Dreamcast Lan Adapter

Does anyone happen to have the relatively useless Japanese DC lan adapter boxed complete with disc for sale?

 

good luck finding one under around 100-125USD these days.. they're rather far from useless with a pretty nice selection of games supporting them.

Must it be the JP version with disc, or will any version do (aka you just need the adapter)? I have a few suppliers who can sometimes pull off miracles...

 

Don't confuse the LAN adapter hit-0300 with the broadband adapter hit-0400.

The LAN adapter does not support any games if I'm not mistaken.

 

Yep thats correct, Its not the broadband adapter that I'm looking for.

 

oh.... I learn something new every day...
i know this question is deemed for another thread, but why the hell did sega feel the need to release 2 versions, and not update support in their games.. is there a good use for this other adapter? it smacks of the absurdity that the ps2's network adapter had in comparison to the original lan-only one that shipped with linux kits... only at least both adapters seem to work fine in ps2 games...

 

As I understand it, the two network adapters were developed (and produced) in largely the same way that the different Katana and Dural game system prototypes were. Separate teams of engineers and programmers were given slightly different specifications and slightly different goals. I imagine that Sega wanted internal competition so that the best design would logically win out, but you'd think they would shield us from that sort of information.

Come to think of it, Sega used to do that a lot, didn't they? 32x versus Saturn is the other example that comes to mind, although that was more of an east versus west sort of situation. And now I've dragged us too far off topic.

 

I was always under the impression that they felt the BBA to be too expensive (to produce and to buy) and too few games supported it. The SLA was released entirely for web browsing and was significantly cheaper. The biggest hardware difference is that the SLA does not use any proprietary chip to interface with the DC, it uses a single off-the-shelf Fujitsu LAN chip (and only ran at 10MBit max). The BBA on the other hand had a proprietary SEGA chip to interface between the expansion port and what was essentially a PCI bus (and could do 100MBit max).

They do run around the same price nowadays despite the fact that the BBA is much more useful (and faster). I believe it mostly has to do exactly with the confusion between them, with the additional bits of collector's value, dev usefulness, and game dumping usefulness.