The VMU, also known as the Visual Memory System (VMS) in the United States, never reached its full potential during the height of the Dreamcast’s popularity. If connected to your Dreamcast controller, it would sometimes show the game, logo, vital statistics, or other information while playing games. Some multiplayer games provided personal data, hidden from your opponents.

You can also use standalone VMU games with a few commercial titles. Games such as Power Stone use standalone VMU games intriguingly. Sega’s Sonic Adventure is particularly interesting because it allows you to grow a cute-looking Chao creature on your VMU and then import this data into the Dreamcast game. There were also several official VMU games downloadable from the Internet via the Dreamcast’s web browser, for titles such as Namco’s excellent fighting game Soul Calibur. However, with the Dreamcast’s cancellation and the homebrew scene’s interest, the VMU has seen significant and interesting independent development efforts.

As discussed previously, you should be able to find a Dreamcast VMU for anywhere between $5 and $10 at your local specialty game store or on eBay. They come in a variety of fetching colors, with even limited-edition VMUs sporting Godzilla and Sonic Team themes. White and transparent are the most common colors, so don’t spend too much time collecting. Just pick one up.

When you track down a VMU, whether bought in the store or unearthed in the closet, you may find that its batteries have died. The unit takes two CR2032 lithium batteries, also found in watches and cameras, so it’s easy to track down replacements for around $5 for the pair. Just remove the small screw holding on the back compartment and replace the batteries to return your VMU to fighting shape.

Transferring files from your PC to your Dreamcast may not be exactly straightforward. You have several possible choices:

The advantage of this method is that you don’t need to burn CDs to manipulate VMU games. A major disadvantage is that you’ll need to take your Dreamcast online somehow, which probably means you need a dial-up ISP or an ultra-expensive Dreamcast broadband adaptor.

Click one of the browser options to reach the main menu, then use the digital controller to choose the Menu option. Finally, choose the VMU Mini Games option to see a web page (as if you were actually online) that includes over 30 freeware, freely distributable VMU games. This includes the vast majority of the games we’ll talk about in the next section. However, the disc also contains highly customized versions of Dreamcast browser software that, while possibly being abandonware in some abstract sense, the developers may not have permission to distribute. Bear this in mind before downloading.

This solution works because the developers burned an offline web page and a web browser onto the same disc, so it’s a little like you’re online.

While this option is excellent if you have normal Dreamcast save games that you’d like to transfer to your Dreamcast without going online and grabbing them, there’s currently no functionality to detect if a save is actually a VMU game, so VMU game support is broken. Perhaps this will change in the future, though.

After you’ve successfully downloaded a VMU game onto your memory card, you can access it by removing your memory card from its berth in the Dreamcast controller. Press the Mode button on the controller until the playing-card icon flashes, then press the A button to enter the VMU game.

Please note that you can have only one VMU game on your memory card at a time, although you can also store multiple Dreamcast non-minigame saves. The VMU has no multiboot concept; you can’t select between multiple games. VMU games may use up to 128 blocks (the official maximum), so you also need to ensure you have enough space, even if the new VMU game writes over the old one.

However, separating the quality games from the mere demos can be tricky when it comes to playable VMU titles. Frankly, it’s fun to download everything because the entire VMU pantheon is limited to tens of titles. You can make your own decisions then. If you’d like to do that, you might want to check out the following:

If I had to pick some homebrew VMU games you should check out because they’re wacky, weird, cool, or any of the above, they’d be the following:

You can download these and others (shown in Figure 5-4) from the Rockin B site.

Figure 5-4. Title screens