Sega Dreamcast Advice Needed!

[moonwhistle]

Power Stone 1 and 2 are excellent, the first for single player the second for 4 player mayhem.

I didn't like any of the fps games on DC, the controller was ****ty for them and I'm not into keyboards and mice.

Tonnes of great 2D shooters and fighting games, probably the best titles on the system. Project Justice is suprisingly excellent for a 2D fighter with 3D display.

You'll need a VGA box rather than a cable, the pc cable plugs into it along with the speakers.

[Pilotwings]

I have some good us/jap games if your looking any.

[rmoxon]

Yeah FPS's on the DC play horribley now we are all use to playing them with two sticks on consoles. I would still recomend MDK2 however as its the best version of the game that was released, and a fantastic game it is too.

[sj33]

I need to source myself a couple of things still though. I'm going to need to get hold of a Codebreaker or DC-X type thing so I can start buying the import games. Which do people recommend out of the two?

I think DC-X is regarded as the most compatible boot disc. I'm not very familiar with CodeBreaker though. DC-X basically replaced Action Replay as 'the' disc to have.

I complained before about the UK game cases, are the US the same as the JP games in that they come in a standard CD type case?

Yep, thankfully they're normal CD cases. UK ones are as fragile as glass

I've had a look for VGA leads and I've found a few listings, most are for some sort of VGA Box while others are for VGA Cables. From what I can tell the boxes are more general purpose connectors?

The main thing about the VGA boxes is that they allow you to connect S-video also for the handful of games that don't support VGA. That said, DC-X *can* force most of these games into VGA anyway.
The 'Performance' VGA Box specifically allows you to passthrough VGA from a PC or similar, which is convenient, but good luck finding one!

[anephric]

Where do people buy their Dreamcast games from? Which online shops still sell them or is it mainly eBay people use?

http://www.chipsworld.co.uk/dreamcast.asp?Category=All

Chipsworld still have a decent stock of DC stuff.

[fallenangle]

http://www.chipsworld.co.uk/dreamcast.asp?Category=All

Chipsworld still have a decent stock of DC stuff.

I used chipsworld years ago and gave up on them. They were always expensive and advertised DC games as being in stock that weren't. I was always getting e-mails apologising that they didn't actually have stuff I'd ordered. I suspect they didn't update their lists regularly enough - might have changed since then of course.

[JP]

I was looking at their stuff earlier and thought they looked promising! Hopefully they've improved since you used them though...

[anephric]

I ordered Zombie Revenge off them not too long ago and they had it in stock.

[Red_Breast]

This guy has some good stuff. I've never used him myself but have often thought about it. I'm really tempted by the NiGHTS pad and game advertised at the moment. I think he also has a EBay shop. Looks as though he has 3rd party VGA cables going. Bad luck with the original DC.

http://www.robwebb.clara.co.uk/shop/dc/dc.htm

[JP]

Hands up everybody who has a Dreamcast then!

Yep, that would be ME standing at the back waving my hands around in the air!!!

It's just arrived and I'm off work today. The only thing that could have been better was my Super Mario Galaxy arriving in the post.

It's strange, it feels like it used to getting new consoles. It's just not the same when you unpack new ones now for some reason.

Thanks for peoples help so far...there will be more of the silly questions I'm sure.

This has come with the standard RF lead so I'll have to get myself a VGA box as soon as possible. Found a SCART lead in my mates shop yesterday so I'll pick that up tomorrow.

I'd forgotten one thing about them...they changed the orange logo to blue over here and I never liked that change!

If this one dies today, than I'm NEVER going to buy another after this one. I think I've given the machine enough chances now.

Which first? Sonic Adventure, Quake 3, Sega Rally 2, Jet Set Radio, Virtua Fighter tb or Ecco. I'm stuck with PAL games until I sort out my DC-X...

[charlesr]

Jet Set Radio has to be your first port of call from that list!

[MikeRox]

Jet Set Radio is actually my favourite game of all time.

The Dreamcast is the best console I have ever owned, with so many great games in such a short time, but more importantly so many unique and fresh feeling games. It felt like a revolution at the time, and from day 1 there was a hell of a lot of content coming out that screamed "next gen".

Tokyo Highway Challenge ate up hours upon hours of my time, the game was so atmospheric, it was weird, the game on it's own wasn't amazing. But when you added the pumping soundtrack, gorgeous neon lighting (with trails) and beautiful cars to the atmosphere, it really became greater than the sum of it's parts.

The depressing thing is that it still feels more advanced to me than the GC, PS2 and Xbox if only thanks to how gorgeous it's VGA and RGB output is.

There are still 75+ games on the system that I'd say are well worth playing and out of a PAL list of 217, thats bloody impressive.

*Mad Dreamcast fanboy*

[JP]

Bollocks!!

Can't even get a picture on my nice shiny HD TV via RF. Tuned it in to channel 36 (Took me ages as I had to find out how to do it lol) and get no picture at all.

Tried the auto-tune as well and it's just not picking anything up at all.

I've not used anything on RF with this TV before so I'll have to dig out the instruction book in case I'm missing something.

Any ideas? I've tried the RF setting as PALI & PALG without any luck. I'll pop into town in a bit to pick up the scart lead, hopefully it was RGB rather than composite.

[Lyris]

There's not much point in using RF anyway, given how lousy the quality usually is. I've also found that European HDTVs won't display 60hz video through RF.

Also - I don't think there was a Dreamcast Composite SCART cable - only RGB. So you should be OK there. Have you considered using VGA?

[JP]

I know, it's just that it came with the RF lead and was looking forward to finally getting a Dreamcast working in my house after all these years!

Good to hear it's RGB as I'll pick one up this afternoon. I checked and they couldn't find VGA, didn't ask about S-Video though but I will today.

I'll be ordering a VGA lead when I get home, this whole Dreamcast thing has happened really quickly so I've just not had time to get this stuff sorted out yet.

Lyris, any idea what the problem with RF could be? It's only for a coupel of hours and I'm just dying to get it running!