eBay auction reveals prototype Dreamcast Zip Drive

As at least two members of the Engadget staff can attest to, the Dreamcast was a totally bodacious system -- one which has been surprisingly kept alive well past its cancelation from commercial sale by a core group of terrifically dedicated gamers and home-brewers. You'd think that a system which was discontinued in 2001 (though Sega did start selling refurbished units in 2006) would have run out of tricks... but you would be wrong. Some DC-fanboys just discovered an eBay auction for a prototype Iomega Dreamcast Zip Drive, an add-on that was clearly just on the brink of making it to market. The unit would have sat beneath the system and interfaced via the DC's expansion port, providing 100MB of storage (per disc) of your precious Shenmue and Code Veronica save-states. Listen, it's not too late to own this piece of Dreamcast history, though we can't promise we won't be desperately trying to outbid you. Oh, by the way, the starting price is $10,000.

[Via DCNews, thanks Darksaviour69]

[John M @ Sep 13th 2007 5:07PM]

Funny thing is my dreamcast still works...now on 360 #4

[Phour ZwanZig @ Sep 13th 2007 9:29PM]

Yah know, Ive never had a DC, but with everyone talkin bout them still, Im half tempted to get one from a used store.. I have played it b4 thou..

[Alan Strangis @ Sep 13th 2007 5:07PM]

$10,000 to experience the "Click of Death" on a console? Niiiice!

[AC @ Sep 14th 2007 3:04AM]

That sound still haunts me.

[octoberasian @ Sep 13th 2007 5:09PM]

Wait... wait... I think that was my bank on the phone, they might approve me for a $10,000 loan.

[Z @ Sep 13th 2007 5:09PM]

My DC is sitting right beside me as I type this, gona go have a blast on virtua tennis 2. =)

[Scott @ Sep 13th 2007 5:14PM]

http://cgi.ebay.com/Sega-Dreamcast-Zip-Drive-extension-box-rare_W0QQitemZ250163670619QQihZ015QQcategoryZ62054QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

[James Ollier @ Sep 13th 2007 5:19PM]

WTF is the point? One of the questions on his listing says it doesn't work wih any games!

[rH @ Sep 13th 2007 5:24PM]

$10,000? $10,000???!!!! what the...

[Montusama @ Sep 13th 2007 5:24PM]

10k no.....100 sure.....speaking of which i really should get a new dc....LONG LIVE SEGA

[Boynamedsue @ Sep 13th 2007 5:25PM]

something tells me you could homebrew something that worked for far less.

[Felipe Ferraz @ Sep 13th 2007 5:28PM]

Best videogame ever!!!!!

[Ant @ Sep 13th 2007 5:28PM]

man i still have a magazine that shows this as a rumor XD
if it was maybe 100-200 id buy because im dumb like that

[Fruition @ Sep 13th 2007 5:37PM]

My Dreamcast is one of my most prized posessions, despite that I picked it up in 2003 in the GameStop bargain bin for $30 (in fact that might be why I love it so much--no one else did)... I don't know what I'd do without Crazy Taxi or Skies of Arcadia! I just wish I could justify a $10,000 purchase for it.

[Fruition @ Sep 13th 2007 5:42PM]

Oh and ZOMG I have that exact same kind of table!

[Grant @ Sep 13th 2007 5:44PM]

Wow, no bids yet? I'm shocked, I tell you. SHOCKED.

[sgt_easton @ Sep 13th 2007 5:48PM]

My dreamcast still works too. Once in a while I'll play Worms: Armageddon. But $10,000.....seriously, even if it is the only one in the world, it's not worth it. Maybe put it in a museum or something.

[Mauricio @ Sep 13th 2007 5:50PM]

does anyone else think that Zip Drives and Jazz Drives were the dumbest invention in the world? CDs (650mb) and DVDs(4gb) were already out.

[kev @ Sep 13th 2007 5:56PM]

No, because the idea was that you could actually read/write from/to it at your own leisure without having to install stupid software like Sony's abCD or something. You don't have to reburn the entire Zip drive. It was meant to be a floppy x100...

[mike @ Sep 13th 2007 5:56PM]

Got to say I agree with ya there! 10 bucks for a 100mb disk was crazy!

[tiuk @ Sep 13th 2007 5:56PM]

They were affordable before CD or DVD writers were.

[insertAlias @ Sep 13th 2007 6:08PM]

You gotta remember that 100mb was a good chunk of memory back then, that cd burning was slow and expensive, and personal dvd burning was barely heard of. People were still using floppies, you know. I had bought a zip drive for my computer back then, and used the hell out of it.

[Peter D @ Sep 13th 2007 6:21PM]

Dude, I remember how useful zip disks were back in their hay day, I still have a USB zip drive somewhere in my pile of lost computer relics, but zip disks sure were better than the alternative CD's back then, because no one else had cd burners, and CD-RW's were practically unheard of, I was one of about a dozen kids in my entire school with a CD-RW drive, but the whole school had zip disks

[Miguel @ Sep 13th 2007 6:27PM]

Minus the fact that Zip and Jazz drives didn't lock the information after you wrote to the disc, yeah, sure.

[John @ Sep 13th 2007 6:35PM]

How old are you, 12? Zip drives were incredibly useful in their time, because there was really no other easily portable and rewritable medium. CD writers weren't that common. Optical media like CDs and DVDs are for a completely different purpose than the Zip drive was, so please don't randomly insult an outdated but still once important format.

[Yoyodyn @ Sep 13th 2007 6:37PM]

A) They were rewritable.
B) They were much faster. Even over a parallel connection, I could play doom directly off the drive.
C) they were semi-portable, you could take the whole drive with you and just plug it in anywhere.

[Tucker @ Sep 13th 2007 6:56PM]

Zip = 1994. DVD = 1995. CD-RW = 1997. DVD-R = 1997. "already out" = FALSE. Believe it or not, some people had need for more than floppy-sized storage when you, apparently, were in diapers.

[Ben Belden @ Sep 13th 2007 7:02PM]

Whether they were dumb or not is open to debate, but they did have their uses. They WERE out before recordable CDs and DVDs had gained widespread usage. I know this because I was using a Zip drive long before I started burning CDRs, and I've been burning CDs for a long time now. My mom worked in a photography studio and she retouched pictures. Zip drives offered 100 MB of storage as opposed to 1.44 MB on floppy. High resolution scanned pictures take up a lot of space and so having a rewritable portable disk was highly valuable at time. Heck, a lot of people today still don't know about open session CDRs or CDRWs and it certainly wasn't an option back then. Most people I know use flash drives when they need to constantly transfer files back and forth and most flash drives I see are only 256 or 512 MB. It's not the amount of storage space, it's the convenience of use.

[Urza @ Sep 13th 2007 8:12PM]

The problem with Zip drives is that NOBODY HAD THEM. I've probably seen about 3 computers with zip drives in my entire life. CD-Rs quickly became more popular simply because every computer already had a CD drive, so you at least had read access to all your data on any computer. What good is a disk that you can't use anywhere?

[John @ Sep 13th 2007 10:38PM]

uh, urza.... let's see... back in 1997, I know most Macs had built in zip drives. Plus, the standalone drives were portable. And anyone working with large files would have a zip drive.

[rt @ Sep 13th 2007 11:26PM]

When the ZIP came out, it was a big step forward. Its competition consisted of Syquest and Bernoulli drives. I never had a Bernoulli, but I remember 5.25" 44-meg syquest cartridges costing around $50 each.

The ZIP drive was a "ton" of storage in a tiny, cheap package. It became an almost instant hit with graphic designers, print shops, and sampler owners.

[alex1robinson @ Sep 13th 2007 6:01PM]

Hang on, surely anyone who had enough know-how could make any number of these rare add-on's for ancient consoles and sell them for 10k a pop?

[Kade Miller @ Sep 13th 2007 6:04PM]

$10,000 is a complete rip-off, even for a collectors item, it should be at most $1,000 and the colour of the unit doesn't even quite match that of the main unit.

[Philometalist @ Sep 13th 2007 6:27PM]

I'd be interested in getting the data off that DC zip disk, examine it for any drivers that could be exported

[Mauricio @ Sep 13th 2007 7:27PM]

jeez john, calm the fuck down. It is, after all, my opinion.

PC World named the Zip Drive the 15th Worst tech product of all time. PC World also named it the 23rd Best Tech product of all time. So apparently I was half right.

I guess since there was no real competitor for higher storage capacity it was a good product. Kind of like if the Playsatation 3 existed in a world without a 360 or a Wii. If I wanted to play video games on my TV id have to buy a PS3. No matter how bad a product it is.

[Nova @ Sep 13th 2007 6:38PM]

Wow. There is a part of me that said: What's this mess? I don't believe that!

[Tucker @ Sep 13th 2007 6:55PM]

Zip = 1994. DVD = 1995. CD-RW = 1997. DVD-R = 1997. "already out" = FALSE. Believe it or not, some people had need for more than floppy-sized storage when you, apparently, were in diapers.

[gerbick @ Sep 13th 2007 7:06PM]

Seriously... you know some console collector will "just have to have" this... unfortunately, that's not my stance on this.

And like some of the above, I'm still enjoying my Dreamcast to this day.

[tastybytes @ Sep 13th 2007 7:12PM]

best soul-calibur ever

[Harrison @ Sep 13th 2007 7:33PM]

The DC is the shit. I've been playing soul calibur all weekend. The only thing that sucks is the controller ports break on them all the time (something I don't understand, seeing how my nintendo still completely works). However, if I was freakin loaded, I would gladly fork over ass wiping money for that thing. I'm ridiculously jealous of this guy, but it reminded me of an idea I had. Someone needs to write some drivers so DC games can be played off of a hard drive. Think about it, complete rips (not ones made to fit on a CD) on the DC, without having to worry about your laser dying. That would be tits.

[Disipha @ Sep 13th 2007 8:17PM]

Has anyone payed attention the auction? The seller has only 6 feedback and non were him selling. Seems fishy to me I bet you will hear about this one in a few months.

[Jonny @ Sep 13th 2007 11:13PM]

So true, but remember this.

A) There is only one of these drives on the planet.

B) The only other time this drive has ever been seen anywhere was behind glass at E3 2000 next to a mockup of a Dreamcast DVD player, with a very tiny shot of it in Game Informer.

So, if this guy made this entire thing up, hats off to him, hes f***ing brilliant.

[raymond @ Sep 13th 2007 8:27PM]

i just bid guys this ones mine

[Tucker @ Sep 13th 2007 8:39PM]

Guess we all ran in different crowds... I know people who still use them for legacy purposes, and back in the day just about everyone I knew (especially the artists) used them like crazy. None of us were bleeding the kind of money it cost to buy a CD-R drive - which, at the time, was several hundred dollars. It was a long, long time before writeable CDs of any fashion made it worthwhile to ditch a disc you could only write once (it's already been mentioned how insanely difficult it was to read a CD-RW for years - talk about proprietary). I don't think anyone here is arguing that we use Zip drives all day, every day, like some kind of crazy hermits yelling at darned whippersnappers to get off our land.

Fact of the matter is, during the Zip's heyday, it was about the best you could do to have portable, rewritable, cheap (relatively), large storage. Pretend for a moment that it's not 2007. Gear existed in the 90s, there were these things called "modems" that connected at rip-roaring speeds of 28kbps and sometimes even LOWER! SHOCK!

Which brings us back on-topic - I'm sure there are plenty of crazy nostalgic nerds out there who would love nothing more than to have a $10k zip drive for their Dreamcast.

Just wait 'til 10 years from now when we're laughing at Blu-rays and HD-DVDs - "honestly, why was there even a format war now that we have 100TB drives embedded in our brains! Haw! Loozers!"

[dj-kenpo @ Sep 13th 2007 9:10PM]

johny pneumonic didn't even have 100gb, never mind tb in his brain. what was it, 80gb? and then he used his neato memory doubler... ahh good times..

[Tom @ Sep 13th 2007 9:00PM]

Old news. This information was made public like 6 years ago. Guess everyone just forgot, huh? Wasn't important enough... next up... Alf... remember Alf? He's back!

[Donald @ Sep 14th 2007 8:02AM]

In POG form?

[dj-kenpo @ Sep 13th 2007 9:00PM]

I still have the backup ram cart for my sega cd... I still think sega cd was the best... long live lunar and snatcher

[dudeInAmerica @ Sep 13th 2007 9:02PM]

I'd love to dissect this thing.

A booting hard drive would be an awesome ad-on.

[Damien @ Sep 13th 2007 9:55PM]

to whomever buys this;
I've got a stack of 20 or so zip discs I'll sell you!