Sega Nerds

Sega Japan still showing Dreamcast support in 2008? {Updated}

Posted by Graham. Filed under G, Japan, News. Tagged with Dreamcast, Fan Stuff.

“Do you still own a Dreamcast?” - That is what Sega Japan is asking the world.

“Why?” is just what you might be asking. To be honest, we are not entirely sure. But Sega Japan appears to have updated its Dreamcast website and has opened up a new sub-site where Dreamcast owners can register, using their Dreamcast’s serial numbers, allowing them access to their own “@user.dreamcast.com” account.

At first I thought it could be some sort of fan/hoax site, but now I’m not sure, as the site content does appear to be fairly legit.

Could it be that Sega is planning some sort of Dreamcast re-release? Are they planning to celebrate the DC’s 10th Birthday? (Though I’m not sure if the dates tally for that). Maybe they are planning on releasing old Dreamcast games? Or perhaps starting up the old Dreamcast servers for online play? Or are they just curious little puppies?

The main point of this is that if Dreamcast fans ever wanted to show their true support for the system, now is the time! By registering your console at the site, we can show Sega Japan just how many Dreamcast owners are still out there!

Hopefully we will get some answers soon enough.

{UPDATE: Ok it seems as though this is a (very believeable) scam.  Not sure what the scam is for… but it seems that Dreamcast.com is no longer owned by Sega right now, and the site visited was a Japanese site  running from a shared server in the US - as a result we have taken most of the links out of the post.  Here’s a quote from the DCEmu forums, to help explain more:

I forgot to to the most basics of basics when looking into this, I didn’t check if this site was still hosted by SEGA. So I pinged dreamcast.com and lo’ and behold http://72.29.74.51/ was the IP I got. It links to a cPanel set up page. I then pinged SEGA.jp and got the IP 210.174.184.7, SEGA.com: 204.155.67.210, Sonic Team: 202.3.142.231. All SEGA sites are no where near the IP range of dreamcast.com. Running a trace on this IP brings us right back to square one with DimeNoc/dizinc.
http://www.ssukstudios.co.uk/_rubbis…_com_trace.htm for a report from http://visualiptrace.visualware.com/
SEGA.com is run from San Francisco under their own, internal servers. SEGA.jp and Sonicteam.com are run from inside Japan, as you’d expect.

So to sum up, it’s a site not on ANY of SEGA’s servers, it’s supposedly a Japanese site running on a shared server in Orlando, emails set out are from a dizinc email address, uses Gmail as a front for a Dreamcast email address, the site poses as an official website (including copyright marks from SEGA). It’s fake, don’t use it. If you have used it, as a few of you have, hope this comes to nothing.

Let’s just hope nothing comes from this.  I know quite a few of you guys (including most of our site staff) filled out the registration form, and I just hope that nothing too bad will happen here - maybe just a few more ’Check me out’ or ’Enlarge you Wang’ emails will appear.

Apologies to everyone, though it seems we weren’t the only site that fell for it…  Yeah doesn’t quite make up for it, but just goes to show how convincing it was.

See the full post on DCEmu, here.  Thanks to Dragoon for the update.}

[Source: SegaBoards/Special Thanks: Steve]