Printing "Officially" From Your Sega Dreamcast was Possible All Along!

As many Junkyard readers will know, I’ve become somewhat obsessed with the possibility of printing from the Dreamcast. Back in the day, readers of UK Dreamcast magazines would write in asking if Sega had any plans to release a compatible printer for the Dreamcast, or if there was a way they could print webpages and the like from their console. Alas, a Dreamcast-branded printer was never released.

Indeed, I even turned this subject into an April Fools gag a few years ago with the alleged discovery of the Canon Dreamcast Inkjet prototype (model number 5L-00FLIRPA). This, of course, was a fake.

Official Dreamcast Magazine, issue 1.

Dreamcast Magazine (unofficial), issue 22.

You can see above that in issue 22 of the UK’s unofficial Dreamcast Magazine they even said on the record that printing from a Dreamcast was not possible. Well, here we are, all these years later, we're proving them factually incorrect! You see, there was an official Sega printer that was released only in Japan. And now I have one.

But does this mean that I can finally fulfil my dream and print off Spirit of Speed 1937 screenshots directly from my Dreamcast console? Let’s find out...

The printer in question, the “Pri Fun”, is a video hobby printer designed to capture and convert single frames of composite video into physical prints. Released by Sega in late 1995 in Japan, it’s fundamentally a rudimentary capture device that should work with pretty much anything you can plug into it with a composite cable.

At the time, Sega's educational console aimed at kids, the Pico, was pretty popular and the idea was that you could combine it with the Pri Fun to print off pictures that you'd made in the games onto photographic paper. Two games were made which officially supported the printer, Petapeta Chokkin Asoberu Zukan: Doubutsu and Sanrio Festival Tanoshii Card, but the text on the back of the box also brags that it would work with VCRs, TVs, camcorders... even a LaserDisc player! Of course, the eagle-eyed amongst you will have also spotted that along with the Sega Pico, a Sega Saturn is also displayed on the box as an option. Any game console will work with the Pri Fun as long as it outputs a composite video signal.

Unlike regular computer printers which receive precise instructions on how to print a page, this printer simply prints the current frame of video. Printing generates 4x6-inch pictures on specially adapted paper using thermal dye and each printer roll can produce up to 30 full-colour prints.

When I found out about this device, immediately my mind went into “DREAMCAST PRINTER!!” mode, and so I tracked one down from Japan. So without further ado, here's the Pri Fun printer in all its glory...

Photo brightness levels can be adjusted with these switches.

Inside the box is the printer itself, some instruction manuals, a sachet containing a cleaning wipe, a packet of printer paper, some AV cables, and the ink ribbon.

Hooking up the printer wasn’t particularly taxing. One composite cable runs from the printer to the composite-out from the Dreamcast, and then there’s a convenient signal splitter so that you can still plug the composite into your television.

Composite cables go directly from the Dreamcast into the printer.

Don't blow up your Japanese devices - use a step-down transformer!

Once all of that was taken care of, plugging the printer in at the wall (via a Japanese voltage adapter, of course; I didn’t want to blow this thing up before I’d even had a chance to print something) made the Pri Fun jump into life, immediately greeting me with an “E5” error message on its LCD display. No need to panic, a quick check of my translated instruction manual suggested that this was due to the ink ribbon not being present. So let’s install that.

Error! E5!

Loading the ink ribbon cartridge is simple, it's like inserting an NES cartridge.

With the ink ribbon installed, we were almost ready to go. For my first test print, I thought the Dreamcast’s BIOS screen would be suitable; especially as it comes complete with a date and timestamp to mark this momentous occasion in history.

It was time to insert the special printer paper into the tray and boot up the Dreamcast. When ready, you just press the button on the printer to kick things off. Upon pressing the button, the LED displays a countdown from 30 to 0 whilst the process completes. It didn’t take 30 seconds, though... the whole process actually takes between 90-120 seconds to complete. But it worked!

Look at that! The first print ever to come directly from the Dreamcast console? Who knows? But at least we know everything works, so it was time to move on to printing some game screenshots.

One thing to note about this printer is that what’s displayed on the screen needs to be as static as possible for the image to be clear. Not an issue for static menu screens, but things become a little trickier when it comes to snapshotting actual gameplay.

Ideally you’ll want to pause your game before printing a screenshot, but the problem with almost every Dreamcast game is that pressing the pause button almost certainly brings up a pause menu which hides the gameplay.

Sega, it seems, thought of this and made a “Pause Pack” available for the Pri Fun printer. It’s an additional add-on which bolts onto the back of the printer itself and allows you to pause any live input (presumably to some sort of internal memory) so that you don’t have to worry about finding a static shot to print. Unfortunately, I did not invest in a Pause Pack, and after considerable investment already just to get this far, I decided against procuring one.

The Pri Fun Pause Pack, courtesy of VideoKraken from an X post.

So we’re just going to have to be creative when it comes to screenshot prints, and there was only one game on my mind. Of course, it was the mighty Spirit of Speed 1937.

Let’s give it a whirl.

Spirit of Speed 1937 prints. A great Christmas gift for any loved one.

The fruits of my labour. Spirit of Speed 1937 screenshots printed in physical form which I will now be able to frame and hang in my office. Lovely. I’m pretty confident at least in saying that these are the world’s first screenshots of Spirit of Speed 1937 ever to be printed directly from a Dreamcast console with an official Sega printer. If that isn’t newsworthy, I don’t know what is.

Let’s fire up some more games and see what else we can print.

Blue Stinger.

Toy Commander, split into four identical images.

Sega Marine Fishing.

Sega Rally 2.

The best website on the whole internet.

It’s worth noting that despite these screenshots being somewhat monochrome, this is supposedly a colour printer. I did try cleaning everything as the manual suggests, but I think this is just the result of the ink ribbon sitting unused for over 30 years.

I'm sure a 30-year-old cleaning solution will be fine, right?

You’ll also notice that the Toy Commander print out above is four duplicates of the same image. This layout is triggered by a different button on the printer itself and is intended for use with the official Sega sticker paper which can be used with the device. This turns your printouts into four smaller stickers that you can use to decorate your school text books, or plaster all over the side of your PlayStation 2.

There’s even a screenshot of the mighty Dreamcast Junkyard as viewed via the Dreamcast’s web browser. This would legitimately have been a cool use case for the printer back in the day if you found a particularly awesome website with superbly researched and well-written articles that you wanted to print a physical copy of, for example.

***

So, there you have it, the Dreamcast printer was real after all! Well, sort of. I’m very aware that this isn’t a Dreamcast-specific product, but it is an official Sega printer and that was close enough for me to finally put this to bed; printing on the Dreamcast is (and always has been) very much a reality after all.

It’s all largely pointless in 2026, of course (not to mention expensive), but it would’ve been pretty cool to print out your favourite game screenshots for your bedroom walls, photos you’d found on the internet (no, not those sorts of photos), or even emails you’d received back in 1999, right?!

If you’d like to see the printer in action, check out the below video from our YouTube channel:

They said it wasn’t possible to print directly from the Dreamcast. And they were wrong. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some more printing to do.

How would you like to win some of these physical Dreamcast prints? All you have to do is leave a reply to the post about this article on any of our social media pages telling us what you'd print from your Sega Dreamcast, and we’ll pick a winner from random. The lucky winner will receive four prints directly from my Dreamcast. Your chance to own a little piece of Junkyard history!

These Dreamcast printed screenshots could be yours!