Daytona USA Is Back Online!

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to make one of these posts but the time has come once again to announce that another Dreamcast game has been brought back online! Thanks to the work of a newcomer to the scene named Ioncannon, Daytona USA is now playable online once again! Daytona will without-a-doubt be a great addition to our current roster of online games and brings the overall total to 25 (Update: Now 26 thanks to Driving Strikers!)! A huge thanks to everyone involved with this project including Ioncannon who reverse-engineered the server, Shuouma who coded the software needed to get the game working via DreamPi, and Xiden who created the webpage for generating the Daytona Battle Key. I also want to give a shout-out to a guy named goodcow who had the foresight to save his Daytona battle key from over two decades ago, which proved to be helpful. Such an amazing community we have!

There are a few things to note about this game. Firstly, only the US and Japanese versions of the game have online multiplayer modes, so if you’re in a PAL territory, you’ll need to import the US version of the game. As of right now, the Japanese version has yet to be restored but that may be an option in the future as well. Secondly, the game will require the recently released DreamPi 1.8 DLE to function online. You can grab the new image from the Downloads page. If you need instructions on how to flash the image to your Pi’s SD card, see the video here. And lastly, since I know people are going to ask, no, it doesn’t support the broadband adapter. Only the standard modem is supported.

As per usual, if you want to play this game online, please refer to the Connection Guide for instructions and as this is a work-in-progress, if you have any issues, you can report them on the Dreamcast-Talk thread here. There is one known issue where the game will crash after two races. Ioncannon is looking into this and will hopefully have it fixed soon.