Old Sega Veteran just joined... what did you want to know?

Welcome, it's very nice of you offering to answer some questions so people can get 1st hand information

The Dreamcast Zip Drive, was it a working device and did it support games or only savestates and other things that could be extracted to an external unit similar to the VMU?

Did Sega ever plan a localized version of Segagaga?

Any info on Shenmue 3...............?

 

Dreamcast Zip Drive. Tell us all.

 

My question would be, do you have proof?

 

Oh, forgot about the ZipDrive. Yeah, it was real. I was friends with one of the Sega Japan execs and got to play around with it. Don't remember what function it had as I just checked it out... like I did the Dreameye.

Shenmue 3? Nope, I left when Shenmue 2 was ported to Xbox. But, I'll tell you this. We had a final, tested, and approved Shenmue 2 for the US that was scraped and never came out. The producer came around and got ever single burn and returned them to SOJ.

No, Segagaga was too Japanese for us to localize. Wouldn't have sold that much.

LOL, considering my name is in 80% of all Dreamcast games ever made? Kind of. Not posting my business cards, ID badge, or W2's but Assembler has a good idea who I am.

 

No offense, but anyone could come on here and say they worked for Nintendo/Sega/et al. In fact, it happens on forums quite often.

 

No offense taken at all. Totally agree. I think if you pay attention to what I have to sell in the next week or so here that there won't be much doubt that I'm old school. The things I have to sell are just too odd for a random collector to have.

 

How about the Sky Pace/Dreamcast box? Ever see anything of that? Also, are you still under any dreamcast NDA's?

 

OMG! That's so cool! I'm sending you a message about the NetLink... =D
Thank you for the answers.

Have you worked with the Dreamcast online games too?
What can you say about the Dreamcast Light Gun in USA?
And just one more question. What can you say about the USA Saturn controller (the big one)? (why,who, anything)

 

Hello DonnyK, it is good to know you. Firstly, thanks for answering all our questions and helping us to preserve the videogame history.

Now, for the questions...

- Did you have any contact with Sega's third party publishers and distributors such as brazilian Tectoy? Do you know if these parties had access to unreleased content?

- How about NiGHTS 2? Was a sequel ever considered?

- Were these Dremcast Controller protos real? Have you actually tried (any kind of) prototypes?

- A curiosity. We don't see many former videogame industry employees around talking about this stuff. I understand they may be forced to be silent about the industries' plans, not sharing such piece of information. So what motivates you to share your knowledge? Don't you fear of being hunted down by Sega just for telling us these bits? How did you find this forum?

Sorry if I sounded too long and boring, it wasn't my intention. Thanks again!

 

x

 

This might be a little broad, but since you were mainly involved with first party stuff, can you share any memories of earlier versions of some games? Ever saw an earlier Sonic Adventure for example, or anything else pre-Dreamcast like Saturn Shenmue?

 

oh, i also forgot the Sega CDX...
I wanted one of those so badly. An all in one Genesis/Sega CD/Portable CD Player? Hell yes!

There is a place here in Las Vegas that has one in the original box for sale, but they want $200 for it, which seems steep to me, but I am not a real collector, and so maybe it is just right.

 

200USD is a good price if it's in nice condition.

 

DonnyK,
You poor bastard. You're going to be hounded for life now. =P

 

CDX isn't a platform in its own right, though. If we start listing all the variations on hardware that Sega released we'll be here for a long time

 

Never heard of the Sky Pace. Sorry. I quit Sega 10 years ago. Not sure any NDA still matters. Sega isn't even the same company. They are just a shell of what they used to be.

I have a special place in my heart for the Netlink and yes... I worked on all the online Dreamcast titles. Nothing much to say about the light gun. Wasn't supported much. And the US controller? I have no idea.

Well, I started the industry in 1994 and will soon leave the game industry forever in a few months. I'm just selling off the last of what I have to clean out my storage and give a little bit of info while I can before I close the door forever. Once I'm gone... I'm gone. Again, the Sega today is about 10% of what Sega was when I worked there.

I think a lot of people stay hidden cause they don't want to be bombarded with questions but this is different. The Dreamcast meant a lot to a lot of people and I really loved working there. We did something special. I still talk to all my co-workers and I love each of them. I figured it would be nice to give something to the people who supported what I was doing before I cut it all off.

I've been doing this for so long, as long as people are mature and ask neat questions I don't mind answering them.

 

Man didn't he carry the player with him? I do and my consoles aren't expensive prototype stuff.

So it did play movies and nothing else? did it use the DCs HW to decode or it had most of that stuff built in?

Do you think Sega could have afforded the DVD ir they had removed the modem from the equation? Just how expensive the GD drive was compared to a regular CDROM?

No prob on the hardware, but its kinda weird for me that after pushing the GG for so many years Sega just trowed all their portable strategy away. Releasing a smaller Nomad would have given them an advantage on the market, and prolonged the life of the Genesis.

There were rumors of MS buying it, but from what you say it seems it was just that: rumors. Yet considering how much money they poured on the Xbox it might have been wiser to buy Sega and keep the DC alive.

I remember when the DC went for $99 it was selling like crazy! And even after they announced Sega was cancelling it and it was $50 people still bought it.

Don't know if MS would've been able to actually make it and sell it at that price, but hey, they threw like $5BB in that repackaged PC...

Anyways, thanks for the info Donny, it was my dream to someday work at Sega but they went down when I was around 13. Glad to know being there was as amazing as I thought it would be.

Is it brand new? or just comes with the box?

And yeah I wanted one too, everybody did:banghead:

 

Thats true.
Actually, I never rebutted before but that is why I would not consider the variations on the DS line as separate entities.

If you can put the same cartridge in the different machines, that is different. The DSi and DS play the same games.
Sega CD and 32x CD required different hardware. As did the cartridge based 32x and CD 32x.

If software is where you profit from your business, do not offer 7+ different hardware platforms for your customers to buy software!

It isnt brand new. You can see wear and tear on the box.
Since i am in ZERO position to spend that money now (I can barely pay my iPhone(s) bill every month for almost the same ammount) I have not really bothered to look and see what shape it is in... But the box is in great shape considering the age. Just the common cracks/fading that a box nearly what, 20 years should have.

I wonder, did that CDX even have anti skip so you could actually LISTEN to music on it reasonably?

I mean, just look at how freaking BEAUTIFUL this thing is!



Bigger photo here:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Sega_Multi_Mega.jpg



bigger:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Multi_Mega_mobo.jpg

 

Microsoft did sport a WebTV disc that was released in Japan but I haven't a clue what it did off hand.

To add to this:

The Zip drive did appear up as an auction on eBay not too long ago. The owner did confirm IIRC that it had actual hardware inside but since he didn't have any software to boot in the DC that could make use of the Zip drive he didn't know if it worked or not or even what it did.

From what I personally recall reading the main hope was for it to act as a multi-purpose storage space of sorts for game saves, downloads from the internet (like those normally stored on the VMU) and whatever else one could think of. I'd imagine they could have released games for it akin the the N64DD but I can tell you that from personal experience (got a Zip100 IDE in this box and a Zip250 elsewhere) that the Zip drive neither had the raw speed needed for loading anything at a decent pace (those of you familiar with using tape drives on older computers know what I'm talking about) nor the random access speeds to make them worth a damn for very much beyond what I've mentioned.

Even then Zip disks were notoriously fickle with their aptly named "click of death". Plus there was the Zip100, 250 and 750s competing with each other all with different compatibility marks with each other. Picking Zip disk media as a storage platform was an odd choice that likely had some reasoning behind it such as subsidized licensing/convenient technological designs between the zip drives themselves and the bus the drive used on the DC.

Flash wasn't large enough then or cheap enough to use (look at how small VMUs were and how much larger they never got. Then again the same happened to the XBox, PS1, PS2, etc), CD-RWs wouldn't have made any sense and regular floppies just were too small to be of any real use. Frankly the Zip drive seems to have been yet another of Sega's forward thinking ideas that just wasn't technologically feasible quite yet. Now look at the 360 and PS3 making great use of removable flash media and you have exactly what I think Sega was going for.

 

Loading a full Dreamcast game from Zip drive would've been torture. Even back in the day for PCs they were horribly slow. By the time they were starting to make headway CDRs/CDRWs were becoming affordable and made much more sense.

That said, I'm still hoping I come across a Zip drive for a quid in some charity shop as I found a bunch of my old disks recently and would love to know what's on them.