Dreamcast Now August ’19 Update

Kazade has deployed an update to Dreamcast Now with some improvements in the way that it detects and displays games. Here’s what’s changed:

The biggest update was a collaborative effort between Shuouma and Kazade to implement a new way of detecting what game you’re playing without relying on DNS queries (game server URLs). Games such as POD and Monaco which have the same URLs, making them indistinguishable from one another, and Internet Game Pack which doesn’t use DNS queries at all, were not able to be detected properly by DC Now. An ingenious fix has Shu’s game servers reporting to DC Now when a user is online and what game they’re playing. So far this has just been implemented for Internet Game Pack but POD/Monaco should be fixed soon as well. 

One other change makes it so that if Dreamcast Now can’t detect the game you’re playing (i.e.you’re just using a web browser or connecting with an unknown game), your player card will just show a generic “Dreamcast menu” background image and no game title. Previously it would display the last you game played which could cause confusion.

Dreamcast Now keeps getting better all the time! This is just the tip of the iceberg as the new game server interaction opens up some other possibilities for more detailed information on Dreamcast Now. Stay tuned!