Daytona USA back Online, Dreamcast: Year Three, Samba De Amigo in VR, and more! - Dreamcast News Round-Up July 2023

Summer is here... not that you'd know in the UK, though, because it's been raining nonstop for two weeks straight. At least the forecast for new developments in the Dreamcast community is looking promising, so much so that I thought I'd round it all up for you in this handy post. There's an overarching theme of homebrew wizardry this month, whether that be in the form of new software or hacking old software, so be sure to thank all the talented individuals mentioned for their hard work.

Dreamcast: Year Three announced!

This piece of news is one I have no shame plugging first! Last month saw the release of Dreamcast: Year Two, a book edited by Andrew Dickinson that features many written collaborations from The Dreamcast Junkyard team and others in the Dreamcast community. Well, for those who were wondering, Andrew confirmed in a tweet that Dreamcast: Year Three is coming, revealing its awesome cover, illustrated by KinkySketch, as well as saying to "expect a [Kickstarter] campaign mid-2024". The plan with this one will be to launch the campaign with much of the content already produced to avoid long waiting times for backers.

For more information on The Dreamcast Junkyard's book releases, check out our dedicated section on the website.

Debug Indie Sampler, Vol. 3

Wave Game Studios have already given away two great demo samplers, each featuring snippets of the latest and greatest in Dreamcast indie games and homebrew. Anyway, here's a heads-up to say that Debug Indie Sampler, Vol. 3 has gone up on Wave's store for pre-order, and as before, the only ask if that you pay for shipping. None of the demos have been confirmed yet (as represented by the anonymous coloured squares on the cover below), but Wave have said that "[we] won't be disappointed". Exciting! The sampler is limited to 2,000 copies and won't be reprinted, so make sure you go and grab one!

This modern art is getting out of hand...

Reinvigorating the games of old...

While you sleep, talented hackers in the Dreamcast community toil away, tweaking the inner workings of your favourite Dreamcast games to make them more accessible in various ways. You may never have knew you needed hacks like the ones discussed below until this article, so let us know if they went straight onto your GDEMU or a CD-R after reading.

VGA Dreams

This follows on from a topic brought up in Lozz’s last Dreamcast News Round-Up. TapamN has been doing some amazing work making a whole load of Dreamcast games compatible with VGA output. A bugbear of many a DC fan is the seemingly random assortment of games that don’t natively work with this oft preferred method of video output, so what TapamN is doing is a godsend. 

The most recent title to receive TapamN's VGA treatment is the The King of Fighters '99 - Evolution, the Japan-exclusive Dreamcast remake/port of The King of Fighters '99. Here's to enjoying Neo Geo-quality bouts in beautiful VGA on the best console ever made.

The King of Fighters '99 - Evolution working in VGA mode, as shown by Derek Pascarella (ateam).

Also hacked to work with VGA is survival horror title Seven Mansions - Ghastly Smile, another Japan-exclusive game that received an English fan translation thanks to SnowyAria and MrNobody back in 2019. This one is particularly handy, as I'm pretty sure it was the only fan translated game available for the console that lacked VGA compatibility, so this hack is a great addition to GDEMUs everywhere.

A full list of the VGA patches that are available and where to download them can be found on the console mods wiki. With these most recent additions, the number of Dreamcast games that remain incompatible stands at a surprisingly slim 24. 

DreamOn Demo Disc Hacks

Hello again, remember me? Sorry I have been more or less completely post-less on here and Sega Memories for quite some time, as you may or may not know I have been rather busy the last few months, but here I am again. Anyway,after my one resource of ripping video from Dreamcast games decided to become incompatible with my new telly, I haven't been able to do any Rummage reviews or anything like that for the YouTube account. Now however I have a DVD recorder that I can grab footage with, and best of all it lets me record in NTSC as well so I can record footage of Japanese and American now if I want to. That means I should be bringing some brand new Rummage videos your way, as well as possibly some video features (thinking of making a video that explains the whole Bleemcast thing, for example) in the near future. In case you missed them before, here are the Rummage videos for Bangai-O, Pen Pen, and 18 Wheeler. To think I made all of those in one week and haven't made any in almost a year. Peh.

So to test it out I've put together a video just showing off some hacks I put together last year based on a tutorial up on DreamAgain.fr that gives you access to the menu from one of those PAL Dream On demo discs which you can use as a menu for multiple full games on one CD-R. It's mind bogglingly complex and i went through quite a few CD-R's trying to put together discs where every single game worked like a charm, but I managed to make three 100% successful discs each with 3 or 4 games crammed on. I'm taking screen shots using the DC for PC emulator Chankast (in which I cannot seem to switch the language to English).

First off: "Power Stone Collection", which as the name obviously suggests features both Power Stone games. Because I also had some more room left over I squeezed two small games also by Capcom on the disc for good measure; Cannon Spike and Net De Tennis. Thanks to a rather handy Photoshop PVR texture converter (I.e: the images the Dreamcast runs )I could also open up all the textures of the DreamOn menu and give it a fancy custom look with my own fonts and such. The best thing with this set is all the game's on it feature music that resides on the data side of the disc, so they all have music intact. You see, if the music runs on the audio side of a disc, then you can't stick it on one of these multi-game discs. making these things is complex enough as it is!

Another disc idea was to put both Tokyo Extreme Racer (AKA Tokyo Highway Challenge AKA Shutokou Battle) games onto one disc. I also had some room over here so I stuck a small racing game on there; Team 17's Stunt GP. Unfortunately with Stunt GP the music is CD audio so the game plays with no music but the Tokyo games are fine.

Finally, a disc with a random assortment of games that have just one thing in common: shooting things! I was going to make a whole collection of these 'GAGAPAK's, each with their own theme, but this was the only one that got finished. It contains 4 games: Incoming, Millennium Solider Expendable, Silent Scope and Under Defeat. The latter two games have music but the two rage produced games don't (western developed games tend to rely on CD audio a lot more than Japanese ones, it seems).

For those wondering, I don't intend to release these to the many torrent sites out there, although this is mainly because I don't know how to make this content into a burnable file thingy. I mainly did these for my own amusement (although it became frustration in the end what with all the attempts they took to work) and so i can say I've kind of made something that I can run on a Dreamcast...sort of. Anywhoo, here's the video showing off all the menus to these discs. I think I'll record in Short Play quality next time..

As for more hacking from me? Eh, probably not, although I do have all the files to The Lost Golem here that I might attempt to make a translation out of...

Eh, I probably won't ever get around to it.