wraggster
October 14th, 2010, 00:23
In parts 1-3 of this, I more or less spent the time discussing why I really liked the Dreamcast system. But that isn't enough by itself to convince us to back and encourage projects for a particular system. It is a big bonus though -- why produce things for a console you don't like -- but if that was it, we would have games out for practically every system that the GOAT Store carries. And, to be clear, we'll look into games for every console that the GOAT Store carries as long as they meet this criteria -- we were just especially willing to jump in headfirst with a console that we loved so much.
Anyway, the Dreamcast meets a lot of criteria that we feel is really important to properly create new titles for it in the way that we did. So what are those criteria?
The Dreamcast was legally reverse engineered. What this means is that someone figured out a way to legally go in a backdoor to the console that allowed the Dramcast to run code that was written on a Sega produced development kit. To be clear, this isn't the first time something like this occurred on a console still in production - it was done on basically every popular cartridge console - for instance, the Color Dreams games on the NES, Wisdom Tree on the SNES, Accolade on the Genesis, and since there was basically no ability for them to stop anyone, practically everyone on the 2600. This legal reverse engineering meant that if we followed a few criteria -- namely, ensuring our packaging was not confusable with standard Dreamcast games and that we used every opportunity possible to remind people that this was NOT first party software -- then we could legally produce games for the system. Now, there is a whole different layer of issues added to this thanks to a law that was pretty new at the time called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA, which made a lot of the things that had been proved to be legal in the past questionable again, but we were willing to explore the legalities of that act to produce these games.
Full article --> http://www.goatstorepublishing.com/news/17/15/Why-the-Dreamcast-Part-4/
Anyway, the Dreamcast meets a lot of criteria that we feel is really important to properly create new titles for it in the way that we did. So what are those criteria?
The Dreamcast was legally reverse engineered. What this means is that someone figured out a way to legally go in a backdoor to the console that allowed the Dramcast to run code that was written on a Sega produced development kit. To be clear, this isn't the first time something like this occurred on a console still in production - it was done on basically every popular cartridge console - for instance, the Color Dreams games on the NES, Wisdom Tree on the SNES, Accolade on the Genesis, and since there was basically no ability for them to stop anyone, practically everyone on the 2600. This legal reverse engineering meant that if we followed a few criteria -- namely, ensuring our packaging was not confusable with standard Dreamcast games and that we used every opportunity possible to remind people that this was NOT first party software -- then we could legally produce games for the system. Now, there is a whole different layer of issues added to this thanks to a law that was pretty new at the time called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA, which made a lot of the things that had been proved to be legal in the past questionable again, but we were willing to explore the legalities of that act to produce these games.
Full article --> http://www.goatstorepublishing.com/news/17/15/Why-the-Dreamcast-Part-4/