Sega has a bit of a reputation of making bad accessories for their gaming consoles and basically making a mess of things as a consequence. The 32X was probably the biggest disaster and there are plenty of Angry Video Game Nerd videos out there about how he talks about the multiple problems not just in the quality of the games that it was meant to produce, but its overall design and the much maligned power adapter situation.
I was thankfully never privy to that because it was too expensive when it was first released and once it became affordable it was already getting ripped apart in the press so much that I had a clear enough head to realize that I should not get involved.
There are plenty of other examples of bad or useless accessories and it isn't just SEGA that was / is guilty of this. The entire spectrum of video game console manufacturers try to make some extra cash off of stuff that is simply stupid. My experience with these add ons have been limited but I ended up being very excited about Phantasy Star Online, which was a fantastic game that was well ahead of its time. The only problem for me was the fact that I couldn't talk to the other players very well because I had no keyboard. Actually, I didn't even know such a thing existed until it was pointed out by one of my online friends.
I went to the local Game Stop or whatever they were called at the time (Babbages?) and had a look. The official Sega keyboard was absurdly expensive but then there was this other thing.
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Now anytime that an accessory is made by a 3rd party you should be suspicious to begin with, but the price difference was something along the lines of $60 vs $10 so I figured "what do I have to lose?"
Well, a lot as i turns out.
The idea behind this thing was that you could plug just any ol' keyboard into it and it would be able to interact with the Dreamcast the same as the overpriced official SEGA keyboard. Of course that is not what ended up happening at all.
Somewhere in the middle of the Mad Catz device some coding that your keyboard normally emits to make a letter appear on a screen had to be decoded and recoded in order to make the corresponding letter appear on the screen via the Dreamcast input. This is not what would happen at all.
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While the official keyboard, which is something I eventually bought anyway, did this process seamlessly the adapter had massive delays presumably because it was made by Mad Catz and was a plastic POS that was never designed to work very well anyway.
Other times the decoding just stopped working and even though you typed the correct thing, that is not what would appear on the screen. Sometimes it would start typing on its own and put nonsense on the screen when you hadn't even touched the keyboard. This would irritate your teammates because it wouldn't stop doing this until you unplugged it and plugged it back in and since Phantasy Star Online was a live-action RPG this could result in you getting killed while you took your hands off the controller to make this happen. Keep in mind that this was back in the days when there were no wireless controllers (well, none that worked very well anyway) so unless you were sitting directly in front of your television the entire unplug, plug back in process could take some time since the cable on the Mad Catz adapter was a convenient 6 inches long or so.
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I guess you were meant to play like this but herein lies another problem: There were no flat screen TV's at the time that I am aware of and we were all subjected to CRT monstrosities if we were going to have a screen of any sort of size. I think my TV at the time weighed about as much as a Volkswagen.
I learned a valuable lesson that day and that lesson was that unlicensed or just any third-party accessories for consoles are probably cheap for a reason: Because they are garbage and the chance that they are going to work at all is pretty slim. I would never repeat this mistake again in the future. At least it only cost me $10 to learn this!