Where I live (Dallas, Georgia, USA), Dreamcasts are EXTREMELY cheap. I can pick one up at Blockbuster for less than 30 USD, with a controller.
I recognize that that's an awesome deal, but I'm hesitant to follow through, mainly because I don't know much about the system.
1: How's the game selection (actual DREAMCAST games, not things you find online and burn to a CD)?
2: How's the system? Is it fast (read speed, loading time, etc.)? Reliable?
3: Are components hard to find? As in, controllers, memory cards, etc. How expensive are they?
and 4: I understand emulation is possible. What's emulated so far, and how easy is it to set up the DC to emulate? Also, are there any other programs (i.e. video players, MP3 players, etc.)?
Thanks for your input, folks.
As for ? 4, it truly isn't hard to setup emus for the DC. I've found two major ways so far: if you find a .sbi file, you can use a program called Self Boot Inducer to setup a disk image. I had to copy the files from the disk image, add roms, and run the second method below to get a bootable CD w/ ROMS on the disk when I tried this method, but my image editing program may have been screwing the file over, before adding roms it burnt and loaded fine.
The second method is for when you download what is marked as "Plain Files" on the DC emu site. You just put the files you want on the CD in a single directory (you do need a few specific files in the main directory, IP.BIN and one other, those should be included with the files you DL, you add roms basically). Then run the program "Selfboot" and it creates a disk image... burn it.
That's it, no mod chips, no messing around. I burnt several CDs before I got mine a couple weeks ago, they all worked fine. Quality of the emus: can't speak for every emu, haven't been using it long enough, but they seem similar to the GP32 scene. SNES is a bit slower than we have as there isn't a frameskip option on DreamSNES, but if the game is played w/o sound it picks up, and IMO, is still playable, but some think its not, matter of opinion. Genesis emu is okay, again in my opinion, but no sound option right now. SMS and NES are both excellent, MAME has a large release I haven't played with much (it seems to be lacking a bit though on newer games, there is a ROM size limit... no metal slug, sry... I had to remap a key on the pad to be able to increase frameskip, that got some games playable that weren't). There is also several single game releases of MAME for a few of my personal favorites, those tend to run better.
Can't speak for cost in your area, but here the availability of controllers, mc, etc is fine, you can get anything you want at reasonable prices (3-8 per item for those).
I haven't tried these yet, but
http://homebrew.dcemulation.com/ has some free media players and homebrew games, the earlier listing was pretty much just emus...
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