DreamPod Episode Zero

It's been a long time coming, but we finally pulled our collective fingers out and recorded our first podcast episode. We settled on the name DreamPod as both 'Dreamcast' and 'podcast' end in...um...'cast,' and so we just lopped that off and added the remnants together. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Anyway, the first episode is here and can be listened to now:

Future episodes will be publicised as normal but will be listed in the 'podcast' tab up there on the right, underneath the page header. We hope you enjoy the first episode and in future we intend to get members of the listenership on as guests as audience participation is something we really want to push. Big thanks must go to RetroCollect.com for the use of their server for the recording of this episode while we get our own permanent server set up.

Edit: we are now also able to bring you our episodes of DreamPod on both iTunes and YouTube, so feel free to check out the links (and leave comments/reviews!). Thanks.

Dreamcast Emulation Comes To Raspberry Pi 2

Got to be honest here - the Raspberry Pi hasn't really appealed to me at all. While I can see the point of this tiny programmable device and it's value as an educational tool, I've just never felt the need to actually purchase one. My standpoint on the the Pi may have just been shifted slightly though, because somebody has managed to get a version of the Reicast emulator up and running on the modest hardware. As reported on RetroCollect.com, the emulation isn't 100% and can get a little choppy (see TechTipster's YouTube video below for a demonstration) but from a technical perspective it's a pretty impressive feat. The Raspberry Pi 2 only costs around £30 in the UK and has decent specs including 1 GB Ram and a Cortex A7 processor, but is lacking horsepower in the GPU department. Regardless, this demonstration shows just how far technology has come - that a credit card-sized circuit board can convincingly emulate a system like the Dreamcast is nothing short of amazing. That said, nothing beats playing Dreamcast games on authentic hardware and this build of Reicast is still very early, but as a starting point the future looks very bright for this project.

You can find out more about the Raspberry Pi 2 on the device's Wikipedia entry here.

Source: RetroCollect.com

Developer Interview: Elysian Shadows' Falco Girgis

Elysian Shadows Team hit the gaming headlines in the summer of 2014 when their eponymous indie RPG Elysian Shadows made it's Kickstarter goal in a matter of weeks. Since then, Elysian Shadows Team have been a constant fixture in the gaming press due to the open and entertaining nature in which lead programmer Falco Girgis and his colleagues have kept us involved in the development process via blogs and the popular YouTube series Adventures in Game Development. Often outspoken yet never dull, Falco very kindly agreed to speak openly to The Dreamcast Junkyard and tell us a little bit more about the rest of the development team, the history of his project, his impression of other upcoming indie games, and just how Elysian Shadows has quickly become one of the Dreamcast's most eagerly awaited games...

DCJY: Could you give a little bit of background on the Elysian Shadows team – who you are and what your roles are in developing Elysian Shadows?

Falco Girgis: Right now we’re just four dudes from different countries who work together every day in our underwear via Skype, haha! Falco Girgis and Tyler Rogers are the resident rednecks, from Alabama. Falco is the one behind the fancy tech like the lights and physics. He’s the engine and toolkit developer and the resident graphics guru. Tyler Rogers marries Falco’s tech with the pixel art and audio to achieve the creative vision we’re aiming for through his Lua scripting. He’s focused more on the gameplay experience while Falco is focusing more on the technology powering the game. Patrick Kowalik and Daniel Tindall are our pixel artist and our level designer respectively. Patrick lives in Poland and Dan lives in Britain. We met both of them through our YouTube series, “Adventures in Game Development.” They both messaged us looking to join our cause.

A Closer Look At Dreameye

As mentioned here many, many times in the past, present and (probably) future, the Dreamcast has a fantastic number of peripherals - both official and third party. Just look back through our recent articles and witness the unrivalled majesty of the DreamPhoto Treamcast mouse for a good example of the latter. While that isn't technically a Dreamcast peripheral per se, you get the gist of what I'm saying...hopefully. So with this in mind let us turn our gaze, rather fittingly, to another of the Dreamcast's lesser-known peripherals: Dreameye. While it's true that our very own Gagaman wrote a short article on Dreameye back in 2009, I thought it was time that we took a closer look...

Top 5 Games That I Would Play If I Were Stuck on a Desert Island

I'm sure you've seen it before. The "what X would you take if you were stuck on a desert island?" or "What X would you Y if that was the only thing you could Y?" Or something of the sort. Those silly, annoying questions that ask you to pick a few things, not even considering the fact that picking a favourite X may cause you great emotional distress, turmoil and mental unrest and ARRGRGHRGHH...

Sorry about that.

Still, they are interesting sometimes. Trying to think of article subjects the other day, this one was a potential topic. Instead, I went with the fruitless "hidden music track" quest. That quest showed me one thing - my Dreamcast collection is surprisingly small. This top 5 would represent almost 1/4 of my collection of 23 games! Fortunately, this is a hypothetical scenario, so I can give myself all the Dreamcast games, even the unreleased ones. I could even give myself a Dreamcast 2!

Deciding this list depends solely on one thing: replayability. (Or replay value, if you want to be a hater.) Can I play this game many times without getting bored? Can I learn speed-running techniques to learn and master the game? Can I find some wicked glitches to totally break the game? Also, soundtracks are an important consideration. Despite this, it's still rather difficult to imagine that scenario, given that I have over a dozen systems plus a robust emulator on my Mac.

So, in no particular order, here we go:

The Ultimate Collector's Guide

A few months ago we had a little look at the DC Collector app for iOS and came to the conclusion that it's a pretty decent way to catalogue your ever-growing Dreamcast library and track the games you may have your eye on. The way it allows users to check eBay prices and create a 'wanted' list also adds to the appeal. The thing is, not everyone has an iOS device. Fear not though - there is an alternative. And boy, what an alternative it is...

Every game is listed. Every game.

The Dreamcast Collector's Guide is a document that spans 52 pages and is the culmination of over 3 years of work by it's creator Mike Phelan. Currently at revision 1.5, the Guide is a mightily impressive tome of knowledge and documents every single Dreamcast game ever released. Every single game. In every territory. Let that sink in for a moment, and then be even more gobsmacked that it also includes information on the slight deferences between various European releases of certain titles and also rates games in terms of rarity, price and special edition status. As well as this, the guide features listings for white label and promo editions, serial numbers and even a playability guide for Japanese releases - which basically allows you to gauge how much fun you'll be able to glean from an NTSC-J bargain without being able to speak (or read) Japanese. It doesn't end there though, as Mike has thought to include all of the indie releases and even includes upcoming games such as SLaVE, Hypertension and Elysian Shadows.

The very useful Japanese accessibility section

This document really is jam packed with information regarding the various release types of certain games and has detailed guides to the Sega All-Stars and Dorikore collections. The best thing about Mike's guide is that it is compiled as a PDF and can be downloaded for free and printed out. You'll need to create a free account at the hosting site in order to download it, but if you're serious about collecting for the Dreamcast, this check list is something you definitely need to have a look at.

Click here to download the DC Collector's Guide.

Treamcast DreamPhoto Mouse

It's a bit of an oddity this one. Last week I was just mindlessly browsing eBay to pass the time while I was waiting for something interesting to happen, and I came across an item I'd never seen before: a Treamcast-branded mouse called DreamPhoto. Now, most Dreamcast collectors will know all about the Treamcast and we've featured the system here at the Junkyard a few times in the past (and several members of the team here own them), but for those who are wondering if I've just misspelled the word Dreamcast, here's a very brief info burst: the Treamcast is an all-in-one clone of the Dreamcast that has it's own built-in LCD screen.

The Dreamcast Rucksack

Very recently we inducted the excellent Dreamcast messenger bag into the 'Yard. No, not the new Insert Coin pretender - the original Sega Europe messenger bag that was sent around to various retail outlets in 1999 as part of the promotional activity surrounding the system's launch. There was another item of wearable luggage created to promote the Dreamcast though - the Dreamcast-branded rucksack. That description probably isn't technically correct as the 'rucksack' only has one strap that goes across the wearer's body, but it's not a satchel or messenger bag in the traditional sense, so I guess we'll have to stick to our guns with the description. Enough words though - thanks to the planet-destroying power of the BlackBerry Q5's amazing camera, here are some extraordinarily high resolution pictures:

Defense Commander - Dreamcast Tech Demo

There are quite a few Dreamcast tech demo videos and images knocking around on the internet - from the Irimajiri 'floating head' and Tower of Babel videos to the less well-known Future City sequence (pictured below). It seems there is another one to now add to this list, but this one is quite interesting in that it is actually available to download and is fully playable: Defense Commander from Titanium Studios. I had never heard of it before seeing the video posted below, and it's only down to some pretty impressive detective work from YouTuber and Dreamcast fan pcwzrd13 that we are able to present this demonstration of it. I must point out that the word 'Defense' should really be spelt 'Defence,' but seeing as Titanium are an American studio, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt here.

Future City

Defense Commander

As stated in the video below, Defense Commander was created as a demonstration of how easy it was to port PC games to the Dreamcast due to the implementation of Windows CE. The game does look fairly basic and has overtones of the Atari Jaguar title Missile Command 3D (albeit without the massive screaming space eels), but it serves as a nice reminder of how the Dreamcast was technically very easy to simultaneously program for. After watching the video, be sure to head over to Titanium Studios' website as they do have some rather interesting (and probably long forgotten) articles relating to Dreamcast development and experimentation.

Source: PC's Dreamcastic Channel

A Rough Guide To Dreamcast Express

For a console that was only really supported for three years (more or less), the Dreamcast has left an impressive mark on the landscape of the gaming world. Looking at the system retrospectively, it's true that the Dreamcast was something of a commercial disaster for Sega even considering the record-breaking launches and relatively impressive sales figures. That said, it still amazes me the sheer volume of paraphernalia that was generated around the brand - from alarm clocks and pocket TVs to pens, jackets, mugs, bags and even tissue box holders...the amount of merchandise and superfluous branded tat that was spawned to celebrate the arrival of Sega's final console is bewildering. Some systems died on their asses simply because the public weren't aware of the thing's existence; but Sega were clearly on a mission to make sure that didn't happen to the Dreamcast, and while the platform didn't quite reach the commercial targets they had in mind, nobody can say that the firm was stingy with the marketing budget.

Marketing the Dreamcast brand was not strictly limited to stamping swirls on tea towels and mouse mats though - in Japan at least, Sega took things a little further by allowing gamers to sign up for a 'partner' service which furnished them with exclusive demo and preview discs. These could be played in their Dreamcasts and offered a sneak peek at future releases and featured exclusive bonus content that wasn't available anywhere else. This series of discs was called Dreamcast Express and seven volumes were released between 1999 and 2000, and they each comprise either a single or double GD set packed full of imaginatively-presented content.

BBC News: The Unexpected Archive

The BBC News website is a service I use on a daily basis - indeed it's usually my first port of call if I want to read the news while I drink my coffee in the morning. Interestingly though, it's also a rather unexpected mine of forgotten Dreamcast-related news items, preserved in an internet-based time capsule for future readers to pore over. I've known about this for some time now, having done quite a bit of internet-based digital archaeology and digital preservation work in a previous employment role, but I thought it might be nice to share this valuable - and reputable - information source with you.

The Games That Never Were

We're big fans of the search for unreleased and leaked beta software here at the Junkyard, and in the past we've featured plenty of material focusing on the games that were rumoured yet never saw the light of day. There are a few games that we doubt we'll ever get to see running, let alone get the chance to play - Colin McRae Rally 2.0 is one - but as the recent discovery and release of Toejam & Earl 3 shows, sometimes miracles do happen.

It seems we're not the only ones with a fascination of the subject of unreleased games though, as YouTuber and friend of the DCJY pcwzrd13 has created a series of interesting videos detailing some of the lesser (and more well-known) games that were promised, but for whatever reason never made it to shop shelves. Here are episodes 1-3 for your enjoyment...