Dreamcast How bad of a purchase would a Dreamcast be in this day and age?

[Aldia Aldia]

At a time when Sonic Adventure could probably be emulated in a smartwatch, how wise would it be to pull a stunt such as buying a Dreamcast?

P.S: I'm not planning in doing so myself.

 

[Nebulon_Galaxy]

Depends if you already own a CRT or a CRT Monitor. No reason to own one unless you have those or want to use official accessories. Same with the PSX, kind of redundant with Duckstation looks far better and can be played with CRT Shaders without any error.

 

[dkpopman]

I think its a good investment if you're interested in the library. It emulates pretty well, but there's no emulating that controller/VMU experience.

Games for the system, especially the ones you'd want the most, are quite expensive though. They good thing about that is piracy is EXTREMELY easy on Dreamcast, all you have to do is burn a game to a CD-R and you're good to go. Just make sure the model you get is one of the ones that can handle burned discs, but thats not much of a challenge to find. Most units in circulation are able to do so as far as I'm aware.

I'd reccomend it highly, especially if you have a CRT TV like @Nebulon_Galaxy said. Even more so if you have an old 480p LCD or CRT monitor, since the console can output VGA to get that full 480p image quality.

I love my Dreamcast!

 

[ShinnAsukaYESTaylorSwiftNO]

I still have my father's old black SEGA Sports Edition SEGA Dreamcast from back in the day (sadly not the matching controller it came with though as it was not working and my mother and I sold it off)
had to get its internal clock battery replaced by professionals at eStarland but it still works like a charm
I feel like owning an actual Dreamcast is neat if you have a CRT of any kind to plug it in as the Wii can't emulate Dreamcast games well plus most models have laughable copy protection so you can burn games onto CD-Rs to play on the console relatively easily
and there's also SD adapters that plug into its serial port that play games being sold on numerous online market places as well
as for online though:
https://dreamcastlive.net/

 

[Anim8rDude Anim8rDude]

If you found a good lot locally with some good games at a decent price, I'd probably say yes.
But then I'm reminded that you probably want a couple of stuff minimum like the VGA Cable (& that TV/Monitor/Upscaler to hook it up to), a few VMUs & a whole lot of CDs to burn games with.

The authenticity of playing the games on the actual console is nice though!

 

[JellyjamLu]

I think its a worthy investment, depends on price and what extras you get too. but i'd say around 100 is fair just for the console & controller and like a game thrown in.
also I use a KAICO HD adapter which makes the image quality look very nice on modern TV's.

 

[MajesticSiN]

Honestly It would be a great purchase.
The dreamcast has a bunch of great games and it feels good playing them on the real console with the real controller.
Not knocking emulation because I love emulating everything.

 

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

You can't go wrong with a DC, my friend — you don't even have to mod the fucker to get it to play anything.