October 17th, 2025 - VMU #3 by CMA THE DOPE MAN You are currently on: PAGE 1 Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | Page 6 First, a word from the dope man... Before I get started, I just wanna send a mega dope shoutout to the folks over at the Ragol.org Discord server for the kind words they had about this website. Ragol.org site & Discord admin Matt was kind enough to let me post the website in his Discord server, and just from watching the logs in real time there were quite a few people checking out the site. I hope y'all bookmarked it! Also, one last thing, if you are reading this on a real Sega Dreamcast with an OEM VMU plugged in, go ahead and take a look at your VMU screen. That's right, I've added a text scroller! Shout out to the homie Blst from the Ragol.org Discord for giving me the idea to add this. And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming... Alright, today we got another 3rd party VMU special. Another 4x VMU! This one is a Pelican 4x VMU with a clear smoke grey shell. I think this same model was sold under a few different brands (this seems to be common among 3rd party Dreamcast VMUs). There is a button on the left-hand side of the VMU that allows you to select one of the four banks. I bought this particular VMU from a gentleman on eBay back in January 2025, I do not remember which state this one came from. I should note that in today's post that even though this is a 4x VMU, that only the first bank was used. The remaining three banks were blank when I received it (this is somewhat of a common thing I have seen with these 3rd party 4x VMUs). This particular model actually has a connector on the top of it. There is a parallel port cable that you can plug into this connector which will plug into a PC which allows you to save/dump VMU saves the old school way. I believe the software that works with it was designed for Windows 95/98. I do not have this special parallel port cable, but really nowadays you don't need it as there are more modern (and honestly way better) ways of doing the VMU backups/dumps. BBA + DreamExplorer + DCLOAD-IP + VMU Explorer is what I use to do this. Here is what it looks like plugged into my smoke OEM grey controller. It even lights up! There is also a button on the left-hand side of the VMU for switching the memory banks. The red and green LED color combinations change depending on which bank is currently selected. I'm using my standard Dreamcast test setup. This consists of a Sega Dreamcast Sports console with a GDEMU w/ 512GB SD Card + DreamPSU + BBA. All VMUs I test get backed up, with both full VMU dumps + individual save dumps. The full VMU dump then gets loaded onto a 'COPY VMU' which is basically a throw-away VMU I can restore VMU dumps to so that the original VMUs don't get accidentally altered/deleted/overwritten/corrupt/whatever. The save files you see are original to what I found. Alright, time to dig in! --- BANK 1 --- Here's a screenshot of the saves straight from my Sega Dreamcast: Here's the full metadata from VMU Explorer: Here's what we got: - Elemental Gimmick Gear (E.G.G.) - Ready 2 Rumble Boxing - Sonic Adventure Main Data + Chao Data - Dead or Alive 2 - Soul Calibur - Phantasy Star Online Main Data + Guild Card (!!!) OK so we got an interesting selection here. I'm very curious to check out the Sonic Adventure chao data. I had to look up what Elemental Gimmick Gear was, turns out it's sorta like an action RPG. And of course, we got a PSO character to restore. Hopefully this is another one we can add to our restored PSO character list! The rest of the games listed are usual suspects. The only date stamp on any of the saves that looks even half-way legit is the 3/18/2001 2:04PM date code on the PSO saves. As usual you really have to take these time stamps with a grain (or an entire shaker) of salt, as the Dreamcast battery dies very quickly and often people don't put the current time back in when prompted on startup. The 1998 time stamps you see listed in VMU Explorer are a perfect example of that. It would be fair to say based on the PSO save date that this VMU hasn't been touched, at the latest, since 2001 (24 years ago as of me writing this). Anyway, see ya on the next page.
