Tarantino

I'm thinking of buying a few japanese Dreamcast games. What will I need to play these games on my american DC? Will a Gameshark work? If so, how?

Any help would be great...

- Jason

DLogic

I heard some cheats 'n codes discs will boot imports... there was a disc that used to be sold at game stores called "DCX loader" but there was a certain amount of Dreamcasts that were made that don't read regular CD's. Here's one that would help out. I'd be really cautious about buying one made under another title. They could be the illegitamite versions of the boot disc people are selling for profit.

I ended up going the route of modding my system because of the amount of imports i have now. And for those waiting to hit the "report" button, Dreamcast mods only allow the playback of DC discs. I've never heard of a mod-chip allowing the playback of anything other than original Dreamcast discs.

menaz

The utopia boot cd can be downloaded free.

KnightLerxst

Yup, you can dl the utopia.

Word of warning, using a boot disc burns out the motor in the system. Mine is pretty much on its last legs because of Giant Gram 2000.

Dan Average

My understanding is that you can get around the motor fatigue issue by putting a dummy file on the boot disc so the actual boot program gets pushed to the outer edge of the disc instead of the inner edge.

KnightLerxst

Hmmm never heard of that.

My dc is having problems playing all games now...sometimes they will boot...and if they do they will just reboot in the middle of a game sometimes.

But if I put the system upside down the game plays fine...go figure...

milo bloom

That sounds like the old upside down Playstation trick. Seems there was a gear that wore down on one edge when upright. When you turned it over, it used the other side of the gear, and extended the life of the system.

Dan Average

The Dreamcast reads game discs from the outside in rather than the inside out, so it expects to find the beginning of the program at the outer edge of the disc. But when you burn a really small program like a bootloader, the data gets placed on the inner rim of the disc (since traditional CD burners burn from the inside out), meaning the DC's motor has to move the laser all the way from the outer rim of the disc (where the laser is usually located) to the inner rim of the disc where the program actually is. Basically a dummy file pushes the actual program data to the outer edge of the disc and fills the rest of the disc with garbage data so the laser no longer has to move so far and the motor doesn't wear out as quickly.