![Technical Technical](/uploads/1/2/5/3/125350301/231282878.jpg)
The good news is that you can surf the 'net on your Dreamcast. The bad news is that once the initial novelty wears out, and assuming you have another means of access, you're not going to be doing it too often.
Currently, and Sega seemed to admit this at their Gamers' Day, the Dreamcast online facilities are in a very young state; they're functional, but there are a lot of things that we hope to see in coming revisions.When you start the system up for the first time, with the web browser disk loaded in, you're taken to a screen that offers you the chance to sign up for Sega's preferred ISP partner, AT&T, or to input information for gaining access to your own ISP. Both methods of signing on are very user friendly; you'll be up and running in minutes, and once you've set up the ISP, logging on is achieved by simply starting up the Web Browser disk and telling the system to dial in.Sega's done a good job of getting users startedTesting the browser wasn't the most difficult thing in the world. See, every day, once I've made the hour long drive home from work, I sit at my computer and surf the web for gaming news (I'm a gaming news whore, as our Editor in Chief would say). A couple of days ago, instead of using my computer for this daily ritual, I had a go at it through my Dreamcast. I visited most of the pages I normally go to (whose URLs I could remember, at least), and posted a few messages to some message boards.
Free Download Tech Romancer Dreamcast ISO. Things tend to get tense the further you go into the future. While civilization reaches new heights and technical innovation is. There’s no doubt that lighting was the biggest downgrade in the Dreamcast-Gamecube conversion of Sonic Adventure. It’s easily the most noticeable downgrade in the entire game, and the most serious from a technical standpoint. Let’s compare lighting systems in SA1 and SADX and see how they perform against each other.
I also played around with downloading images, movies, and sound files.Sega hasn't provided us with a keyboard, so I was forced to use their slow, but functional software keyboard device in order to navigate and post messages. Let me say it right now, Sega probably did the best they could with the software keyboard, but a hardware keyboard is a must-have device if you intend to surf the web through your DC (a DC-compatible keyboard will be available from Sega's web page). Moving the system's cursor around the screen is achieved through the analogue and/or D-pad. This does serve as an adequate replacement for a mouse, despite the fact that pointer movement is somewhat more clumsy; actually, the analogue pad probably works better when you're laying down flat on the on the ground as I was (and if you don't like using the analogue pad for cursor movement, too bad, as Sega's not providing a mouse until next year).The pages are readable, but buggy.The web pages themselves are readable, although there are some major problems.
The system displays the text using large fonts. While this is probably required in order for the text to be visible on televisions, it messes with the formatting of the pages. It's time for High Definition TV, damnit! There's another problem with the text, and it's visible in some of the shots I've provided. With some fonts, the browser seems to display certain characters as either a bar, or as white space.
The problem doesn't usually get in the way, but on Sega's own page, 'House of the Dead 2' appears as ' O 2', and only our intern was able to figure it out.The browser is low on frills, but image support is strongImages are a different story entirely. The image support is very well done; everything is in full color, and very clean. The included magnification tool is totally cool here, as it allows you to zoom in on certain sections of the images, and does some anti-aliasing, so the zoomed in portions don't appear as a pixelated mess.So, you can go to pages, see images, and see text, but that seems to be just about it. I wasn't able to make the system display Quicktimes, MPEGs, AVIs, Midi files, or Flash-based pages (in fact, it crashed at the two flash-based pages I went to). For the record, Sega has said that the system can play WAV files, but I was kinda hoping to hear some midi coming out of the Dreamcast's powerful sound hardware. Also important to mention is that the system doesn't display Java applets (it works fine with Javascript and dynamic HTML, though); it loads the surrounding HTML page, but the applet is inactive.Another problem I noticed when browsing the pages is that the system doesn't seem to cache everything it should. I was posting a message to the Dreamcast Technical Pages message board.
It had taken me about ten minutes to write the short message using the software keyboard, and when I clicked the button to submit the message, I got a screen stating that I had typed the incorrect password. So, I pushed the back button to go back and edit the password field of the form, but the entire message had been erased. Normally, on a computer, the contents of a form seem to be kept in the memory cache, so it's still there when you backtrack through the pages.
![Dreamcast technical pages page Dreamcast technical pages page](/uploads/1/2/5/3/125350301/179268049.jpg)
This wouldn't have bugged me too much, except that I typed the message over again, resubmitted it, and was told once again that I'd typed the wrong password; in my haste to rewrite the message, I'd retyped the same incorrect password. Anyhow, typing the short message to the message board took me a very frustrating hour, and I don't think I'll do it again, especially without a keyboard.That seems to cover everything there is to know about the web browsing. The other features of the online component seem to have similar limitations. For instance, you can send e-mail, but you can't attach VMU files. This seems like an obvious feature that will hopefully be included in the next revision (if not, someone needs to smack someone at Sega across the head).Overall, the same rule seems to apply throughout the whole online component. It's very limited now, but expect Sega to iron out some of the problems as the revisions keep on coming.
You'll surf the web through your Dreamcast on 9/9/99, but unless the DC is your only way of going online, you'll use your Dreamcast exclusively for playing games, until a newer version of the browser comes out.-, IGNDC.