A Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty Prototype is Running on the Dreamcast!

Just three weeks ago, a video went up on YouTube from a creator called Frogbull showing off their very own prototype of Metal Gear Solid running on the Sega Saturn. Seemingly looking to prove wrong the naysayers claimed MGS could never have run on the Saturn, the results looked very impressive, and definitely had many Sega fans intrigued to see what was next from Frogbull. Little did I expect, however, that next we'd see Metal Gear Solid's sequel, Sons of Liberty running on the Dreamcast. But don't just take my word for it, see it for yourself below!

Seeing this game in action on the Dreamcast is simply mind blowing. It was also really cool to learn that this homebrew prototype build was developed using Luke Benstead's Simulant Engine (with tools from Jayveer and SecaProject). I also loved the tribute at the end of the video to the late Hidekazu Yukawa. Excellent job, Frogbull.

While this prototype build isn't currently available to download to play for yourself, we here at the Junkyard will definitely be keeping an eye on Frogbull's future work. If you want to do so as well, go follow them on Twitter here. They also have a Patreon that you can support here.

Somebody got Cuphead playing on a Sega Dreamcast?

Yeah, you saw the title correctly. Studio MDHR's hard-as-nails indie sensation Cuphead... on Dreamcast! Well, kind of. 

This project came completely out of nowhere, posted to GitHub by user Aionmagan three days ago, and seemed to fall under everybody's radars (including mine). That was until Dreamcast-Talk forum user kremiso happened upon it yesterday and posted a thread about it.

What Aionmagan has created is a prototype of what Cuphead on the Dreamcast could be like. You control Cuphead and you can jump, dash and shoot as one of the game's bosses, Goopy Le Grande, hops around on screen. You can't kill the boss or go any further than this single screen, but the graphics look great and animation is fluid. It's basic, but it's still a really great proof-of-concept and we look forward to seeing more.

Aionmagan uploaded some footage to YouTube of them playing their prototype, so check that out below:

Click here to go to the GitHub page for this project, where you'll find links to this playable prototype in .CDI format, meaning you can easily throw it onto your GDEMU (or you might be able to burn it onto a CD-R - I've not tested that yet). Aionmagan has also uploaded the source code for the prototype, and in the comments of his YouTube upload has also stated that he is welcoming contributions if anyone wants to help with development.

Are you a Cuphead fan? Would you love to see this prototype developed further? Sound off in the comments below!

Previously unseen prototype Dreamcast logo discovered

We do love a bit of internet archaeology here at the Junkyard, and this little snippet of news has 'digital Lara Croft' written all over it. Reddit user u/LeFaggo recently posted the image above to the r/Dreamcast thread, along with a link to the original source - the Japanese Patent Office.

Could this be a hitherto unknown prototype of the Dreamcast swirl we all know and love? The discussion in the thread points out that this mysterious trademark was actually filed after the familiar Dreamcast swirl that made its way onto the final console design; but it is also noted that sometimes trademarks are filed weeks or months after their creation just to keep them in the system, so to speak.

Either way, it is an interesting glimpse at what could have been. Rather surprisingly, this image doesn't appear anywhere in the excellent Sega Dreamcast: Collected Works by Read-Only Memories. Surprising because the authors had full access to Sega's own internal archive; and the book features many concept images for the Dreamcast's shell design. Perhaps this prototype trademark was filed way back in 1998 and simply forgotten about, hidden in plain sight for over 20 years.

Thanks go to Rich from Dreamcast Years, who then alerted my my colleague Andrew Dickinson to this, who in turn WhatsApped me while I was trying to light a bonfire. Oh, and thanks of course to the ever alert r/Dreamcast community for another excellent and intriguing discovery.

New Dreamcast Prototype Found: Panic World

If you've had your eye on the Dreamcast community as of late, you'll probably agree with us in saying that 2021 is definitely the year of Dreamcast prototypes.

The latest unreleased game to enter our collective attentions comes courtesy of Mike Mika, the studio head at the California-based game studio Digital Eclipse. Last night, Mike tweeted a string of tweets that I presume came about as a result of him looking through a treasure trove of Sega stuff. The tweet that peeked everybody's attention, however, was one of a GD-R for a mysterious unreleased game 'Panic World.' "What is Panic World for Dreamcast?," asked Mike (source). Unlike many other legendary unreleased Dreamcast titles, this is one that we've never heard of before. Much speculation occurred as a result. Was it somehow related to Hello Kitty: Garden Panic? Maybe the unreleased Sega puzzler Aqua Panic? Many people hoped it was some kind of sequel to the trippy-as-hell point-and-click title Panic! for Sega CD. Basically, we were all pretty eager for Mike to answer his own question for us.

Luckily, Mike had a System Disc 2, which would allow him to boot the GD-R up on a normal Dreamcast. A few hours later, Panic World was unveiled to the world, for the first time ever. 

Turns out Panic World was a 2D puzzle game (in the vein of something like Tetris Attack) that Digital Eclipse had been developing for Dreamcast that had reached the prototype phase. Mike shared some gameplay footage, then two screenshots of the title screen, as well as what appears to be a character select screen (source). It definitely looks like it could've been quite interesting. The game's aesthetic makes me think less of a Western-developed Dreamcast game, and more of one of the odd but fascinating titles that might have been released exclusively in Japan. Check the gameplay footage and screenshots below:

pic.twitter.com/H2ubgamBkZ

— Mike Mika (@MikeJMika) September 22, 2021

Rather amusingly, Mike's fellow Digital Eclipse colleague Chris Kohler tweeted "lol let's finish it and ship it" (link). While pretty obviously said in jest, we'd still like to see this game released and preserved in some manner, even if it's just a prototype for us to tinker with on a GDEMU to see what could've been. We're sure the community are already reaching out to Mike to see if he'll dump it online for us all to take a look at, so watch this space!

What do you think of this prototype? Does it look like something you might have enjoyed back in the day? Let us know in the comments below, or on our various social media pages!

Start your engines - a Dreamcast Test Drive Cycles prototype could be released soon!

The internet is still reeling from the epoch-making news that the long lost Dreamcast port of Heroes of Might & Magic III has finally been dumped, but the potential releases of lesser-spotted cancelled Dreamcast titles don't stop there. The same collector who released Heroes has now started a Go Fund Me in order to release Infogrames' canned motorcycle racer Test Drive Cycles.

As you can see from the footage uploaded to YouTube by FatalistDC (below), Test Drive Cycles for Dreamcast is barely a game in truth - there's only one playable course and it is very early, and is thus full of graphical glitches and bugs. That said, it's still cool to see yet another game dragged back out of the abyss and now tantalisingly close to being dumped online.

The story of Test Drive Cycles is a familiar one. It was released for the Game Boy Color as a full retail game, but the PlayStation, PC and Dreamcast versions were all scrapped in mid 2000 according to Wikipedia. No real reason is given, but it probably came down to money in the end - there's no evidence to suggest the Dreamcast would have had any issues playing what looks to be a fairly bog standard arcade racer; unlike with Heroes of Might & Magic III, which was apparently cancelled due to technical limitations of the Dreamcast hardware.

As a motorcylist in real life, I'm always keen to see any digital recreation of the act of riding bikes - especially so it they also involve the Dreamcast in some way. That said, the very early nature of Test Drive Cycles doesn't fill me with too much enthusiasm. It's doing some interesting things - I especially like the  rear view mirrors effect employed...but there just doesn't really seem to be a lot to do in this prototype as is (although the way the rider appears in various bizarre seating positions after a crash is probably worth the entry fee alone!).

The GoFundMe for the release of the Test Drive Cycles is set at a rather modest €160 and is similarly being run by Jan Baumgartner - the same man responsible for the Heroes of Might & Magic III campaign and also the awesome CF modded Dreamcast we reviewed a while back.

Are you intrigued by this Test Drive Cycles prototype? Willing to chuck some cash at the GoFundMe to get your hands on it? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter.

A Rare Shenmue Prototype Appears!

It's one of those posts about something cool that's popped up on eBay! Huzzah! This is quite cool though: a prototype copy of Shenmue, complete with a smorgasbord of hastily labelled VMUs that were apparently used for demoing sections of the game to the press back in those halcyon days of the late 1990s. Indeed, the seller goes on to detail the exact circumstances in which these labelled VMUs would be used:

This is the exact bundle my husband used when he demoed to the press, including save files from multiple points in the game so that he could easily show the various scenes. This was given to him as a gift upon completion of the Shenmue project.

We don't know who her husband is, but damn this is a nice leaving gift. Edit: this has been confirmed as belonging to Mike Rhinehart, the lead tester of the NTSC-U version of Shenmue. I know for a fact that I can't afford this bundle (which also includes a System Disc), but it'll be interesting to see what the lot eventually goes for. Here's the link to the auction. Oh, and the gallery is below...


Thanks to Gameboyle for the heads up. Be sure to check out his Gameboy-tastic YouTube channel!

The Rarest Dreamcast Hardware On Earth?

*Updated! We have new info on this. Scroll to the bottom for the update*

Allow me to be presumptuous, but I'm going to guess that if you're here at the Junkyard reading articles about a console that has been out of production for well over a decade, you're either a) a Dreamcast enthusiast; b) a retro-gaming enthusiast; or c) both. For these reasons alone, I'm also going to presume that you dear reader, know a thing or two about so-called 'rare' hardware; and more specifically rare or lesser-spotted Dreamcast hardware. You know the kinds of thing I'm talking about - the Divers 2000 and the various special edition consoles that occasionally pop up on eBay for astronomical sums of money. Think the Resident Evil STARS edition, or the Hello Kitty variants that surface every now and then. Hell - you might even own one or two. There's something that I can guarantee the vast majority of people reading this don't own though. Not only that - I would wager that the vast majority didn't even know of the existence of this Dreamcast variant - I certainly didn't until I stumbled across DreamcastGaga's article a few days ago. Allow us to present the Dreamcast SFL-2000P1 Control Unit.

As mentioned in DCGaga's original article, the Control Unit originally surfaced on eBay in late 2014 and was snapped up for a mere $123 (that's about £80) by an eagle-eyed bidder. This was probably down to the fact that the item was listed rather ambiguously as 'Vintage Sega Dream Cast Japaneses Metal Console,' [sic] and not (as I would have listed it) 'Rare as Rocking Horse Shit Hitherto Unknown Dreamcast Box Thing.' 

Dreamcast & SEGA 64: A Visual Analysis

We featured the lesser-spotted SEGA 64 here at the Junkyard way back in 2006 (original post here), but that was little more than the publication of a few pictures. As stated in that original article, the SEGA 64 was first leaked in issue 8 of Saturn Power - a UK magazine that was the evolution of the awesome SEGA Power. Rather than just re-blog those pictures though, I thought it might be quite fun to actually compare the SEGA 64 to the final Dreamcast system design and have a look at how accurate these hoax console designs were. Back in 1997, access to the internet - for me at least - was very limited, so in that era there was no real way of knowing whether lo-res images leaked from 'sources in Japan' and printed in magazines were legitimate or not. With hindsight, we can deduce that the pictures of the SEGA 64 were very probably part of an elaborate wind up...but we won't let that spoil the fun! So first up, let us compare the way the systems themselves look:

The most obvious similarity between the two systems is the large round disk tray in the centre. Both feature a logo, but the final Dreamcast only features a tiny SEGA motif on the front above the controller ports. One would assume from the picture of the SEGA 64 that the round bit is a top-loading disk tray and that the two diagonal slices to the rear of the case are where the hinges would be. In this area, it is quite close to how the Dreamcast actually turned out. Similarly, the SEGA 64 features two buttons - one either side of the media door, however unlike on the Dreamcast they are labelled Power and Reset, while the Open button sits below. On the Dreamcast, we only have Open and Power, and they are on the opposite sides, while a hard reset button does not exist (you have to hold all four joypad face buttons and press Start to perform a soft reset). You could argue that the final Dreamcast shell and the SEGA 64 do look similar in some ways though - there's no denying at least a passing resemblance, especially with the large circular door and the placing of the buttons. The sides of the two machines do not really compare favourably apart from the large vents - both the SEGA 64 and the Dreamcast have these, but the Dreamcast's vents are on the front right, while the SEGA 64's are on the rear left. The fronts do not share many similarities though, as the Dreamcast features four controller ports and look nothing like the meagre two on the SEGA 64:

Speaking of controllers, here are the SEGA 64's compared with the Dreamcast pads we know and (for the most part) love:

There's a definite similarity here, as they both share some of the characteristics of the Saturn 3D pad. Both have a single analogue stick and d-pad located on the left, and do not have a right-hand analogue. The design of the analogue 'nub' on the SEGA 64 pad looks a lot more like that of the Saturn 3D controller than the DC one too. Interestingly, the SEGA 64 pad only has A, B and C buttons...although it does appear to have a Start button located in the centre. Due to the black and white nature of the images, we can only speculate at the colours used on the face buttons but the different hues of grey indicate that they were all different. Tellingly, there is also no hint of a VMU slot on the SEGA 64's pad, so probably the biggest hint that it is just a bastardised re-imagining of the Saturn 3D controller.

I guess we'll never really know if the SEGA 64 images were really leaked from SEGA Japan or whether they were the work of an overactive imagination. One thing is certain though - there are a lot of similarities in the design of both the console and the pad to the final design of the Dreamcast. Educated guesses and pot luck...or genuine blueprints for the Dreamcast...? The truth is out there. Somewhere. Probably at the bottom of this whiskey bottle. *Sob*