5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Buying a Dreamcast

These are the top 5 things I wish I knew before buying a Sega Dreamcast. Even with all its faults, is it still worth owning one today?

[calvinspiff]

Nah, the dreamcast controller has always been one of my all time favorites

[FlyingDuckMan]

I'm still hoping for the day when Sega makes a Dreamcast Mini (and a Saturn Mini, to a lesser extent). Reportedly, the reason Sega has been holding back is because they want it to cost under $300.00.

At least Hallmark gave us a Sega Dreamcast ornament with a light-up VMU and the Emerald Coast music from Sonic Adventure for this Holiday season.

[Kaido_]

I'm digging up my old yellow nasty smoke colour dreamcast, replace the power adapter, put in the sdcard reader thing and give it a second life.

[jacobsfitnessladder]

I dont know. Alot of these sounds like personal preferences. Ive never really had memory card issues. Most games ive played used smaller blocks. As far as the ports blowing out. Ive had that issue one tume because my vmu was corrupt. Once i figured that out, never had that issue again. Never had an issue with burned games either. The space is usually freed up by taking away the online gameplay option. Lastly, the dreamcast controller is the most comfortable controller i have ever played. It feels the most natural for my hands. One correction, playstation 2 didnt kill it, sega killed it. They released too many consecutive systems in the 90s without supporting them and lost the trust of buyers. While nintendo only had super nintendo and n64, sega had genesis, cd, 32x, saturn, and the dreamcast. The ps2 was just the proof that the buyers were no longer trusting sega.

[Zurenza]

Bit late but the Dreamcast Controller's Joystick is incredible for 1 reason. Almost 2 decades before other companies started looking into it, it used Magnets to trigger the inputs. Meaning, stick drift is nearly impossible on the Dreamcast.

[doublegxg]

Great video! The Dreamcast was one of my favorite consoles growing up, and I spent many late nights delving into futuristic dungeons with strangers on Phantasy Star Online.

[janbiela]

What a great video! Usually people just praise their retro consoles but this is very important information. Would love to see a similar video about other „troublesome“ consoles like the Saturn or the N64.

[spindash]

I just made the jump into the DC a day ago. Paralysis of choice hit me and I just kinda bought Sonic Adventure (again), but that’s not stopping me from having the time of my life with it: the transparency looks genuinely lovely on Chaos


Looks like I got lucky in getting a 4x card to start with: I didn’t even know what the cycling did before this video, but that’s a huge bonus, being able to have 800 blocks instead of 200 (or I guess 1000 instead of 400, since I bought a VMU as well)

[volvoguy]

Glad I checked the comments regarding the large size of some games and with how they will fit on blank discs. Thanks!

[NewGabeOrder]

7:18 Grand Theft Auto 2 is on Dreamcast, and I have to say it's a superior port as opposed to the PlayStation version. In fact, many multiplatform games that came out on Dreamcast tend to be the best versions presentation and quality-wise.

[dbzfanatic]

Awesome video man. Dreamcast is one of my favorite game systems of all time. I owned one when it first came out back in 1999 and it felt like such a graphical leap at the time compared to the n64 and ps1. Didnt realize it had so many issues with the laser and all that. So thanks for pointing that out.

[striderskorpion]

Pirated games don't use extra compression beyond downgrading audio and/or video quality (except Skies of Arcadia). If the full game can't fit, audio will be excluded or dummied out with empty track. Videos can also be dummied out with blank files.

[bloodeagle]

1.its great
2.its great
3.its great
4.its great
5.its perfect

[aidans]

This video is absolutely amazing!! So informative, I am obsessed with retro gaming, but I haven't actually played on a Dreamcast since 2001! I've been toying with the idea of buying one!

[PopeTheRevXXVIII]

23 year Dreamcast owner here

16x cards also exist and a SD card based vmu is coming.

The quality of the CD-r for burns goes a long way. Don't burn to cheap discs.

S-video is the way to go for Dreamcast, pair it with a retrotink. A lot of the good games don't work with vga.

Region mod it there are a few ways to do this

[Matucks]

I had a dreamcast in 1999, the only thing I didn't like about it was how loud the fan was the noises the GD-ROM made, got over it all once the games started. I still got one thats modded and still love it and my kids who are 12 and 15 love it...

[Supersayainpikmin]

What's weird is, the Saturn is known for having an amazing disc drive; why they cheaped out on the Dreamcast's I will never understand.

[pogon]

In general most is true. Cannot agree about being 5th generation at all. Console was more than 10x more powerfull than ps1 which was a model 3d platform of 5th generation. It could displayed more than 3mln poligons vs 300K of PS1 in a higher resolution 480p vs 240p. Agree that ports were there around to be also moved to DC (even PS2 received these), but it didn't push the hardware to it'slimits. Games like Shenmue2, Dead or Alive2, Sonic Adventure2, MSR, Sport 2K2 have great graphics, nice physics and were complex (especially S2) which fight with the best PS2 games on par until 2002 when last official games were released outside Japan market. Obviously it was less powerfull than PS2, and there were a huge gap between XBOX (PS2 vs XBOX performance was also a pretty big gap), but DC was a console release in 1998 vs 2000 ps2 and 2002 xbox.
It worth mentioning that DC video output was cleanest from competition out of the box as it used same GPU as arcade Naomi board enabling true 480p for almost all games, where PS2 have little of them (or upscaled 480p) which looks blurry on modern TV.

[redplanet]

The main issue you'll find with it now is only having 1 analogue stick, it totally changes the way we control games from what we have grown accustomed to now.

[waynetttttt]

I always use to plug controllers in, after I booted up the game and forgot to do it.. never had a problem so far with it