Recovery and restoration of dcvmuicons.net, a Dreamcast web browser site for downloading memory card icons.
This website was recovered to serve as a working example of how to host Dreamcast memory card files for download through the many Dreamcast web browsers that were available. Also with my Dreamcast back online after eighteen years, I thought it would just be really awesome to resurrect and use again myself.
It was the year 1999 and Dreamcast was my love. With importing a Japanese model, I got a whole extra year with the console. One of my first games was Power Stone. I couldn't read the menus but I couldn't get enough of it. I was so intrigued when I discovered the game could set the VMUs icon to a custom non-stock, Capcom one. Eventually I figured out how to make my own and I created this website to share with others how to make them.
But actually what people wanted was for me to make icons for them. So through all the user requests for that year I ended up creating 326 icons. The website got enough attention that some folks from the GameSpy network reached out and offered free hosting as subdirectory on PlanetDreamcast.com. So, long after the dcvmuicons.net domain expired, the site continued to exist at planetdreamcast.com/dcvmuicons for many years until GameSpy totally shut down.
Thankfully, SegaRetro's archive included PlanetDreamcast and DCVMUICONS website along with it. Seeing YouTube videos about the Dreamcast online again in 2018 got the wheels spinning. So I built a couple totally modded Dreamcasts, got my hands on a Dreampi, and got to hacking to bring everything back to life in April 2019.
Dreamcast VMU files end with a .VMS file extension, for example ICONDATA.VMS. In order to be able to download these files using the Dreamcast web browser you will need a matching VMS info file, aka .VMI, for example ICONDATA.VMI in the same folder. These VMI files point the Dreamcast web browser to download the VMS file.
Luckily the NeoDC-Icondata-Tool generates the ICONDATA.VMI file along with the icon VMS file. The last piece of the puzzle is having your web server serve up the file as the correct MIME type. I was able to achieve this on my Apache server by including an .htaccess file with the following lines:
addtype application/x-dreamcast-vms-info vmi
addtype application/x-dreamcast-vms vms
More details can be found at vmudev.dcemulation.org.
- SegaRetro for maintaining an archive of the original website itself after all these years.
- @mrneo240 for creating NeoDC-Icondata-Tool, which was used to rebuild the lost 326 VMI/VMS data files.
- Kazade for creating DreamPi and getting Dreamcast back online two decades later. (for sale at dreamcastlive.net)