pcwzrd13 wrote:Tom doesn't actually own any of these games with the exception of Take the Bullet which was given to him by the actual owner of the games. The owner is a friend of his who is an ex-Sega employee. He's currently looking into the legality of releasing them, so whether they will be or not is up in the air at this point. You have to keep in mind that some of these companies are still around, including Codemasters, so chances are, he would need permission from them or legally he can't release them.
That's really interesting because the legalities of all of that should be there, and is a good thing. But on the other hand if the floodgates were opened to release stuff like this and opensource, for the sake of argument, everything ever released or not released for this thing. Then the console itself would just flourish. Extremely more so than when this thing was new
What makes all this stuff so appealing to myself at least, is the amount of content and modifications the community has made for it. Even more so than any console/community out there. And i think we see posts every year saying "this is the year of the dreamcast" because slowly but steadily the console has gotten better and better with each passing year. New stuff is always being made and discovered. And games are still being brought back online. A cheap, minimal setup modern dialup solution was just developed specifically to play Sega Dreamcast online. That's really awesome
http://www.thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk/2 ... ealed.htmlLet it be known that the anonymous benefactor who allowed me to sample this game also had a lot more stuff to show me. And I was allowed to take footage. Think you've seen everything the Dreamcast has to offer? Think again! Over the next couple of weeks The Dreamcast Junkyard will be bringing you video of unreleased Dreamcast games you've never even heard of. Watch this space...
http://blog.kazade.co.uk/2015/08/sega-w ... ld-we.htmlPatents are Expiring
The Dreamcast was released at the tail end of 1998. Given that patents only last 20 years in most countries, and that most of the Dreamcast patents (e.g. for the GD-ROM) were patented in 1997, the Dreamcast will essentially be free to clone in a couple of years.
There's even better news though. The SH4 CPU which the Dreamcast uses will no longer be patented in 2016 and the Open Processor Foundation is already working on their own version. It's not unlikely that at some point in the next 3-4 years there will be a "J4" system-on-a-chip (SOC) available, it's also probable that any SH4-clone SOC will be higher spec'd than the Dreamcast was, with some kind of OpenGL ES based GPU built in.
If an SH4 based SOC was released, the rest of the problems to solve involve software, peripherals and packaging.
My point is since there is all this very current stuff still happening, eventually because of the efforts of the community the Dreamcast will pretty much gain state of permanent relevancy as a video game system. And that is really cool