If Planet Ring has been 'made' online, can't other games be?

[Homers]

I find it awesome to see that homebrew work has re-born an online game. It's fantastic - never thought it was possible.

So... if Planet Ring has been made online again, can't it happen to other games? I'd love to see Soulcalibur, Jet Grind Radio, Metropolis Street Racer, Test Drive Le Mans online. What you think?

[BlueCrab]

Planet Ring was always an online game. The servers were just gone, like pretty most Dreamcast online games.

Games that did not have an online component to start with will most likely never see an online mode, at least not without running them through some sort of emulator on a PC. It is far too much work to add that sort of functionality to a game after the fact -- to the point where it is practically impossible.

[Homers]

Okay. But were these games I mentioned once online?

[BlueCrab]

I'm pretty sure that the first two never had an online mode. The others, I have no idea about.

That said, even if they did, unless the game's online protocol is extremely simplistic, I wouldn't hold out much hope for reviving it without extensive packet logs from when the game was originally online. Unfortunately, figuring out a game's protocol when you don't even know where to start is a pretty daunting task.

Planet Ring's revival was benefitted by the fact that it appears to have a relatively simple protocol (which is partially text-based) and that it uses no encryption on the connection.

Games like PSO encrypt all communications and don't really make it obvious what packets are, even if you know how to decrypt them.

EDIT: I went and looked at a list of the Dreamcast games that had any sort of online component, and none of the games you mentioned had online play. Some of them (JSR/JGR, and MSR) had downloadable content and/or rankings online, but no online play of any sort.

[Neoblast]

Planet Ring was made as if they wanted people to have it reverse engineered, a very thankful game. About all the games with downloadable content... that part of it could be brought back very easily, but it would require a place to host those sites, and probably a loader to patch the website addresses.