Consoles

Sega Dreamcast Turns 10 Today

The Dreamcast was launched in North America 10 years ago:

I bought one for myself in the Christmas of 1999 and it was one of the best video gaming experiences I had in my life due to the excellent games and very advanced hardware for it's time.

The Dreamcast used an Hitachi SH-4, an excellent CPU that held it's own against desktop processors of that time and outpaced them in real world situations. Games before 2000 didn't take advantage of 3DNow! or SSE while the SIMD engine inside the SH-4 was used from the start providing up to 900MFLOPS/s, something especially important for 3D calculations. (For a more in-depth article, take a look at the post at Segatech detailing the architecture)
Graphics duties were taken care of by a design from PowerVR, now Imagination Technologies - the firm who has designed the GMA 500 core for Intel Poulsbo and the core inside the iPhone - which was an important company back then, that also delivered subsequent chips for post Dreamcast SEGA Arcade consoles, including the one used for Virtua Fighter 4.
The PowerVR2 chip inside the Dreamcst couldn't really have been a better choice: in a time Transform and Lightning wasn't a part of graphics cards' chips, it had a tile based rendering technology that allowed it to more efficiently render than any graphics card at the time, only drawing the parts of the scene that really were visible. The same architecture was later revised for the PC, which gave birth to the interesting Kyro II.

As for other components, the Dreamcast featured a modified CD-ROM capable of carrying 1.2GB of data, named the GD-ROM. The biggest innovation was the integrated 33.6K modem for internet play(in Europe, 56K in the USA), which SEGA hoped would connect every owner of the Dreamcast online. I gave it some use, although limited due to the high ISP costs around here. I frequently remember that the hardware and software were so optimized that the slower modem was much faster loading pages than the 56K modem in my PC - this reflected itself in online gaming, where lag times were very acceptable.

The failure is now part of history: the Dreamcast was seriously hacked(no chip was required, the CD-Rs just booted), sales weren't as good as SEGA had hoped in 2000 and in January 2001 SEGA decided to stop manufacturing the console. SEGA still sold the remaining units fairly fast when they announced a price drop to clear inventory, ending with 10 million consoles sold. The last game released worldwide was NHL 2K2 in February of 2002 but some games were still released in Japan after that. SEGA then moved multi platform and kept the arcade business.

My Dreamcast still works and I still game on it from time to time. Since Soul Calibur was ported to the Xbox 360 it hasn't been turned on so often but there's still some games I will play through, namely Skies of Arcadia.
Until today, the Dreamcast still has something of a cult following due to the abundance and excellent quality of the games released, despite the short lifespan. May it live forever in re-releases and homebrew emulators.

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