VMU History

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.

Acquiring Your VMU

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.

Arming Your VMU

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

Hop online

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.

VMU Development Resources Do you think you're a hardcore programmer capable of creating your own VMU games from scratch? It's definitely possible, but it won't be easy. Start with the VMU Development page at http://www.maushammer.com/vmu.html. This site provides info on a VMU assembler, available in Windows, Linux, and even Amiga (!) flavors. However, VMU development has poor documentation and requires assembly code, so it's hardly straightforward. Also bear in mind that some of the interest in the Dreamcast VMU scene started to die out when the DC began to fade, so many of these pages have fallen into disarray in recent years. To aid you in your programming task, and heck, even to run the previously mentioned VMU games on your PC as a test, download a PC emulator that claims to emulate the VMU. This should be handy if you want to check ongoing development. However, both the Windows-based VMU emulators, DirectVMS (http://www.dcemulation.com/emu-directvms.htm) and SoftVMS (http://www.dcemulation.com/emu-softvms.htm), seem to crash with some regularity on the most recent versions of Windows. You may have better luck with a Mac OS port of SoftVMS (http://www.bannister.org/software/softvms.htm). Finally, if you want to know anything else about the VMU, the VMU FAQ at http://rvmu.maushammer.com/faq.html is an extremely useful document that explains many common problems, from how to reset your VMU to animation constraints. However, please bear in mind that its writing preceded the discovery of self-booting methods for burning Dreamcast-compatible CDs, so it doesn't cover any of the self-boot options for running VMUs.

Choosing the Best VMU Games

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: