Host Dreamcast Games Online
DC online gaming still has a little life left in it, even after Sega has bailed out.
Because each Sega Dreamcast came with an included modem ( [Hack #50] ), it was one of the first consoles to support mass online gaming ( [Hack #54] ). For a while, Dreamcast online gaming was seriously hot. Unfortunately, Sega shut down the servers for most of their Dreamcast games in June 2003. Many excellent titles such as Bomberman Online, Chu Chu Rocket, Alien Front Online, and the Sega Sports titles are no longer playable on the Net because Sega has not released their server code to third parties.
This is a definite shame, but it doesn’t mean that those games are useless. There are a couple of bright spots in the Dreamcast online canon that you can still log on to and play even today.
Quake III
id’s (http://www.idsoftware.com) Quake III benefitted from synergy with the PC version. PC servers can actually host Dreamcast players, so you’ll never have trouble with anyone shutting down the official servers; you can always create your own!
To set up your own server, you’ll need a copy of Quake III for the PC as well as various extra free downloads. Then you do a bunch of tinkering. The excellent Dreamcast OnlineConsoles site has the best tutorial on how this works (http://dreamcast.onlineconsoles.com/phpBB2/content_q3_serversetup.php).
Briefly, you need to run Quake 3 v1.16n on your PC. Download the
special Dreamcast-only segapak.pk3 map file
(http://dreamcast.onlineconsoles.com/q3ss/segapak.pk3 ...
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