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The Sega Dreamcast (Japanese:ドリームキャスト)
is
Sega's most recent
video game console though the company has discontinued it.
It was released in
1999 long before other similar consoles were and enjoyed brisk sales
its first season. It was an attempt to break into the console market with
a next generation system designed to supersede
Sony's
PlayStation and
Nintendo's
N64, but mainly because of doubt (some Sega add-ons and consoles have
been less than successful, such as the
32X and
Sega CD) and anticipation of the
Nintendo
GameCube,
Sony
PlayStation 2, and
Microsoft
Xbox, it lost a lot of steam and Sega began to lose money once again.
In
January
2001, Sega announced that the Dreamcast was to be discontinued by the
end of the year but that new games would still be made. The failure of the
Dreamcast was the final blow that took Sega out of the home console
business.
Dreamcast used a proprietary format called
GD-ROM for storing games in order to foil
software pirates, a strategy that ultimately backfired when the first
run of discs had a high rate of defects, and pirates managed to pirate the
games anyway (in some cases the pirated games were released before the
legitimate versions!). Sega largely had themselves to blame for the high
levels of Dreamcast piracy - their use of the GD-ROM format was completely
undermined by the console's support for the
Mil-CD format, which allowed the console to boot from a standard
CD-R. Mil-CD support was removed from the final Dreamcast revisions
toward the end of the console's life.
Microsoft cooperated with Sega hoping to promote its
Windows CE
operating system for
video games, but Windows CE for the Dreamcast showed very limited
capabilities when compared to the Dreamcast's native operating system. The
libraries that Sega offered gave room for much more performance, but they
were sometimes more difficult to utilize when porting over existing
PC applications.
The Dreamcast has a modest hacking enthusiast community. The
availability of Windows CE software development kits on the Internet, as
well as ports of
Linux and
NetBSD operating systems to the Dreamcast gave programmers a selection
of familiar development tools to work with, even though they do not really
support the high speed graphics. A home brew minimal operating system
called
Kallistios offers support for most hardware, while not offering
multi-tasking, which is superfluous for games. Many emulators and other
tools (mp3,
DivX players and image viewers) have been ported to or written for the
console, taking advantage of the relative ease with which a home user can
write a CD which is bootable by an unmodified dreamcast.
Sega released a board, using the same technology as the Dreamcast,
called
Sega NAOMI for use in
arcade games.
Though the Dreamcast was officially discontinued in early 2001,
commercial games were still developed for it and were released afterwards
(though mostly only in
Japan). Sega will release one final game on
February 24,
2004 called Puyo Puyo Fever. Also a small number of 3rd party
games are still being released.
Specifications
- CPU:
SH-4
RISC CPU with 128 Bit graphic computational engine built-in
(operating frequency: 206 Mhz 360 MIPS/1.4 GFLOPS)
- Graphics Engine: PowerVR2 DC (capable of drawing more than 3 million
polygons per second)
- Memory: Main RAM-16 MB, Video RAM-8 MB, Sound RAM-2 MB
- Sound Card: Super Intelligent (Yamaha)
Sound Processor with 32-Bit
RISC
ARM CPU core built-in (64 channel PCM/ADPCM)
- GD-ROM Drive: 12x maximum speed (when running in Constant Angular
Velocity mode-CAV GD-ROM is a new high density memory medium (capacity =
1.2 GB)
- Modem: Removable 56 kbit/s modem (33.6 kbit/s in Europe, whilst in
some regions of Asia it was not included)
- Color Output: Approx. 16.77 million simultaneous colors (24 bit)
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