Dreamcast Zip Drive Found!

Well, SEGA canned the console in march 2001, so it must been between the E3 and that...

 

Shadowlayer: I think I'm getting lost about our discussion, LOL. What I said in my message was that the concept of being just a DVD unit and other circumstances (like the units sold) doomed this device to be canned.

You said it was announced in 2000, just in the period of success of this console. But that doesn't contradict what I said, since the decision to cancel it came later. And not much later even, since SEGA already was keeping conversations with Acclaim in August / September 2000 to negotiate a port of "Crazy Taxi" for PS2 (rumours which none believed by the way).

 

Looks like he dropped it to $4k.

 

Which is still a lot for what appears to be a plastic case with a normal zip drive in it He says (very honest) that the thing works mechanically but there is no way to use it since the software support never happened.

I'd buy it for a few 100 maybe but a few 1000 for a unusable peripherial? nahhh

 

Well, that price is more interesting but, as AM2 said, still excesive (at least in my opinion). Maybe $1200-1500 would be better.

 

He tried, and I congratulate him. I know some greedy collectors on eBay that wouldn't have even lowered their price by $200, let alone $6,000.

 

If this thing hit the $1k range, I'd seriously consider it. I've long been intrigued by this unreleased peripheral ever since seeing it in the earliest ODCM mags.

 

Funny, thats what I tought I was talking about...

 

Come on, $4K is a great price for a truly one-of-a-kind item.

 

althought it's a prototype I wouldn't go as far as to say it's the only one made. It's a fully working prototype as well, which means that it largely reflects the final retail-to-be design and functionality - only needing the appropriate drivers to be written and embodied for applications to use it.

This would suggest that a select few content-providers or game developers might have had access to similar or same units for creating applications etc. - that's why you make working prototypes in the first place, to assist in the software build-up for when you launch your system.

Hence, although the man in the auction is offering this single unit he or other people he knows might own similar units.

The price of this first Zip-drive will eventually determine the "market-price" for the rest of the people who decide to sell ther prototype DC Zip drives. If it goes sufficiently high, then more owners would be encouraged to sell for a quick cash-in.

 

For me, what makes this thing most interesting is the hacking potential. Never mind duplicating the Zip Drive functions... If this thing does appear as a giant VMU to the hardware, that means there's the potential to have any IDE-compatible storage connected to the serial port. You could potentially have some other removable disk, or even a hard drive connected there. Of course, if the functionality is anything like the 4x memory card then many games might not even support it.

It would only be useful for games that need an insane amount of storage, like Dreamstud!o or that other construction kit whose name escapes me right now. Of course, the people running Linux in any serious way would have a field day with that...

 

He's lowered the price down to 4 thousand.

 

That will be extremely useful when all GD drives start failing due to age and wear, so the only way to play DC games will be through an IDE HDD.

Is sad but thats the reality, and with the DC's 10th aniversay coming next year theres going to be even less units functioning every year...

 

I ve looked into the IDE thing in the past, here on the boards, and was given some pretty good links of guys who made IDE HDDs work on the DC. This has been already done.

 

Barcode: Right. I remember that the first one (or at least the first one which was shown to people) was made by 2 students of the Nagoya University. Nowdays, the most recent attempt has came from the Dreamcast forums of www.elotrolado.net . I believe they still are trying to make it work (with homebrew, obviously; commercial games excluded).

 

I know there were a few attemps at doing it, but none was very sucessful...

But on the other hand I've been out of touch with the DC scene lately, so I dont know if someone managed to load a commercial game from the HDD.

Any news? did anybody broke that barrier?

 

If I'm not mistaken, in order to get such thing you would need to hack the BIOS or implement some kind of boot mods. I believe that idea of adding a HDD is more related to home made apps. Commercial games are designed to use the maple bus to store game data and would fail (plus the BIOS limited the storage to blocks of 256 KBs... Am I right?). And if we wanted to use a HDD to load commercial games via the serial bus, it would be too slow.

I believe that one of the most interesting projects to use the serial port of Dreamcast is this one: http://f17.aaa.livedoor.jp/~takotako/g2bus.php . No a HDD, but a BBA clone.

Getting that ZIP drive without documents or software which use it wouldn't help much in this way, I think... It would be a great collection item, but "only" that.

 

Thanks for the heads up Assembler. Would make a nice addition to the museum when it resurfaces.

 

but what would have been the benefit of it, since GD-roms can store about the same volume of data (i believe) and weren't that expensive in productuion as those zip-disks (i believe).