+- Tendo City (https://www.tendocity.net)
+-- Forum: Tendo City: Metropolitan District (https://www.tendocity.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=4)
+--- Forum: Tendo City (https://www.tendocity.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=42)
+--- Thread: The Atomiswave is a Dreamcast (/showthread.php?tid=7385)
The Atomiswave is a Dreamcast - A Black Falcon - 10th May 2022
This is not new news, it was discovered in 2020 with further developments happening since, but... I decided to make a thread now because why not.
So, when Sega designed the Dreamcast in 1998, they being an arcade company also made an arcade version of the system. That is the Naomi. However, the Naomi has additional hardware in it, more RAM specifically, so the Naomi is a boosted Dreamcast, not a Dreamcast. The Naomi games that didn't get home ports on the DC cannot simply be converted over without major reprogramming.
Later on, Sega released a second revision, the Naomi 2. This one adds a second boosted Dreamcast attached to the first one, essentially, so it is even farther removed from the base console. If Sega had had the money to stay in the industry maybe this would have been the basis for their next machine? Who knows. It'd still be somewhat underpowered versus some of the competition but not as badly as the base Dreamcast. (The DC was a next-gen machine and has fantastic image quality, but it also has a 3 million polygons per second hard limit. The Gamecube, XBox, and Playstation 2 all can do in the 15 to 18 million polys per second range.)
Then, in 2003, Sammy released an arcade board based on the Dreamcast, the Atomiswave. This cartridge-based system was designed to kind of be like the Neo-Geo but newer, and had support from SNK. It did okay but not great and got several dozen releases in arcades over a few years before fading out. Unfortunately, though, most of the games stayed arcade-only; only the SNK stuff, which include KOF NeoWave and XI, Metal Slug 6, and Samurai Shodown Tenkaichi Kenkakuten, got home ports. For a long time, everyone assumed that like the Naomi, the Atomiswave was a hardware-enhanced Dreamcast with added RAM and such, so the games stayed arcade and arcade emulator-exclusive.
And then... someone doing some digging into the hardware realized the truth: that is not true. In fact, the Atomiswave is a Dreamcast with a cartridge port instead of a disc drive. Its hardware is identical to the original Dreamcast console, there is no additional RAM, or anything else, other than the cartridge-based games and an SRAM save solution that is entirely different from how the VMU saves. This meant that it would be easy, with only a little work, to run all Atomiswave games on the Dreamcast itself! And so in 2020 some people set off to do those conversions. The only major limitation is that cartridge port issue -- a cartridge can read data much faster than a disc, so while it can be possible to convert some of the Atomiswave games to run off of discs, not all of them can. All Atomiswave games have now been released on Dreamcast, but only some have disc conversions; the rest require a GDEMU (SD card based disc drive replacement)-modified Dreamcast. There is one third option, a SD-based stick called a Dreamshell that you can plug into the serial port on the back of any Dreamcast to attempt to run games through the serial port, but from my experience this does not work reliably; I tried, but it just keeps crashing in some of the Atomiswave games no matter what settings I use. Even just loading the Dreamshell menu was unreliable, it crashed frequently. It's a neat option and is dramatically cheaper than buying a GDEMU Dreamcast, though. Also you cannot play Metal Slug 6 and maybe a few other games through a serial port device for some reason, that game uses the serial port for something else.
So, the serial port converter's really cool and they are cheap, but ultimately, using it left me frustrated with the constant issues, either incompatibilities or crashing. From what I have read, there are some crashes in Atomiswave games on Dreamcast no matter what you do because none of the options exactly mimic the data loading speed from an Amomiswave cartridge. Ho well games work despite this varies from title to title. However, there are fewer crashes with a GDEMU than with a Dreamshell serial adapter. If I wanted a somewhat more stable experience with Dreamcast Atomiswave software, my only option was to spend a few hundred dollars on a GDEMU Dreamcast if I wanted to play all of the Atomiswave games on a Dreamcast with fewer crashes. So, last year, I bought one, set up a SD card for it... and promptly didn't use it for quite some time. Now I have and yeah, it's pretty cool. The games work and it adds several dozen high quality arcade games to the Dreamcast library, including a couple of racing games and a couple of light gun games, in addition to a bunch of fighting games, a beat 'em up, and two run & guns (Metal Slug 6 and Dolphin Blue). I actually don't have a Dreamcast light gun, so I can't test the lightgun games. There were only a very small number of original light gun games for the DC, and I've always been fine with playing House of the Dead 2 with a controller. This release probably doubled the total... it makes me much more interested in getting a DC lightgun. Someday. I also should get a DC racing wheel, playing racing games like these with a controller is not ideal, it's not precise enough. A wheel apparently also makes the DC version of Daytona USA dramatically more fun. But anyway.
However, there are two big drawbacks. Well, three including the likelihood of crashes in some titles, depending on the game and how you are loading it. But beyond that there are two more. First, because of the way the system menu works in the Atomiswave, there was no way of making any games' options configuration menus accessible. Instead, each Dreamcast Atomiswave image has the options burned into the image and they cannot be changed or viewed. So the main Metal Slug 6 image gives you a very high 15 lives per continue, who knows what difficulty level any games are set to, and such, and you can't change any of this. That's not great.
The other issue is about saving. You can't save at all. Atomiswave saving does not use the VMU memory card protocol for its SRAM high score / best time saving, it uses its own solution based on SRAM, so without significant game hacking that nobody working on these games now can do as far as I know, there is no way to add saving to the games. It sounds like it wouldn't be easy to do that. I hope somebody manages it someday though, it's really the biggest thing missing here. I know that as arcade games you wouldn't be unlocking anything or such, but saving your best times and scores would be fantastic.
Regardless, finally being able to play Dolphin Blue NATIVELY on a console, and it's the Dreamcast, is amazing! That's the big one here for me; sure, the four SNK games are good, or great in KOF XI's case, but they've all been ported to other consoles where they have features like saving and such. But Dolphin Blue hasn't. It's an arcade exclusive, as are all of the games Sammy published for Atomiswave. I much prefer using real games over emulation or downloads, that's why I have such a large collection of old games, but I just can't afford the space or cost or challenge of arcade PCB collecting. It'd have been far better if these games had had home ports back then, but they didn't, so this discovery is really, really cool.
The Dreamcast-Talk forum is where to go for all info about this.
RE: The Atomiswave is a Dreamcast - Dark Jaguar - 13th May 2022
I JUST found this thing. Why are you posting in Forum 5 of all places?! This is good info to have, let's move it where people will actually see it.
RE: The Atomiswave is a Dreamcast - A Black Falcon - 15th May 2022
It is really cool. I can't help be greedy and wish for more -- I mean, this is amazing for the games on the Atomiswave that didn't get home console ports, but for the SNK games, that did? It's neat to be able to play those games on the Dreamcast, but with the major limitations this has in saving and options, ie that it doesn't have any of either one, this is by far the worst way to play any of those games on a console. Sure, I like the Dreamcast a WHOLE WHOLE lot more than the PS2, but KOF XI is very feature-rich on PS2. This barebones version is amazing but is hardly a replacement. And such.
But for those two racing games, the lightgun games, Dolphin Blue, the beat 'em up, Sammy's fighters... it's just awesome. Sure none of those games are ones I'd put on SNK's level, but still it's really cool.
RE: The Atomiswave is a Dreamcast - Dark Jaguar - 16th May 2022
(15th May 2022, 4:57 PM)A Black Falcon Wrote: It is really cool. I can't help be greedy and wish for more -- I mean, this is amazing for the games on the Atomiswave that didn't get home console ports, but for the SNK games, that did? It's neat to be able to play those games on the Dreamcast, but with the major limitations this has in saving and options, ie that it doesn't have any of either one, this is by far the worst way to play any of those games on a console. Sure, I like the Dreamcast a WHOLE WHOLE lot more than the PS2, but KOF XI is very feature-rich on PS2. This barebones version is amazing but is hardly a replacement. And such.
But for those two racing games, the lightgun games, Dolphin Blue, the beat 'em up, Sammy's fighters... it's just awesome. Sure none of those games are ones I'd put on SNK's level, but still it's really cool.
I'm a fan of the Dreamcast and have a number of games on the thing. I also like the PS2 quite a bit, simply for it's vast library of games including, well, improved versions of SOME Dreamcast games. That said, the Dreamcast did have some things the PS2, even one with the Network and HDD addons installed, didn't. For one, it generally had better "smoothing", and playing into that visual bonus it also offered one thing almost no other console ever did, full on RGBHV output via a D-SUB15 VGA connection. Sadly, VGA as a standard doesn't support old "interlaced" modes, though the connector itself can still of course be used for such a nonstandard mode if you want to connect to NTSC supporting TVs that happen to have it (and that will detect and operate that mode through their VGA ports, like my TV happens to), but it's still a wonderful addition that works on many games. I do have a few issues with the Dreamcast as well, but the little thing all in all was a wonderful introduction to an era past the "blocky" generation of 3D. I do remember some compromises though. Soul Caliber took away Inferno's flames due to challenges porting that game from Arcade to Dreamcast.
Anyway, while I think overall I prefer the Sega Saturn these days and consider it Sega's crowning mix of old and new with a wider array of amazing games, the Dreamcast will forever hold a place of "oh no it's been two hours my VMU's batteries are dead" goodness.