Dreamcast
The Sega Dreamcast (Japanese: ドリームキャスト; code-named "Katana" and "Dural" during development) was Sega's last video game console. It was an attempt to recapture the console market with a next-generation system designed to supersede Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo's N64, and it was generally considered to be "ahead of its time", but it failed to capture enough momentum before the release of the PlayStation 2 a year later. After the Dreamcast was discontinued, Sega withdrew from the console hardware business.
Lifespan
The Dreamcast was released on November 27, 1998, in Japan and on September 9, 1999 in the United States. The tagline used to promote the console was "It's thinking." The Dreamcast was the first console to include a built-in modem and Internet support for online play. It enjoyed brisk sales in its first season and was one of Sega's more successful hardware units. In the United States alone, Sega sold 500,000 consoles in just two weeks.
But Sony announced its PlayStation 2 in April 1999, and released the unit in Japan in March 2000, and the new PlayStation was designed to be backwards-compatible with the older version. This stole a lot of attention from Sega, which began to lose money as gamers waited to see which console would come out on top.
In January 2001, Sega announced that the Dreamcast was to be discontinued by the end of the year, however, new games would still be published. This was the end of Sega's last foray into the home console business.
Technology
Dreamcast used a proprietary format called GD-ROM for storing games in order to foil software pirates. This strategy 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 in hopes of promoting its Windows CE operating system for video games. The system shipped with a CD which contained a Windows CE-based dialer and web browser. But Windows CE for the Dreamcast had 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 use when porting existing PC applications. Developers took advantage of the easy development time, but games like Sega Rally 2 lagged in performance and frame-rate due to Windows CE.
The Sega NAOMI arcade game hardware platform uses the same technology as the Dreamcast. NAOMI-based games such as Crazy Taxi were easily ported to Dreamcast.
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). On February 24, 2004, Sega released its final Dreamcast game, Puyo Puyo Fever. A small number of third-party games are still being released.
The Dreamcast continues to have a modest hacking enthusiast community. The availability of Windows CE software development kits on the Internet, as well as ports of Linux [1] and NetBSD/Dreamcast [2] operating systems, gave programmers a selection of familiar development tools to work with. A homebrew minimal operating system named Kallistios offers good hardware support (though does not provide multitasking, which is generally unimportant for games anyway). Many emulators and other tools such as MP3 and 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 burn a CD which is bootable by an unmodified Dreamcast.
Models
The Dreamcast unit is made of white and grey plastic. The power light, like the Dreamcast logo, is orange. Games were sold in jewel cases which initially had the Dreamcast name and logo on a white background, but later games used a black background.
The unit was packaged with a video cable which supports composite video and right/left stereo audio. Available separately were an S-Video cable, RF Adapter and VGA adapter (See accessories below).
In the United States, a black Dreamcast was released in limited numbers with a "sports pack" which included two Sega sports titles. Electronics Boutique offered a blue Dreamcast through its web site.
Units manufactured after 2001 would not read CD-R media and therefore could not be used to play pirated games.
The Dreamcast in Europe had its spiral logo in blue, similar to the logo on earlier Sega systems. This Dreamcast supported only PAL video. Games in Europe were sold in jewel cases which were considerably larger than their US counterparts.
A third-party in China released a portable Dreamcast clone named Treamcast. This small system with its fold-down display resembled the later PS One. It could read CD-Rs and play MP3s and VCDs, and it contained pirated Dreamcast firmware, enabling it to play Dreamcast games. Sega accused the company of copyright violations and was able to halt production of the system.
Accessories
The VMU, or "Visual Memory Unit", was the Dreamcast's memory card. It had a monochrome display and two gaming buttons. It could play minigames loaded onto it (a Chao game was obtainable in Sonic Adventure, for example). It could also display a list of the saved game data stored on it, and two VMUs could be connected together (end-to-end, needing no other hardware) to exchange data.
Standard memory cards could also be purchased without the additional features of the VMU.
Some Dreamcast games supported a rumble pack, which was sold separately and could be plugged into the controller.
The Dreamcast controller offered an analog stick, a D-pad, a Start button, four gaming buttons (labeled A, B, X, and Y), and two analog index finger triggers on the underside. It also contained two slots which fit memory cards or the rumble pack; the uppermost one had a window through which the VMU's display could be seen. The Dreamcast controller was somewhat large and some players found it difficult to hold.
Unique to the Dreamcast among console gaming systems, it used a VGA adaptor for output to a computer display, and HD-Tv compatible sets (which provided much better quality than a television set).
The Dreamcast supported a mouse as well as a keyboard which was useful when using the included web browser, but also was used in a few games such as The Typing of the Dead.
There was a microphone peripheral used for Alien Front Online, Planetweb Web browser 2.6 (long distance calling support), and Seaman. A fishing-rod controller was used in Sega Bass Fishing, a maracas controller used with Samba de Amigo. Steering wheel controllers and dance mats were also available.
Hardware Sales
| Region | Sales |
|---|---|
| North America | 4 million |
| Europe | 2 million |
| Japan | 3 million |
| Worldwide total | 9 million |
Online
When released, Dreamcast came packed with a Planetweb web browser. The browser allowed people dial-up access to the internet. Version 2.0 was the first to come out alongside the Japanese Dreamkey browser. The last Web browser, version 3.0, was able to watch movies on the net with Java support as well as have broadband and mouse support. Unfortunetly, because of lack of Sega support, only a few thousand Version 3.0 browsers were released in America and Europe.
The Dreamcast was one of the first systems to offer online gameplay with the game Chu Chu Rocket. The Seganet online dial-up service (US$29/month membership) attracted 300,000 subscribers in America alone. About twenty-two games, including Quake III and Phantasy Star Online, supported Seganet. 4x4 Evolution(first crossplatform game) and Starlancer are the last two remaining online capable games. In America, Seganet ran until the beginning of January 2003.
The modem module in the Dreamcast could easily be replaced with a broadband module to allow networked gaming over Ethernet.
Screenshots
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 CLX2, capable of drawing around 7 million polygons per second (though rarely pushed this far; the models for the polygons would become a limiting factor, chipping away video memory for the textures)
- Memory: Main RAM-16 MB, Video RAM-8 MB, Sound RAM-2 MB
- Sound Card: Super Intelligent (Yamaha) Sound Processor with 47MHz 32-Bit RISC ARM7 CPU core built-in (64 channel PCM/ADPCM)
- GD-ROM Drive: 12x maximum speed (when running in Constant Angular Velocity mode)
- GD-ROM: Holds up to a Gigabyte of data. A normal CD-rom held 700 Megabytes.
- Inputs: Four ports that can support a digital and analog controller, steering wheel, joystick, keyboard, mouse, and more
- Dimensions: 189mm x 195mm x 76mm (7 7/16" x 7 11/16" x 3")
- Weight: 1.9kg (4.4lbs)
- Color: White
- Modem: Removable; Original Asia/Japan model had a 33.6 Kbytes/s; models released after 9 September 1999 had a 56 Kbytes/s modem
- Broadband: these adapters are available separately and replace the removable modem
- HIT-400: "Broadband Adapter", the more common model, this used a RealTek 8139 chip and supported 10/100mbit
- HIT-300: "Lan Adapter", this version used a Fujitsu MB86967 chip and supported only 10mbit
- Color Output: Approx. 16.77 million simultaneous colors (24 bit)
- Storage: "Visual Memory Unit" (VMU) 128 Kb removable storage device
See also
External links
- Console Database – Dreamcast information
- Dreamcast-Scene - Wiki based database incl. scene news
- PlanetDreamcast
- Dreamcast Emulation - Run emulators and applications on your Dreamcast
- Dreamcast technical details and other articles