Unreleased Dreamcast racer found on devkit, now playable
Keeping the legend alive.
Dreamcast enthusiasts have made playable an unreleased racing game found on a devkit.
Millennium Racer: Y2K Fighters was a futuristic racing game in the mould of WipEout that came out on PC in 1999. It was built by Russian developer Creat Studio and published by Cryo Interactive. Here's what it looks like on PC. Of note: racers ride floating wireframe bikes.
It turns out, a Dreamcast port was created, but never released.
Earlier this month, the owner of a live journal site who goes by the name "japanese_cake" was contacted by someone called "Kuririn84", who claimed to own a Katana Dreamcast devkit. According to their message, on the hard-drive were files for an unreleased Millennium Racer: Y2K Fighters.
According to a post by japanese_cake, these files were not for a demo or some incomplete version of the game, but a complete Dreamcast port of Millennium Racer: Y2K Fighters. Japanese_cake then released the files for use on an emulator.
Now, another Dreamcast enthusiast called Tom Charnock, posting on website The Dreamcast Junkyard, has managed to get the game up and running on a Dreamcast itself, and it runs pretty well.
"The game runs perfectly from an SD card reader on a standard Dreamcast," Charnock said.
"Simply drag the files onto your SD card and run the .gdi file to get it up and running with none of the glitching associated with an emulator."
The video, below, shows off Millennium Racer: Y2K Fighters running on a Dreamcast via an SD reader.
And in another development, another member of The Dreamcast Junkyard, Eric Fradella, created a bootable disc image that you can download and burn to a CD-R, so you can play Millennium Racer: Y2K Fighters in your Dreamcast just like any other game for Sega's console.
While Millennium Racer: Y2K Fighters is no looker, and in fact made little impact when it came out on PC 18 years ago, it's cool to see the Dreamcast community come together to unearth its unreleased port and then make it work on the console. The Dreamcast might be dead, but fans are keeping its legend alive and kicking.