
Rare Dreamcast-Powered Sega Fish Life Preserved and Released by Musée Bolo - yrochat
https://www.thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk/2019/05/rare-dreamcast-powered-sega-fish-life.html
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phren0logy
If you like that, then you need to check out SeaMan:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaman_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaman_\(video_game\))

"The narration is voiced by Toshiyuki Hosokawa in the original Japanese-
language version and by Leonard Nimoy in the English-language version. ...

The 'Seaman' is a form of freshwater fish (the color and shape of the fins
suggest that it is a Carp) with a very lifelike human face. It possesses human
mannerisms and behavior with which the player interacts. ...

Seaman is considered a unique video game in that it presents limited action.
The player's role is to feed and care for Seaman, while providing him with the
company that he needs. In fact, the player is required to check on the Seaman
every day of real time, or he could die. A portion of Seaman's knowledge is
random trivia. When he asks what the player's birthday is (and the player
responds via the microphone input), Seaman will then share significant events
which happened on that date."

It's like a super weird Tamagochi.

~~~
fuzz4lyfe
If you want to see seaman in action with some humorous commentary:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-IV8hCvsXy0](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-IV8hCvsXy0)

~~~
w_s_l
oh man I remember the hype around this game in magazines back then! It's AI
would "adapt" to your inputs and that was a 'wow' in my mind back then.

all in all Dreamcast, imho, was the perfect console. You could emulate PSX
games at higher, smoother res and sharper textures, there are emulators for
various games now.

I wonder how much it costs to pick one up now...

~~~
lostgame
The Dreamcast had an incredible array of quality software, and ran at a
beautiful full 640x480 while other consoles were for the most part stuck at
320.

~~~
ekianjo
Yeah but SEGA had already lost way too much money by then to be able to
recover its hardware branch. The Saturn utter failure hit them very very hard.

~~~
w_s_l
Yeah I've always thought it was sad. I love SEGA games, they have that
signature, clean, fast, simple feel across their characters to game design.

Sega SATURN was a major flop, even though it is an interesting system none the
less. See shenmue running on Saturn vs Dreamcast:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-YxOpZ7mDo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-YxOpZ7mDo)

So the SATURN was more than capable of outputting even PSP level graphics for
the mid 90s!, but seemed to have poor developer experience overall.

Similarly, they went all in on Dreamcast and the console was perfect and
overshadowed by PS2 and entrance of XBOX. Sony had a near monopoly hold on
gaming console market with the success of their PSX variants but failed to
keep Microsoft out while successfully doing it to other Japanese console
manufacturers, testament to the sign of a truly, cutthroat environment, for
example Nintendo's "backstabbing" that made Sony lose face and release
PlayStation as revenge.

XBOX roughly has 1/4 of the US console market, that's either something that
should've gone to Sony had they've been able to keep their market leader
position, something that traditionally has been a Japanese dominant one.

Now Google is entering the game industry with a Stream game approach but its
already questionable, because I've used it before on PS Now and the experience
has been terrible, it would intermittently degrade in visual and audio
quality, and with a poor quality Canadian ISP with a capped upload speed, the
reaction times were absolutely horrid.

I'd imagine in 20 years when Canadian ISP gets cheaper and faster with 5G
(after the world has been running on 6G), this might make sense.

Perhaps its a totally different experience if you live in a country with cheap
and super fast internet like South Korea

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beefsack
It's scary to think about all the games we're going to lose because so many
games are implemented as SAAS nowadays. As someone interested in gaming
history and the preservation of games it's actually quite saddening.

~~~
vanadium
The gaming console space up to a couple of generations ago, prior to digital
distribution, is pretty well covered (and I've contributed ~75 titles and
variations of console-based prototypes myself to the public), but most modern
gaming is going to have a much more pronounced preservation issue.

Consider also the download-only releases of console games, usually by indies
but not always, nowadays on the big 3 platforms; other than avenues like
Limited Run Games that provide for production of limited physical runs of
previously download-only titles, they're lost to the aether eventually.

~~~
unicornporn
> most modern gaming is going to have a much more pronounced preservation
> issue.

That's putting it mildly. Gameplay videos is all that's going to be left for
plenty of games.

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Jerry2
Long time ago, I read somewhere that SEGA, the company, has very little source
code and hardware development artifacts saved from their Dreamcast days (and
even earlier than that). They either lost or just junked majority of it as
time went on.

Do other companies care so little about their own history? If I was running
one of these companies, I'd save a copy of every game, console, HW development
platform and source codes of every game in a vault somewhere.

~~~
sb057
That's part of the problem; standard practice for Japanese companies until
rather recently (as in, within the past decade or so) was to physically print
out a copy of the completed game's source code and stick it in a filing
cabinet somewhere, never to be seen again. Most remasters of games released
~1995-2005 are based on beta code they happened to find on old workstations.

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rfrancois
The link to the Sega Fish Life preservation project:
[https://segafish.museebolo.ch/en/](https://segafish.museebolo.ch/en/)

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daodedickinson
Wow... I read Dreamcast Junkyard for years, starting back around 2005 or 2006,
had a few fishing games for the Dreamcast as well as the fishing controller,
and have never even heard of this one!

This one is even more interesting than some of the weird ones I know about,
like the Dreamcast in the shape of Sonic's head with the built-in TV.

So glad to see Dreamcast Junkyard is still at it after all these years! :)

Still no English Segagaga though :(

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
Even ignoring Sega's dire financial situation at the time, Segagaga had some
uh..."issues" that may have prevented its localization:

>For the most part, once you've assigned your staff, this process is fairly
automated. You pretty much just kick back, speed up time, and watch as the
numbers pile up. Sometimes different random events will pop up, like an
employee getting married (which makes them happy), getting divorced (which
makes them depressed), making friends or enemies with other programmers,
discovering efficient design tricks or coming across some nasty bugs. You can
give specific orders to each person, telling them to work harder, or to take a
break to study, or take a rest. You can give various items to alter various
stats as well, most of which just refresh their stamina. _(One of the skills,
which shows up as a Question Mark, summons an underage girl wearing a gym
uniform, who refreshes each staff member with incredible boosts.)_ [0]

[0][https://hg101.kontek.net/segagaga/segagaga.htm](https://hg101.kontek.net/segagaga/segagaga.htm)

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sandworm101
>> It is also at this stage where the player releases the seaman into the wild

Not good. Not something to teach to kids, or anyone. I cannot stand people who
think that it is acceptable to raise an animal and then "release" it into the
wild once it isn't cute anymore. Setting aside the horror of doing this to a
dog, there was also a famous Japanese cartoon where a pet raccoon was released
once it became an adult. Raccoons, like many wild animals, start off cute but
can become violent as they mature. Raccoons are now an invasive pest in Japan,
a problem that started during the years after the cartoon.

The concept of keeping animals in a cage with the intention that one animal
will eat the other is also very problematic. There is a very fine line between
a "natural behavior" and cage fighting. Zoos may feed the lions meat from a
dead Zebra. They don't release live Zebras into the lion enclosure.

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daodedickinson
You'd think somebody could print money with a Dreamcast Classic instead of all
the cheap looking Genesis things out there. I think the fact that the
Dreamcast had too many arcade-like games would make it better than that
Playstation Classic which had a lot of slow games that you can't easily jump
in and out of.

~~~
CWuestefeld
I've been playing around a lot with RetroPie recently - I built myself a full-
size arcade cabinet and everything. I started it running on a RaspberryPi, but
recently upgraded to a cheap used Dell OptiPlex.

Right now, Dreamcast seems to be the sweetspot for hardware emulation. A
sub-$100 PC (on the used market, anyway) can easily emulate a Dreamcast (for
all the games I've tried, anyway - Tony Hawk 2, DOA 2, etc), possibly even
with extra cycles to provide extra video smoothing to get rid of jaggies that
are pretty obvious at its normal resolution.

So yeah, I think this would be possible. I wouldn't think the IP for the
hardware would be an issue since it's all emulated, it's just down to the BIOS
and the games themselves.

~~~
network_boi
Can you expand on what tutorial or steps you took to build your own arcade
cabinet? I'd be curious to see pictures or the actual internals. Did you
install standard cabinet joysticks and buttons as well?

~~~
CWuestefeld
Here [1] is an album showing the final product, and the build.

I cheated and used a TankStick, but now I wish I hadn't. I think I could have
managed the wiring, and it would have gone a long way aesthetically to
integrate it all.

I designed the cabinet myself, but that was inspired by the "Vigolix" design
[2]. I scaled it up to a full 6', put in a lighted marquee, added a drawer for
keyboard and mouse.

The gross assembly took me 4-5 days, but a total of about a month overall
because of the time to paint, dry, and sand many coats. Plus, of course, the
amount of time to set up the computer hardware and software.

[1] [https://imgur.com/gallery/KpoHLDu](https://imgur.com/gallery/KpoHLDu)

[2] [https://www.instructables.com/id/A-Super-Easy-Arcade-
Machine...](https://www.instructables.com/id/A-Super-Easy-Arcade-Machine-
from-1-Sheet-of-Plywoo/)

[http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,119533.0.htm...](http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,119533.0.html)

~~~
network_boi
Looks great, thanks for sharing.

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joshstrange
Is right-click disabled on this website for anyone else?

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atomical
I love Dreamcast. I'm thinking about upgrading the GDROM drive with the FPGA
chip. It's only a matter of time before the laser fails.

~~~
vernie
The GDEMU is great and it looks like there are now tons of clones on Amazon
and AliExpress.

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bredren
I realize this may be an unpopular opinion, but this is just not an
interesting find to me. A slightly mutated game computer used to display a
virtual aquarium? Knock me over with a feather.

I get the obsession w game hardware and that it was Japanese. But this article
makes it sound like this was a lost DaVinci sketch book, and these comments
liken game design dust to the same.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
It strikes me as odd that you'd spend the time to read an article on something
you don't find interesting, and then go on to write a comment about how
uninterested you are. When I come across uninteresting things online I tend to
just skip them and carry on with my day.

~~~
bredren
And it is even further strange that you would write a comment about me writing
a comment about how uninterested I am about something. A very odd world
indeed. How far down the rabbit hole can we go?

