So I have been writing this little play thing, kinda like a os in the cloud…..or not. you be the judge. Go check it out at Feekes.net/os. Be nice, its on a really slow slow connection.

Originally released in North America September 9, 1999, the Sega Dreamcast had an unusually short life. Sega officially stopped production in March of 2001. In this short life the gaming scene was forever changed. I received my first Dreamcast October 11th 2010, nearly ten years out of production.

The Hardware:

Not crazy powerful by today standards, but back in the release, this was a powerhouse of polygon, triangle pushing, mind blowing 3D graphics. Driving this crazy train is a screaming 200MHz processor paired with a 128bit vector graphics engine from PowerVR. 7.0 Million Polygons per second with some pretty advanced features like anti-aliasing, bump mapping, z-buffering and per-pixel translucency. All this in 24bit color and at the high resolution of 640×480. (Keep in mind, until this the standard was 320×240) This was the high definition of console gaming. Sound was driven by a Yamaha Sound Processor with an independent 32bit ARM7 RISC CPU running at 45MHz. Capable of 64 separate channels all with 128 step DSP. Translates to fantastic audio. All together the Sega Dreamcast has 28Mb of ram. 16MB of 64bit main system memory running at 100MHz, 8MB of 4x16bit video memory also at 100MHz, and 2MB dedicated to just audio.

In comparison the Playstation 2 had 294MHz processor with a custom 128bit graphics processor. Although having a clock speed of nearly 50% faster, the Playstation 2 pumped out only 60 Million Polygons per second. What stole the crown was it being the cheapest DVD player. Sega never had a chance.

Pioneering Features:

Although the Dreamcast is thought of as the failure of the industry (excluding the horrid Atari Jaguar) one thing it did was innovate. This was the first console to sport online connectivity. It included a 56k modem! Not only that, but if you were one of the few at the time, a broadband adapter was available separately. Many games exploited this feature, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and the most famous of them Phantasy Star Online. Not only did the connectivity allow multiplayer gameplay, web browsing was possible. Sega even had a keyboard and mouse attachment to make the process less painful. No, flash was not supported here either. Sega didn’t stop there, their memory card was unique to the market. The VMU (Visual Memory Unit) itself was a portable game console. Many of the games on the Dreamcast would include mini games to bring along with you. Sonic Adventure included a tamagotchi like game, Power Stone had 5 puzzle games, and even third party games were created. They ranged from Tetris clones to Space Invaders, and racing games. One hacker even went so far as to create a VMU 3d game engine which powered first person shooters, all on a memory card! Lastly, unknown to most, the Dreamcast supported VGA output. This gave the console 480p graphics. Impressive at the time.

The Games:

Is it possible to mention Sega and not think of Sonic the Hedgehog? Didn’t think so. So naturally the first game released for the new console was a true 3D rendition of Sonic. In the same manner Nintendo made Mario 64 from Super Mario Bros, Sega created Sonic Adventure from Sonic the Hedgehog. Right from the start this game moves FAST! You open up to killing your first boss and move right on into collection chaos emeralds. You would have thought we would have gathered all those dang things up by now. Controls can be a little challenging at times. The analog stick is very sensitive, and the d-pad placement could have been rethought. Even with those shortfalls the game is pure Sega joy to play.

Next up is Soul Calibur. A visually stunning fighter from Namco. Changed the fighting game genre as we know it. Sega did not need the Tekken series, they had Soul Calibur, and it carried a sword, or an axe, or a knife, or a pole, you get it. Weapons were everywhere. Quite frankly, if you own a Dreamcast, and do not have this game, you owe it to that little white box to go out and purchase it. Now! Get up and go get it.

Haven’t had time to play the games long enough to accurately judge any more. I will be posting an update later on this topic, you better believe it.

Getting Dreamcast Stuff:

Of course with a console being out of production for nearly a decade now, there is a few caveats you need to learn before you begin. You cannot go out to a store and buy accessories, games, and don’t even think about playing multiplayer online, the servers are long gone. Don’t let this stop you, there is still a huge market on the internet for everything Dreamcast. In fact, the last game produced and sold commercially on the Dreamcast was this year! Fast Striker available directly from NG:Dev.Direct. Another “feature” of the Dreamcast is the ability to play backups un moded. You read correctly, you can play burned games on any Dreamcast. Some places will point out that it is only on version 1 consoles, but I own a version 2, and it works the same. http://www.emuparadise.org/ is a good site for game backups. Of course I recommend you purchase used before you go this route.

The Dreamcast does not have a CD-ROM, but a GD-ROM. The native disc format holds 1GB and has much better read times. In most cases games did not utilize the capacity, but instead had a closed blank session towards the center of the disc to push the data to the outside, where it read faster.

Games can be had from 1-15 dollars depending on sources, so its cheap to build a library.

Closing Thoughts:

I really like this system, but it is not without faults.

Pros:

• Crazy innovative features (the VMU is just too cool)
• Fast game play at high resolutions
• Easy to use, slap a game in and go
• Fun original games (isn’t that what its all about)
• hackable to the Nth degree without modding

Cons:

• No longer in production (bummer)
• The controller could use a redesign (never gonna happen)
• DVD media support missing

If you are a classic gamer and do not own a Sega Dreamcast, go right now and buy/order/steal one. You won’t regret it.

This is a graph of 5 minute increments of fuel utilization. Pretty awesome.

—Update—

Been about 2 weeks now, 1000 miles later, and I’m average 52.5 MPG per tank. Not too shabby. I have come to understand that it is all in the acceleration, take it ease there, and your good. 2 More weeks and there will be a complete write up.

Im building a new toy. An iPhone Simulator for Android. This is not just an image put on your screen, it is an html5 simulation of the iPhone home screen. Right now it does nothing, but hey, its cool. Im building some of the apps tonight, like the calculator (dumb but easy), and the phone dialer. We will see how it goes.

UPDATE:

I have the spring in the springboard home, fun to play with, and the preliminaries for the dialer. I know that the animations for launching apps is not there, but hang tight, it will be. Video Preview iPhoneSim

Update 2:

I have the calculator app finished, and have dialer functions working. Just need to find a way to dial directly instead of invoking the android dialer.

Download it here.

I currently have a netbook, Dell Mini 1010, that lives in the living room. Its a nice little machine, 1.6ghz 1gig ram 1366×768 resolution, but all it does is browse the web, and poorly. Its just bloody slow. I had originally purchased it to replace another netbook, HP Mini 2133, because of its “speed.” It is faster than that poor via C7, but its still horrible, not to mention this one has the Poulsbo chipset.

I started thinking, what do I want in a device here at the house?

• Great Web Browsing
• eBooks, including my collection of PDF’s
• Watching Videos
• Playing Games, nothing major
• Write and edit some documents
• Great Battery Life

Going through this list, the iPad is actually the device I need. Say What? Why not just get a laptop? Answer, too much, don’t need all that, besides, they are horrible for reading books. But what about the cons?

• No Camera
• No Multitasking
• No Open Development
• Can’t play my divx/xvid video collection

Well, the camera on my netbook I have used once, just to see if it worked. Never again. As for Multitasking, I have the capability to do it on my Mini, just no processor to, so I end up in single task anyway. Multitasking may come in iPhoneOS 4.0 too. As for development, I don’t write native apps, everything I do is in web languages. Im open to do whatever I want there, especially with HTML5 and webgl support in there. As for my existing video collection, took me about 10 minutes to create an html5 application that would transcode those files into mpeg4 and have them playing. Got to love the open source community there.

Android?

I have a Motorola Droid, rooted, running 2.1. While it is a nice device, the android operating system just does not scale up to this form. There are Android based tablets coming to the market, but just lack the polish for something I just want to work. Sorry Android Dev Team, your doing GREAT!, just keep going.

As much as it pains me to say, this is actually the device I need for what I want. Dang you Apple!

Well, judging from the image you already know what this is going to say. This is what I want to change this year.

Eat Healthier: This is something I need to do. I have high blood pressure and I’m over weight, hrmmm, no brainier. I will go ahead and throw in exercise in there for good measure. If I am to go for it, might as well go big.

Write More: I recently saw an article on AnAndTech wanting more columnist. I thought to myself, I would love to do that. In order to do something like that I need to write more. Doesn’t have  to be about tech, but just more. The only way I will get better is by doing, and im sure anyone reading this gets tired of the pasted content, and the hrmmm’s and ughhh’s. Write more, and get better.

Do the Podcast: A couple of years ago now I started a podcast called NerdNews Weekly, the weekly only lasted 3 weeks and it died. I want to revive it in video form. I have all the equipment and no more excuses, time to just do it. Might not start off weekly, but I want to bring it back.

Get Organized: This just effects everything about me, I am an unorganized person. I will start off with my worklife, them move into my personal which will bleed into my OpenSource/Web life. Time to get organized and start giving back to the community more.

There you have it, what to expect from me this year. Hope I’m up for it.

Chris…

Helloooooooo.

Just wanted to post this picture of my puppy.

She is a 3 year old Boston Terrier that doesn’t realize that she is a dog.

For some really pathetic pictures visit http://picasaweb.google.com/feekes

1. Download file.

2. Rename the file to “update.zip”.

3. Plug your Droid into your computer via USB. On the Droid go to the Notifications bar and select “USB Connected” then press “Mount”.

4. Once the device is mounted, the SD card will show as a removable device on your computer

5. Put the “update.zip” file you just renamed into the root directory of your SD Card.

6. Unmount the device from your computer, and turn the Droid off.

7. Hold down the “X” key on the physical keyboard and the power button. Hold both of them down until you see a Triangle with an !.

8. Hold the Vol+ button then press the camera button and you will see a menu.

9. Using the D-pad on the physical keyboard, select the option to update with the update.zip file.

10. This should take a little bit. Once it’s done select the option to reboot the phone.

The phone will take much longer than normal to boot, don’t worry as it is normal

No I’m not picking my nose. Thanks for that Vimeo. NOTE: I say 2.1, thats obviously not what I mean.

Android 2.0.1 Update from Chris Fikes on Vimeo.

Click to see it all.

How funny is it that a Fedora Ambassador has been selected as a winner in the Windows 7 Release Party contest. Guess I’ll use the opportunity to show off the new features coming in Fedora 12! Might as well use it as an opportunity to review Windows 7.