I bought Rayman 2 on GOG a few years ago, and it had a hard time recognizing controllers. I even tried launching it through Steam, which usually fixes all controller problems, but it still didn’t work. The Dreamcast version still looks good enough, and your controller will definitely work.

Due to licensing issues, Crazy Taxi 2 has a different soundtrack on the PC from the original Dreamcast version. The Dreamcast version is the one with The Offspring.

Sonic 3 has also had music licensing issues, so the version included in Sonic Origins has a different soundtrack. Sonic Origins was also buggy at launch, but I hear that’s fixed now. Sonic Origins also adds a bunch of new features though, so this one may be a tossup.

Question for y’all: did anyone buy the recent PC port of Metal Gear Solid 2? It seems to have both a lot of praise and a lot of complaints.

Me too; in fact I have two games for it on the way right now! Games made in the last few years! Intrepid Izzy and Postal.

Seaman is one of those games that I’m intentionally not replaying, because it absolutely blew my mind when I was ten years old, and I just want to leave it that way. I’m guessing the tricks they used to mimic conversation would be very obvious to me now, but back then it seemed completely real. That game turned your CRT TV into a fish tank with an honest to god talking fish inside of it… and Spock gave you updates about how he was doing when you checked on him after school.

related: Every Episode of Popular Space Show

This may not work out the way I want it to, but I’m actually a little excited about these tech companies making a bunch of anti-consumer decisions all at once. So many mainstream users will be looking for alternatives, and it’s going to provide a great opportunity for non-profit open source projects. It’s already happening with the fediverse suddenly becoming a viable place for discussion in the last 1.5 years. After Windows Recall was announced, I’ve seen more people talking about switching to Linux than ever before. Part of me can’t wait for unskippable Youtube ads.

This post made me realize just how few consoles had a CD flap. Is it just the Playstation, Dreamcast, Saturn, and Gamecube? Kind of weird how that was the default for CD players pretty much forever, but not many consoles went with that. PS2, Xbox, and everything after those had some kind of tray or slot. Maybe it was because they could visually stand apart from their competitors more that way.

Come to think of it, there are probably still people playing CS 1.6 today.

Whoa, turns out to be a lot of them. 14,400 as of a few minutes ago! https://steamcharts.com/app/10

That’s as many as the two most recent Battlefield games have combined right now. Battlefield 2042 currently around 8,000 and Battlefield V at 6,000. I’m sure console players would boost the Battlefield numbers quite a bit, but still. That’s pretty cool.

I downloaded an ISO of it a while ago and played through maybe third of the game. I found it to be very playable. People always mention the long load times, but it’s worth mentioning that long load times were much more common back then. (Although Half-Life on DC was even longer than usual.)

Also, I hate to be nit picky, but the blog post linked here manages to be weirdly wrong about two things and it’s barely one paragraph long, lol.

Half-Life is one of the most successful video games of the early 2000s.

Ahhh, 1998. One of the best years of the early 2000s.

Half-Life was everywhere… except one notable place: Sega’s Dreamcast. It has been a mystery as to what happened with a game destined to have a port on every possible platform.

Half-Life was a PC exclusive until the PS2 port in November 2001, ten months after the Dreamcast was discontinued. The PC and PS2 versions are still the only official versions to this day. Half-Life is not known for being on every platform. Was the author thinking of Doom, one of the best games of the mid 70s?

I think the the previous post was sarcasm. :)

Yes, recently! About two years ago I realized that I wanted more physical media in my house. I wanted stuff that I could put on a shelf, so that when someone came over, they could look at that shelf and say, “Hey, I like that album,” or “Oh, I’ve read that book.”

So I went a used bookstore near me (and immediately fell in love with it, why the hell was I not spending more time there before), and bought an extremely beat-up paperback copy of A Game of Thrones and a CD of Santana’s Greatest Hits.

When I got home I realized I had no way of listening to the CD. I didn’t own a CD player or a Blu-ray player, my computer didn’t have an optical drive, nothing. Then I remembered my old Dreamcast, which was in a box in the garage. So I got that out, set it up, and listened to Santana’s Greatest Hits on ye olde Dreamcast. CDs sound so much warmer on a Dreamcast…

That is also what renewed my interest in retro games. Wanting to listen to a music CD reminded me of how great that system was.

A homemade RISC-V fightstick? This is combining all of my favorite things! I bought a leverless controller recently (an SGF Bridget).

I’m only vaguely familiar with microcontrollers, but I know there are libraries out there for using an Arduino to make a mechanical keyboard or fightstick. Is there something similar for the CH32V305?

It sounds like the answer to “can I run this application on RISC-V” is very dependent on what the backend for that application is. What’s the backend stack for your websites? Are they static HTML sites, or do they have other components? Someone else mentioned that they built postgres and mariadb Docker images for RISC-V, but I don’t even know which programming languages can be compiled for RISC-V right now.

That is very cool, I hadn’t heard of that before. I have never done anything with a microcontroller, but I’m thinking about it for RISC-V. It sounds like that might be one of the better ways of getting a RISC-V device in practical use, until more software packages become available for a full Linux machine.

is the mainline situation any better than with ARM?

Unfortunately, sounds like “no” currently. The ones that let you install Debian usually provide some kind of custom Debian image for that specific SBC. Like you, I’m not really a fan of that. But apparently there are some desktop motherboards with RISC-V CPUs coming out. Hopefully that will increase the chance of things getting supported in mainline distros.

Wow, thanks! That’s fantastic. I hadn’t even thought about the fact that Docker images will have to be recreated for RISC-V, but it sounds like some of the most important parts of the stack are useable already. Nice to see that nginx works – I was leaning towards moving my blog to a RISC-V SBC, and it’s just a static HTML site.

That looks so cool. I was completely unaware that there were desktop motherboards with RISC-V CPUs. I thought they were all still SBCs.

The original video already had a bunch of quotes (like that one) that have lived in my head for years. This remake just added, “Mum pisses in jars!” to the list. :D

For sure. Plus, I’m a sucker for fighting games where the characters are 2D sprites instead of 3D models. The DC probably had the best lineup for that, ever.

I like the fact that there are games that are still best played on the Dreamcast, or only played on the Dreamcast, since there was no follow-up console after it, or because the ports were not great. Today there’s always a remaster, backwards compatibility with the next console, or at the very least a sequel, so games just move along with the hardware. But the Dreamcast had some games that just lived and died on that system.

Weirdly, most of these turned out to be fighting games. Probably because Capcom liked the Dreamcast.

My favorites that are still best (or only) played on that system:

• Crazy Taxi (the ports don’t have the original soundtrack, an absolute sin)
• Power Stone and Power Stone 2
• Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (literally one of the best fighting games ever, and it can’t be purchased on any systems today)
• Cannon Spike
• JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure
• Project Justice

Wasn’t Border Down the very last Dreamcast game? I think it might have been. (Well, the last official one, anyway. Homebrew games are still coming out.) I bet a lot of people missed it for that reason. I hadn’t heard of it until a couple years ago. I hear it’s good, though.