The forgotten dream of second-screen gaming

The original iPad came out on April 3rd, 2010, at a time when most smartphone manufacturers were making the awkward transition from full QWERTY keyboards to touchscreen-only devices. Apple sold 1 million iPads in that first month, and by the end of 2...

20 years of Dreamcast: Readers look back on Sega’s final console

Engadget started up in 2004, so we missed the rise (and fall) of the Sega Dreamcast by a few years. We've still covered the company's ups and downs over the past decade and a half (and can't wait for the Sega Genesis Mini later this month). Today's t...

Sega is becoming its weird and wonderful self again

Sega is in an unexpectedly good place right now. The company was never on top of the industry; it's been beaten by Nintendo, by Sony, by the decline of the arcade. It spent years nursing the wounds from its fall from grace in the '90s, and through th...

Flappy Bird is Back… On a Dreamcast Memory Card

We thought that we had heard the last of Flappy Bird, but it is back in a not so big way – on a Dreamcast memory card. The long-dead console still has a massive fanbase, so it is no wonder that one hacker has ported the game to the Dreamcast’s interactive memory card. Because why not?


The Visual Memory Unit was a unique memory card that plugged into the Dreamcast’s controllers to store game data, or act as a second-screen for some games since it has a monochrome LCD display. It even has basic controls.

Dmitry Grinberg created a custom ARM Cortex chip emulator that runs on the VMU’s CPU, allowing it to run the game, albeit very slowly. Despite the speed, it’s actually even harder to play thanks to the sucky button responsiveness. Still, it’s a neat hack.

[via Hackaday via Gizmodo]