With all the hype and hooplah about online-only games this generation like Destiny and Titanfall, I figured it'd be a neat thing to show that one of the pioneering online consoles and MMOs is still going today thanks to some outside the box thinking and dedicated fans. For those too young to remember the days before the Internet was ubiquitous, The Sega Dreamcast was hailed as a groundbreaking console in the west for being the first, viable system to come packed in with internet access. While several prior systems had flirted with internet access, the Dreamcast was pretty much the first system to make Internet access a priority and a consideration in game development.
Arguably the flagship game for Sega's online initiative was Phantasy Star Online, recognized as the first ever console MMO (even if the actual gameplay was restricted to 4 member parties). PSO was a radical departure for one of Sega's most popular and long running series, but the departure would prove to be popular. Even today, Sega's online Phantasy Star spin-off series is still getting sequels and drawing praise.
The Dreamcast's life occurred during a time when the ways we connected to the internet rapidly progressed. The original system, in japan, launched with a 33 kps modem, while we in the west were lucky to get a bundled 56k modem. Late in the dreamcast's life, a broadband modem was introduced that brought the dreamcast into the modern age. These broadband adapters for the dreamcast are hard to come by and generally go for quite a bit of money because they can do so many cool things - aside from being able to connect to a modern broadband router and enjoy easy internet access today, they also let you network your dreamcast with a windows PC and rip disks. The Dreamcast, you see, didn't use CD-Roms, it used a proprietary disc called GD-Rom that cannot be read on a conventional CD-Rom or DVD-Rom drive. Hence, the only way to dump a DC disc is with a utility over a network using the dreamcast's actual GD-Rom drive.
Now, getting a Dreamcast with a broadband adapter online and playing Phantasy Star Online is generally not that difficult to do. Even though the official servers for PSO went down years and years ago, dedicated fans, sensing its impending death, captured and monitored network communication when playing PSO and essentially reverse engineered the serves and have private servers running today. The most popular PSO private server is probably SCHTHACK which currently has 28 people playing EDIT: This number went up to 48 during the time it took me to type this post lol. That's impressive for a console MMO decades after it released.
As I said, though, getting a dreamcast online with the broadband adapter isn't too difficult, and thus, isn't very fun. Much more interesting is getting the supplied 56k modem up and running again in today's modern environment. Old modems had a lot of particularities to them, most prominent being the way they actually "dialed out" audibly to the connecting ISP. To be certain, I haven't had a land line in about 10 years now, and certainly don't have dial up internet service. We are going to be using a Telephone line simulator to interface our dreamcast with a router and then edit our DNS settings to point to the phantasy star online private server.
TELEPHONE LINE SIMULATOR
First step is to grab a Telephone Line Simulator. These are pieces of test equipment that, as the name suggest, simulates a phone line and dial tone for our dreamcast to dial out to. I am using the TLS above, the teltone TLS-3B. Before we can get our dreamcast connected to this, we need a router to act as a "middle man" between our broadband modem/router and our telephone line simulator.
A netopia R2020 router is precisely what we need. other models of Netopia routers will work as well, but this is the one I personally have. The reason we need one of these routers is because they have the all-important phoneline in port on the back, letting us route a phone line like any eithernet line.
Connect your Teltone TSL3 to your Netopia R2020 and connect that to a PC to begin configuring the router and telephone simulator. Configure the IP address, subnet mask, default IP gateway, etc. of both the netopia router and teltone TSL3. Make sure they are on the same gateway as your broadband router - my broadband router is 192.168.1.1 so I set my netopia router to 192.168.1.2
Under IP configuration on the netopia router, disable "IP Servicing mode" to make the router act as a pure bridge.
At this point, you should have internet access through the netopia router, which is acting as a bridge from your broadband router. Access "WAN Configuration" and select "Add configuration profile" to create a profile for our dreamcast to connect with. Name this connection "Dreamcast" and under "Encapsulating profile" add the following settings:
Next, go under "IP Profile Configuration" and use the following settings:
Finally, under "Telco options" use the following settings:
Code:
Dial: Dial In Only
Dialing Prefix:
Number to Dial:
Alternate Site to Dial:
Idle Timeout (seconds): 0
CNA Validation Number:
CompuServe Login Enabled: NoSave these settings as the "Dreamcast" profile and reboot your netopia router. Connect your Dreamcast 56k modem to the TSL3 phone-in line connection and turn on your dreamcast with the DreamWeb browser inserter to configure your dreamcast's connection settings. Use the following settings to have your dreamcast dial-in to the TSL-3:
Code:
Your Real Name: (Anything will work here)
User Login: dream (Put in the user name that you typed in your connection profile)
Password: dreamcast (Put in the password that you typed in your connection profile)
Dial Up Number: 40 (Type in the number associated with the line on your phone line simulator which is being dialed. Find this out in your phone line simulator manual/documentation. On the Teltone TLS3 dialing "40" rings the first line)
Backup number: (Leave blank)
DNS1: 0.0.0.0
DNS2: 0.0.0.0
Area code you are dialing from: (Leave blank)
Long distance call prefix: (Leave blank)
Call waiting prefix: (Leave blank)
Outside dialing prefix: (Leave blank)
Modem Init: AT&F0 (usually the default. Last character is the number zero)
Dial: Tone
Dial area code: Off
Blind Dial: OffWith this done, your dreamcast can successfully dial out through it's 56k modem, interfacing with the Telephone Line Simulator which routes incoming traffic from your Netopia R2020 router, which itself is acting as a bridge from your broadband modem/router. We're almost done!
Next up, we need to configure our Phantasy Star Online to access this private server. because we're actually dialing out, rather than connecting through broadband, we will need to use a device known as the CodeBreaker (a pro action replay-like device) to manually edit the location PSO will look to the server for.
With the Codebreaker CD, enter the following codes:
Code:
022ED530
646f7370
022ED534
736e6463
022ED538
6874612e
022ED53C
0078632eThen pop in your PSO disc and connect to the internet using the dreamcast dial up profile you configured with DreamWeb.
Voila! You now have dial up access to a private phantasy star online server from your Sega Dreamcast, without having a land line or dial up ISP! The benefit of doing things this way is that you can use the dial-up settings you configured in DreamWeb on any 56k modem. This means, for example, that Sega Saturn games can still be played online, as a friend and I demonstrated earlier this year.
How about that? Due to the peer to pee nature of Sega Saturn online games, they still work online nearly 20 years later. This method is also good for playing Quake 3 online (the dreamcast version even supports KB&M and lets you play against PC players). The thing about this connection setup is its the best possible 56k connection imaginable. Real-world 56k connections never quite hit 56 kps, they were often much slower. Because this is basically tunneling in a much larger connection through your 56k modem, you get a solid, stead 56k connection at the maximum throughput, which translates into a solid 130ms latency (which is very not bad for this hardware).
Just a small tutorial for people to enjoy.
