery of the Voynich Manuscript - is a chess game. Fancy that!

They also offer a wide range of 'merchandise,' including T-shirts. But let's be frank here people - if you buy one and wear it, you're sadder than someone who writes in to Points of View complaining about Smirnoff Ice and WKD adverts (you know who you are). And that's coming from the guy who bought a Dreamcast jacket off eBay, but is afraid to wear it in public. Cough.

While we're indluging in a bit of linkage (in the obvious absence of real news), why not have a little look here. It's a fabulous site called How Stuff Works, and it features a really in-depth look at how the Dreamcast operates. Before reading it, I was always under the impression that hundreds of tiny transvestites lived inside my Dreamcast and it was their endevours (and a little bit of fairy dust from the nymphs living in the plug socket) that made it possible to play Daytona 2001 and Virtua Tennis 2. Apparently, this is not so - it's something to do with 'electricity,' 'processors' and 'memory' that makes the pretty pictures appear on the screen. Go there and see for yourself!

Again, Apologies for the lack of pictures. Blogger is virtually useless at the best of times, so we'll just have to make do with layouts similar to a piece of GCSE English Literature coursework until one of the 'engineers' sorts the image problems out.

7 comments:

Porroe said...

Try posting pictures at imageshack and just using the URL to show them :)

fatherkrishna said...

I'm intrigued about new games for the Dreamcast. How does one go about procuring these tems and indeed would they be any cop compared to the behemoths produced by the likes of Sega, Namco etc?
I like the idea more than I think I would like the games...
The post is still a good 'un without the pictures. Kids don't read enough these days...

Animated AF said...

You've never been to DCS? =P
Indeed it's a great site.

fatherkrishna said...

I've been to DCS before but it all seems a bit weird. Plus there was a post on there recently about someone not posting a petition, where the 'n' word was used blatantly about said person, and it was not edited out at all. What's that all about?

Tom Charnock said...

Father Krishna - I did have some images grabbed from the DCS site, but as is now well documented, I couldn't post them. To answer you question, they are mainly homebrew games so they don't really have the visual punch of a commercially produced game, although some of them do look quite impressive - Dream Chess in particular. The process of actually getting them to run on your DC though is a long and (for me at least) brain meltingly complex one. I've never actually got anything but ready-made ISOs to run on my DC (obsidian megadrive emulator, quake, bleem! etc).

Animated AF said...

One or two of their petition's actually got results, though. Shikigami no Shiro II and Border Down may of never been ported to the Dreamcast without them!

Anonymous said...

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