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A Brief Overview of Making Backup Copies of Your Sega Dreamcast Games

Despite Sega cancelling production of the Sega Dreamcast video game system several years ago, there still exists a large community of devoted fans who make backup copies of their purchased games in order to protect their investment.

The Sega Dreamcast, launched in the United States on September 9th, 1999 was hailed as the most advanced video game system ever created. Being the first 128-bit video game system, it was considered a complete powerhouse compared to Nintendo's 64-bit system and Sony's meager 32-bit Playstation.

The Sega Dreamcast's game discs are easily scratchable, and users wish they could easily make backup copies of their games to protect their investment.

As soon as the system came out, users were a bit frustrated with the media in which the games shipped on. Entitled GD-ROMs, they were basically an advanced CD capable of holding one gigabyte of data compared to a regular CDs capacity of 650 megabytes. The big problem with the discs was the fact that they were easily scratchable and even the smallest imperfection on a game disc would render it useless.

It only took fans a year before making backups of Dreamcast games was possible. A small group of devoted fans released the first boot disc, entitled the Utopia Boot Disc.

This boot disc could be burned with any computer CD writer, and was read with any Sega Dreamcast system. Unlike the Playstation, which required users to purchase an expensive modchip or professionally made boot disc, the Utopia boot disc allowed users to easily play backups on their Dreamcast system without paying for any modifications to their systems.

While most Dreamcast users wish they could produce their own backup copies of their games easily, the truth is it's actually a bit tricky to create a backup of their Dreamcast game.

As mentioned before, the Sega Dreamcast uses a very special type of game disc, which unfortunately is not readable in a standard computer CD-ROM drive. A user wishing to create backup copies of their Dreamcast discs must either build a cable, or purchase a cable that allows the game disc's data to be transferred through the serial port of the Dreamcast system.

The fact that the Sega Dreamcast uses special optical discs capable of storing a gigabyte of data can pose a problem to users creating backup copies on CD-R media.

While this is already a sophisticated procedure, the fact is you cannot burn Dreamcast GD discs, because of their proprietary nature. Instead the backups must be put on CD-R discs, which usually only hold six hundred and fifty megabytes.

Dreamcast games that are larger than 650 megabytes must be modified before they can be placed on a CD-R. Small groups in the past years have removed music and compressed movie files in order to get large games to fit on discs.

Sega Dreamcast is not an easy video game system to create backup copies of the games.

Creating backup copies of your Dreamcast games is not easy. It is best to search P2P applications and other resources for downloads of precompiled backup copies of games you already own. While Dreamcast has seen its better days, you may not be able to locate such backup copies on the internet, and the only alternative would be searching online auctions to purchase cheaply used copies of the Dreamcast games.

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James Fohl is a contributor at Free-backup.info -- the home of the popular Amazon S3 based software for online data backup -- Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/brief-overview-making-backup-copies-sega-dreamcast-games.html