No more Dreamcasts, now and forever? No.

(tags Japan, law, game, hardware)

I think I have 3 Japanese Dreamcasts. I bought the last one just before that Japanese Electronics Safety Law ("Denan-hou", 電気用品安全法) went into effect. You know that issue with the PSE sticker?

The last news around April in various English-oriented game blogs such as Kotaku was that you could probably still get your hardware fix because of the last minute repeals. For a time, Kotaku reported that you could get them from Sega Direct after April 1st, but that EC site doesn't have even a whiff of Dreamcast goodness no more, so it's incorrect.

Yeah, so where are the Dreamcasts? I saw my first post-Denan-hou Dreamcast for sale just last week at some off-the-beaten-path mom-and-pop game-and-hobby shop in Kobe Center-gai. Definately Sofmap isn't carrying any used ones. I wonder if Tiger and Retro Gaming Revival are holding the line. I must not be looking very hard, though.

I'm not much of an online auction guy so maybe they're pretty easy to find there. I'm not good with katakana searching either though (but it's net-confirmed "ドリームキャスト", yo). Lo and behold, getting the hardware isn't very hard at all: Yahoo Auction search for "ドリームキャスト". But I hate bidding on Yahoo Auction. I don't have any cred, so I get passed over. In any case, I like visiting the shops, it's really low-latency and high-bandwidth.