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]
posted September 13th 2007 5:01PM
I'd love to dissect this thing.
A booting hard drive would be an awesome ad-on.
to whomever buys this;
I've got a stack of 20 or so zip discs I'll sell you!
ha ive got a zip 250 drive in my current pc. havent used it in a year, but i got for 5 bucks at a computer fair, so what the hay?
Ok, but does anyone want my circa-1999 Iomega HipZip mp3 player? I'd part with it for $10,000. No takers? Come on, folks! I have at least ten 40 MB cartridges for it.
Wow, at one point Iomega was making drives for EVERYTHING. I remember a Zip drive for the PS2!
At least the shipping is pretty reasonable at $8.59. That sweetens the deal for me.
yeah i remember this vividly appearing in dreamcast magazine. dreamcast had a lot of badass peripherals in development--there was even a swatch synchronizer dealy. what a shame...
All sticker shock aside (honestly, I'm completely used to this from prototype collectors), this is dead cool and the sort of amazing electronic relic that I can only dream of owning just yet. I wonder how functional it is? Does it simply allow VMU saves to be copied over with no further enhancements, or does it have its own system menus and whatnot? Some pics would be nice...
from his Q&A section on his eBay
"Q: Interesting item. Quick questions: Does it actually work (and what does it do)? How did you end up with it? Thanks! Sep-12-07
A: The drive works electrically, loads, locks, and unloads the disk. There are no games that it works with since the games would have to load some kind of drivers. Notice there is a Dreamcast Zip disk with it."
I found my DC at a thrift store a few months after its launch. 70 bucks. Took it home and played it for a while till it crapped out. Sent it to sega (surprised they took it back with a goodwill receipt) and they shipped me a refurb. That one crapped out and sent them that back. After another refurb and crapout they sent me one that had weak solder points on the controller port. I fixed it myself and still have it to this day. The "It's thinking" commercials made perfect sense because I swear me and my DC had chemistry. I'll take care of, yes i will. If I could, I'd get this zip drive and insert it into her expansion port.
its a fake.
color of the unit is off when compared to the dc itself (even with age you would think they would be roughly the same though). the zip disk included is not like the ones from the photos of the actual prototype. the seller has been regularly lowering his price. and i would think he would be able to answer the questions about the system more then listed. also most large corps either keeps thier prototypes to prevent any technology from being stolen or reverse engineered or the company destroys the prototypes for the same reason.