The World's Tiniest Astro City Arcade Cabinet

OK, so this isn't exclusively Dreamcast related, but it does involve the Dreamcast and so that's all the reason I need to knock up a little news peice about it. For those who don't know, the Astro City is a model of arcade cabinet introduced by Sega in the early 1990s and is pretty prevalent in Japanese arcades, even today. Seems one talented chap named Adam McAmis decided to turn a 1/12th scale model Astro City cabinet into a working one designed for ants...sort of:

Yo whatup, here’s my 1/12th scale Astro City model running Third Strike via a Dreamcast that has another tiny Dreamcast on top of it. pic.twitter.com/JgeukizorT

— Adam McAmis (@Sega_AM2) April 2, 2018

In truth, the model is running off a Dreamcast that's connected to a tiny screen installed into the Astro City, which in turn was salvaged from a dashcam, and (as you'd expect) the teeny tiny controls on the Astro City aren't actually controlling the game...because they aren't real controls. Still, it's very cool to see this type of thing and while Adam states that his creation seems to get nothing but derisory comments from people passing his desk in real life, we have nothing but admiration for this little project. Well done Adam - haters gon' hate, but we love it!

Source: Twitter

Don't Pelorian!

We return to our regularly scheduled programming...

Red vs. Blue: The Definitive SG-1000 hardware guide

**UPDATE** This article has been cross-posted on our new sister site: The SG-1000 Junkyard

Did you know that Sega's logo used to be red? Back in the 60's and 70's, it used to look like this, and was proudly displayed on their early electro-mechanical arcade machines.

While the blue Sega logo we all know and love would be introduced in the late 70's and early 80's, the first version of the SG-1000 would eschew a blue colour scheme, and instead featured a bold black, red and yellow motif.

This design featured in the early promotional material, and first went on sale on 15th July 1983 (although it was rumoured to have been test-marketed in isolated prefectures as early as 1981). The original SJ-200 joystick originally came hardwired to the console for player 1, with a port for a second joystick for Player 2 (sold separately). 

The original packaging for the first black-stripe model

The Beginning of the End? Or the Start of the Dawn of a New Age of Junkyard?

We here at the Junkyard have been doing some serious navel gazing recently. After over 12 years of bringing you all the latest news, reports, stories, interviews, reviews, features, rants, opinions, podcasts, videos, and random inane musings about all things Dreamcast, we've realised two things.

Is that a Dreamcast swirl?

Reaperi Cycle - A New Indie Game For Dreamcast

Another day, another new Dreamcast game is announced. This time, it's the ambiguously titled Dreamcast exclusive Reaperi Cycle from the even more ambiguously titled Ancient Hermetic Developers Guild. This new announcement comes by way of a pretty - you guessed it - ambiguous teaser trailer that appeared on YouTube recently, along with a pretty bare bones micro site.

The trailer doesn't really give much away bar for a few shots of surrealist landscapes and some rather intriguing dialogue, although the website hints that Reaperi Cycle will be an 'isometric alchemical tale about fire, magic, merchants, statues and a temple.' So probably an isometric puzzle game then. With light RPG elements? And some nice statues dotted about the place, maybe a tasteful pot plant? Just an educated guess on my part, and probably totally wrong like most things I hazard a guess at. Either way, it's nice to have another Dreamcast title to look forward to, however ambiguous it seems. Did I mention it's all a bit ambiguous?

We'll keep you updated as and when we learn more about Reaperi Cycle. Not too sure on that name though...you know what I'm thinking, don't deny it. Reappear-y cycle? Why, what were you thinking? Filthy minded urchin.

Source: Pcwzrd on Twitter

New Book Documents Every Single Tony Hawk Game

We love a good book here at the Junkyard, especially if there's some interesting and original Dreamcast specific content contained within said tome. Naturally, due to this we're eagerly awaiting the upcoming Dreamcast books from Pix 'N Love and Read-Only Memory, but here's something you may not have heard about previously: a brand new publication that goes deep on the entire series of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater releases, which also includes the two awesome Dreamcast versions.

Tony Hawk's Gaming Domination: The Rise and Fall of the Hawk Franchise (website here) features in-depth investigations on all 17 Tony Hawk games, across 25 different platforms and promises to be the most comprehensive examination of the Tony Hawk series ever laid down. The fact that it's written by the most knowledgeable Tony Hawk expert around - Trevor 'Slateman' Esposito, founder of Planet Tony Hawk - only adds extra weight to this lofty claim.

The book includes comparisons of the Hawk games

The Dreamcast played host to a number of skating titles, but the Tony Hawk ports are regarded as the very best not only on the Dreamcast, but the finest versions of those respective titles; with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 singled out in particular for how good a conversion the Dreamcast received.

Cross Platform Online Multiplayer Added To Doom For Dreamcast

Not content with dragging large swathes of the Dreamcast's official library back online with Ooga Booga, POD 2, NFL 2K and Monaco Online (to name but a few), all-round programming genius Shuouma has turned his attention to an unofficial Dreamcast release and managed to bring it online for the first time. That game is DCDoom, an unofficial port of id's seminal first person shooter, and now Dreamcast owners can play cross platform with PC owners. Sounds pretty awesome, right?

Naturally, the pool of gamers still playing multiplayer Doom is quite small these days, and even smaller if you factor in the number of people who own a Dreamcast, a DreamPi and a copy of DCDoom...but still, the fact that this is an option is pretty interesting. Shuouma has confirmed that cross platform gaming works, stating:

"I looked at this and I have now added modem support for DCDoom. I have also tested to play
from my DC after dialup against my Linux machine running SDL Doom. Works fine. So the network-code is working. People just need to be careful when setting up the network variables."

- Shuouma

It's worth noting that you will need a specially modded version of DCDoom which Shuouma says will be released soon as a downloadable CDI file. We'll update this article when it's available and we've tested it out ourselves, but in the meantime you can find out more about this fascinating project by visiting the DC-Talk forum thread on the topic here. Thank's to Luiz Nai for the heads up on this.

Source: Dreamcast Talk