TE: What's the appeal of the Dreamcast for you guys? Basically, why have you even bothered with making games for this dead system that wasn't all too popular to begin with?
RT: [It's] the last Sega-made console. Ever. It's got too much appeal as a piece of gaming history to just let it die, you know?
Dan was mostly responsible for the reverse engineering of the machine. He likes to tell people that he had minimal involvement in the project to figure out the guts of the Dreamcast, but he's a smart guy. Smarter than me by far. At least as far as math/code goes. Don't let him tell you different!
DP: Let's not distort the record here. I actually had very little to do with the reverse engineering part of it. I tried really hard on a few areas and just didn't really get anywhere. There are some even smarter guys, mostly in Sweden, who did most of that. I helped nudge it along in a few places - by friendly competition, if nothing else. But they did the bulk of the work. My main contribution was to put it all together in one place and make a friendly package to let people get in there and use the knowledge. After awhile, I was really only stewarding that effort.
The most modern version of KallistiOS includes a lot of code from my hands, but I'd bet about half of it was contributed by [others in] the community. If you include all the add-on libraries, my contribution shrinks even further.
RT: I may have to butt heads with you here about the popularity of the system. I believe it was successfully marketed to a burgeoning demographic of core gamers. In that sense, it was a great console and a successful launch, which was only helped by being released almost a year prior to the PlayStation 2.
Sega's focus on the hardcore player made them a failure in the general marketplace, though, so most people see the console as a complete flop. I suppose that means it depends on how you view the console's place in the genealogy of gaming to determine its position in the grand scheme of multimedia. I won't go into this any further; I feel like I'll be talking politics, attempting to defend something that doesn't really need to be defended. The Dreamcast can just "be" for now, and I'll be OK with it.
TE: How would you describe the current state of the Dreamcast homebrew scene?
RT: I'm a little embarrassed to answer this question: I don't really keep up with the homebrew scene. That's Dan's job! I just focus on what needs to be done to complete our projects, and if we need to communicate with people, I take care of keeping those lines open.
DP: I don't particularly keep up with it either. As far as I can tell, though, there's not a whole lot left of it these days. The most active discussion goes on with some of the forums like DCEmu, but I don't know how much practical output those produce. Most of the more hardcore discussion takes place on mailing lists, like the KOS Development List, and there's just not a whole lot of life there these days. A few questions pop up now and then, but it's not like it used to be.
