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Dreamcast (ドリームキャスト Dorīmukyasuto?, code-named Black Belt, Dural, Dricas, Vortex, and Katana during development) is Sega's fifth and final video game console and the successor to the Sega Saturn. An attempt to recapture the console market with a next-generation system, it was designed to supersede the PlayStation and Nintendo 64. Originally released sixteen months before the PlayStation 2 (PS2), and three years before the Nintendo GameCube and the Xbox, Dreamcast was generally considered to be ahead of its time and was initially successful at restoring Sega's reputation in the gaming industry. However, it failed to gather enough momentum before the release of the PlayStation 2 in March 2000, and Sega decided to discontinue Dreamcast the following year, withdrawing entirely from the console hardware business.
HistoryImage:Dreamcast game.jpg A Dreamcast game jewel case and disc
When it was announced that Sega would be discontinuing the Saturn permanently in favor of Dreamcast, many third-party developers in Japan were angered, as it meant that they were putting money into developing titles for what would soon be a dead system. DesignWhen the time came to design the successor to the Sega Saturn, the new President of Sega, Shoichiro Irimajiri, took the unusual step of hiring an outsider, Tatsuo Yamamoto from IBM Austin, to head a "skunk works" group to develop the next-generation console. It soon became apparent that the existing Japanese hardware group led by Hideki Sato did not want to relinquish control of the hardware department, bringing rise to two competing designs led by two different groups. A timeline of the development of the console's GPU may be found here.
The U.S. skunk works group (11 people in a secret suite away from the Sega of America headquarters) led by Tatsuo Yamamoto settled on an Hitachi SH4 processor with a 3dfx Voodoo 2 graphics processor, which was originally codenamed "Black Belt". The first U.S. prototype boards were silkscreened "Shark" and later "Dural". When 3dfx declared its Initial Public Offering (IPO) in April 1997, it revealed every detail of the contract with Sega. Sega had been keeping the development of its next-generation console secret during this competition, and was supposedly outraged when 3dfx publicly laid out its deal with Sega over the new system in the IPO. In July 1997, perhaps as a result of 3dfx's IPO, it was decided that the Japanese "Katana" would be the chosen format, renamed Dreamcast. In September 1997, 3dfx filed a lawsuit against Sega and NEC (later including VideoLogic), stating "breach of contract", and accusing Sega of starting the deal in bad faith to take 3dfx technology, although they later settled.[2] LaunchDreamcast was released on November 27, 1998 in Japan, on September 9, 1999 in North America (the date 9/9/99 featured heavily in U.S. promotion) and on October 14, 1999 in Europe. The tagline used to promote the console in the U.S. was, "It's thinking", and in Europe, "Up to 6 Billion Players". Dreamcast was the first console to include a built-in modem and Internet support for online gaming. Previous consoles such as the Genesis/Mega Drive had online capabilities, but these were comparably limited and required extra hardware (XBAND). Dreamcast enjoyed brisk sales in its first season, and was one of Sega's most successful hardware units. In the United States alone, a record 300,000 units [3] had been pre-ordered before launch and Sega sold 500,000 consoles in just two weeks (including 225,000 sold on the first 24 hours which became a video game record). In fact, due to brisk sales and hardware shortages, Sega was unable to fulfill all of the advance orders. Sega confirmed that it made $98.4 million on combined hardware and software sales with Dreamcast with its September 9, 1999 launch. Sega even compared the record figure to the opening day gross of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, which made $28.5 million during the first 24 hours in theaters. Chris Gilbert, senior vice president of sales, Sega of America, said on the November 24, 1999: "By hitting the one million units sold landmark, it is clear that the Sega Dreamcast consumer has moved beyond the hard-core gamer and into the mass market." He likened it to a music album going platinum or a film netting $100m in box office receipts. Before the launch in the United States, Sega had already taken the extra step in displaying Dreamcast's capabilities in stores nationwide. Much like the PlayStation's launch in North America, the displays of titles such as Soul Calibur, Sonic Adventure, Power Stone, and Hydro Thunder helped Dreamcast succeed in the first year. Although Dreamcast had none of EA's popular sports games, due in part to EA's losses from the Sega Saturn, Sega Sports titles helped to fill that void. The biggest competition between Sega Sports and EA Sports in the U.S. was their football games (i.e. NFL 2K1 vs. Madden NFL 2001). Both games were highly regarded, NFL 2K1 having the advantage of online play (coinciding with release of SegaNet) and Madden NFL 2001 arguably having a graphics edge. NFL 2K1 outsold Madden NFL 2001 with about 410,000 copies, which was about the number of PlayStation 2's that had been sold in America at the time. CompetitionIn April 1999, Sony announced its PlayStation 2, designed to be backwards-compatible with the older PlayStation. The actual release of the PS2 was not until March 2000 in Japan, and late-October 2000 in the United States. Sony's press release, despite being a year ahead of the launch of the PS2, was enough to divert a lot of attention from Sega. With the looming PS2 launch in Japan, Dreamcast was largely ignored in that territory. Dreamcast had great initial success in the United States, but had trouble maintaining this momentum after news of the PS2's release. Dreamcast sales grew 156.5% from July 23 to September 30 putting Sega ahead of Nintendo 64 in that period. For the month of November 2000, Dreamcast passed the Nintendo 64 as the second best selling system. During that time, the PlayStation 2 was plagued by production shortages, with people often paying in excess of $1000 on eBay for Sony's next-generation console. However, Dreamcast's online capabilities through SegaNet (Sony would not bring the PlayStation 2 online until late 2002, well after Dreamcast's demise, though some games, through 3rd party devices, brought the competing machine online as early as Fall 2001 through GameSpy), and a price cut around Fall 2000 (which made it half the price of the PS2) did little to help sales once the PlayStation 2 was launched. A key to Sony's relative ease for success with the PlayStation 2 was that they already enjoyed brand-name dominance over Sega after the huge success of the original PlayStation, while Sega's reputation had been hurt due to commercial failure of the Sega Saturn, Sega 32X, and Sega CD. In particular, Sega's attempt to quickly kill off the struggling Saturn (which lagged in North America) in favour of Dreamcast had angered many third-party developers in Japan, where the Saturn had still been able to hold its own.[4] While initial Dreamcast sales were strong, many prospective buyers and game developers were still skeptical of Sega and they held off from committing, possibly to see which console would prevail. By early 2001, game publishers abandoned Dreamcast development en masse in favour of the PlayStation 2 and cancelled many nearly completed projects (notably Half-Life). In 2000, the announcements of the Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo GameCube were widely regarded as the last straw for Dreamcast, which fueled speculation that Sega did not have the resources for a prolonged marketing campaign. Sega's decision to release Dreamcast early, or even at all, is still debated. While it was largely regarded as a risky gamble, Dreamcast was initially successful in partly repairing the company's reputation at least in North America. Ultimately, anticipation of competitors' newer consoles resulted in stagnation of Dreamcast sales and the eventual loss of third-party developers. Outside USA and JapanSega had problems choosing suitable companies to promote Dreamcast outside the USA. Marketing in European countries was done somewhat poorly, whereas Sony marketed the PlayStation 2 in each country's local medias, such as newspapers, street shows, etc. Sega recruited third-party companies to promote Dreamcast, some of which did not allocate sufficient money for advertising. SegaNet was a fiasco in Finland because the cost of connection was more than three times the amount of a normal ISDN internet connection. This was due to the fact that Sega gave open pricing for third-party companies. The companies stated that the price was steep due to a lack of potential customers, but most believe that the companies were just using the open pricing to their advantage. Some important games also lacked European releases. Many important titles were never released outside of Japan, and many were hard to find without importing them to the United Kingdom. Sega put most of its efforts into fighting the console war in the USA, disregarding European markets. While Dreamcast did receive a price cut in the USA to coincide with the PlayStation 2's American release, the European pricing remained the same, even when the PlayStation 2 was released in Europe. End of productionOn January 31, 2001, Sega announced that production of Dreamcast hardware was to be discontinued by March of that year, although the 50 to 60 titles still in production would be published. The last North American release was NHL 2K2, which was released in February 2002. With the company announcing no plans to develop a next-generation successor to Dreamcast, this was Sega's last foray into the home console business. By the time Sega decided to cease development of Dreamcast, about 10 million consoles had been manufactured. While this number may seem impressive, more Dreamcast systems were sitting unsold in warehouses, retail and distribution channels at the time than had actually been sold to the public. Massive price cuts were quickly instituted in order to move the abundance of unsold hardware and the system had quickly dropped to prices as low as $39.99 USD new. Though Dreamcast was officially discontinued in early 2001, commercial games were still developed and released afterwards, particularly in Japan. Many though consider the critically acclaimed arcade shooter Ikaruga, developed by Treasure, to be Dreamcast's swan song. It was released in September 2002 in Japan only after a large amount of speculation on the game's fate; its U.S. release was on the GameCube in April 2003. Hacked, unreleased games like Propeller Arena and Half-Life continued to become available to the public through warez groups and independent hackers. On February 24, 2004, Sega released their final Dreamcast game, Puyo Pop Fever. A small number of third-party games are still being released, such as Chaos Field released in December 2004, Trizeal released in April 2005, Rajirugi released in February 2006, Under Defeat released in March 2006, and most recently Radium, Last Hope to be released January 2007, Trigger Heart Exelica to be released February 2007, and Karous to be released March 2007. Despite its short lifespan, Dreamcast is still a popular and highly-regarded console among many fans due to its impressive library of both mainstream and more offbeat titles. It is even starting to gain a cult following, as the system is becoming harder to find. In fact, although Dreamcast was officially discontinued in January 2001, Sega continued to produce the console for a short time afterwards due to rising demand, especially among collectors and hardcore fans. Several Dreamcast emulation projects have emerged after Dreamcast's end of production, with Chankast being the most notable. Along with the recently released nullDC. Afterlife of DreamcastOn February 16, 2006, Sega once again began selling Dreamcast consoles through its online store, Sega Direct of Japan. The package deal included a refurbished Dreamcast, a cell phone card, and Radilgy — a new 2D shooter game by developer Milestone. A short time later, developer G.rev followed that game with a second new 2D shooter game called Under Defeat in March. Both releases were for the Japanese market alone. While the refurbished package has been discontinued, Sega Direct does still sell several Dreamcast software titles.[5] On May 20, 2006, Sega of Japan went live with free Phantasy Star Online servers.[6] A translated excerpt from the article reads, "I would like "Phantasy Star Online" to play forever in users. [...] Please continue your favors toward the degree in which 'Phantasy Star Online' is patronized." On May 30, 2006, the gaming website IGN officially relaunched IGN Dreamcast with the goal of revisiting the 243 North American-released Dreamcast games and give "new impressions, screens and videos" and compare them to the gaming experience provided by PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii games. On January 31, 2007, a port of the Neo Geo game Last Hope, developed by NG:DEV.TEAM was published by redspotgames via Play-Asia.com and various other stores. The GOAT store has planned other games which will be released in the 2007. On February 22, 2007, a port of the Naomi powered 2D shooter Trigger Heart Exelica, developed by Warashi, was released on Dreamcast for the Japanese market with both a current and a limited edition release. Despite rumors that went around the internet, the game was not retitled to Trigger Heart Extension for the Dreamcast release. Milestone announced that Karous, their new NAOMI vertical shooter, would be making its way to Dreamcast on March 8, 2007. ModelsThe standard Dreamcast unit was made of white and grey plastic. The power light, like the Dreamcast logo in NTSC regions, was orange (this color was chosen because the Japanese consider it to be lucky). Games were sold in jewel cases. In North America, these initially had the Dreamcast name and logo on a white background, but later games used a black background. Japanese games used an orange-and-white scheme, and European and Australian games used blue. The unit was packaged with a video cable which supported composite video and stereo sound. Available separately were an RGB SCART cable, an S-Video cable, an RF connector (included as standard in the UK and Portugal), and a VGA adapter (see accessories below). In North America, 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 website. Similar offerings were sold through the Lik Sang website. Cases of different colors like blue, red, orange, and green were sold for replacements of the original casing. In Japan, Sega released many varieties of the system, including a limited edition Sonic anniversary version, a pink Sakura Taisen version, and a Hello Kitty version released in 2000 in Japan which, due to its limited production, has become an extremely rare collector's piece. The package contains a keyboard, controller, VMU, mouse, and a Hello Kitty trivia game. The console and accessories came in both translucent pink and blue in color with some printed designs. The Brazilian version, manufactured by Tec Toy under license, was essentially the same as the North American version, but its video output was converted to the PAL-M standard and did not come with the modem, which was available separately. Dreamcast in Europe had a blue spiral logo, similar to the logo on earlier Sega systems. This change is thought to have been for copyright reasons. A German company, Tivola, had been using a similar swirl logo years before Sega branded Dreamcast with the orange swirl. As well as the VGA mode (again using an adapter), the European Dreamcast supported PAL video, in both 50 Hz and 60 Hz modes. This was a first for game consoles, as no previous PAL console had offered the option to play games at full speed, using the ability of many PAL televisions to operate at 60 Hz (a feature that was first discovered after the expansion of import gaming through chipping/modification of the Sony PlayStation, which forced PAL consoles into NTSC mode unlike the MegaDrive/SNES before it). This became a feature of all major consoles released since. The 60 Hz option had to be enabled on the game disc, however, but only a small number of games lacked this. Games in Europe were sold in jewel cases exactly twice as thick as their North American counterparts, possibly to enable the inclusion of thick instruction booklets containing instructions in multiple languages. A third-party company from China named Treamcast released a portable modified Dreamcast which used the original first-party Dreamcast components with a custom made plastic casing. This small system with its fold-down display resembled the later PS One. Many companies included software and a remote with the unit that enabled it to play MP3s and Video CDs. When the internet import videogame store Lik Sang contacted Sega to ask permission to sell a modified version of the system with Sega trademarks on the system, they were told that Sega did not approve of the unit, and felt that it violated their trademarks. In reality, this system is no different from a Dreamcast pre-modified with a third party shell, as the system's internals still use first party hardware, and the only modifications are the outside casing and internal sound and video adjustments. In 2005, the internet import store Lan-Kwei started selling a "Treamcast" portable modified Dreamcast with a 16:9 widescreen LCD. Aside from the cosmetic differences in the case to accommodate the larger screen, there are no differences between the original Treamcast and the newer widescreen model. AccessoriesVisual Memory Unit Template:Commonscat The Visual Memory Unit, or "VMU", was the Dreamcast memory card. It featured a monochrome LCD screen, a D-Pad, and two gaming buttons. The VMU could play mini-games loaded onto it from certain Dreamcast games, such as a Chao game transferrable from Sonic Adventure. It could also display a list of the saved game data stored on it, and two VMUs could be connected together end-to-end to exchange data. Standard memory cards could also be purchased without the additional features of the VMU. Most of these were manufactured by third-party companies, (such as the Nexus Memory Card), although Sega eventually released a 4X memory card. The 4X cards did not have the VMU screen or stand-alone abilities, but they had four times the space thanks to the ability to switch between four 200-block sectors. Controller and Rumble Pack Most Dreamcast games supported a rumble pack, or "Jump Pack", which was sold separately and could be plugged into the controller. In Japan, the Jump Pack was named the "Puru Puru Pack". The Dreamcast controller featured a similar design to the Sega Saturn's analog controller, offering an analog stick, a D-pad, a Start button, four action buttons (labeled A, B, X, and Y, two buttons less than the Saturn), and two analog triggers on the underside. It also contained two slots which could hold memory cards or the rumble pack, with a window on the front of the controller through which the VMU's display could be seen. The Dreamcast controller was somewhat larger than many other controllers, and some players found it difficult to hold. VGA Adapter Unique to Dreamcast was a VGA adapter for output to a computer display or HDTV compatible sets, providing much better quality than a standard television set. Not all games were compatible with the VGA adapter, but work-arounds existed to trick all but a handful of games into working with it. Dreamcast mouse and keyboard Dreamcast supported a mouse as well as a keyboard, which were useful when using the included web browser, and also supported by certain games such as The Typing of the Dead, Quake 3, Phantasy Star Online and Railroad Tycoon 2. Other games such as REZ offered undocumented mouse support. Fishing Rod A motion sensitive fishing rod was released for the few fishing games on the system. Microphone There was a microphone peripheral used for version 2.6 of the Planetweb web browser (providing long distance calling support), the European Planet Ring collection, Alien Front Online, and Seaman, the first console game to use speech recognition in the U.S. Lightgun Sega also produced a light gun for the system, although this was not sold in the United States, possibly because Sega did not want its name on a gun in light of recent school shootings (e.g. Columbine High School massacre). American versions of light gun games even blocked out using the official gun. Several third parties made compatible guns for the few light gun games released, including The House of the Dead 2 and Confidential Mission. The only other light gun compatible games were Death Crimson OX and its Japanese prequel Death Crimson 2, Virtua Cop 2 on the Sega Smash Pack, and a light gun minigame in Demolition Racer No Exit.
Arcade Stick A heavy-duty Arcade Stick was put out by Sega, featuring a digital joystick with six buttons using the same microswitch assemblies as commercial arcade machines. Although it could not be used for many Dreamcast games due to the lack of an analog joystick, it was well received and helped cement Dreamcast's reputation for playing 2D shooters and fighting games. Adaptors are now available to use the Arcade Stick on other hardware platforms. Third-party sticks were also made, like the ASCII Dreamcast fighting pad, which some regard as having a more comfortable 6-button configuration and a more precise digital direction pad. Twin Sticks A twin stick peripheral was released specifically for use with the game Virtual-On. This add-on mimicked the original dual arcade stick setup and made gameplay much more precise. They are extremely rare and often quite expensive. Dreameye Sega developed the Dreameye, a digital camera for Dreamcast, but it was only released in Japan. Samba de Amigo controller Sega developed a special maraca controller for the Samba de Amigo music game. Canceled Accessories Toward the end of Dreamcast's lifespan, Sega created and displayed prototypes of a high-capacity VMU/MP3 player, DVD player, and Zip drive peripherals. None of these items became available to the public. PiracyThe proprietary GD-ROM format was the only means of piracy protection and was quickly defeated. Using a combination of reverse-engineering and insecure firmware, one piracy method was made possible by the existence of regular-CD booting code in the Dreamcast BIOS to enable multimedia functions (called Mil-CD) for music CD releases on the Japanese market. Mil-CD support was removed from the final Dreamcast revisions. It has been said upon discovery of this information and the addition of a boot-disc that over 100,000 additional Dreamcast units were sold within months.[citation needed] Previous to the discovery of the swap file, many games suffered downgrading or removing audio and video streams. Some even denote a high amount of hardware and software knowledge, like the method used on the Echelon release of Skies of Arcadia. Because the game came on two GD-ROMs, featured no pre-rendered FMV, and all audio was chip generated, there was nothing to be ripped or downsampled from it. Therefore, the game was reprogrammed with a decompression program that actually handled data management on the fly (see: http://www.theisonews.com/release.php?releaseid=28702). One of the least successfully pirated games on the system was WARP's D2. Shipping on four GD-ROMs and each filling the 1.1 GB capacity, the game required the user to swap discs without saving to continue on. Swapping to a new disc initiated another disc security check by the system, which would then fail. Pirates eventually circumvented this by using 99 minute CD-R's, but because of the rarity of the discs, the method was not widespread. Other multi-disc games like Shenmue 2 let the user save before swapping discs, whereby they would then power down and load the next disc if it wasn't a legitimate copy. Eventually with the dedication of multiple release groups, every game successfully implemented a swap file to bypass not only copy protection, but allowed the user to create a near perfect copy. The aforementioned problems with Shenmue 2 and D2 have since been corrected. LegacyDreamcast 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 it 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 that can be booted by an unmodified Dreamcast. GamesAs of September 2006, the Sega Dreamcast has more than 720 official games available in its library.[7] Dreamcast features games with the following ratings from the ESRB[citation needed]:
Some of the more popular games that were made for Dreamcast were third-person shooters or arcade-style fighting games. Trivia
Technical specificationsImage:Dreamcast-internal.jpg Internal view of a Dreamcast Console Processor
Graphics Engine
Memory
Sound Engine
Storage
Input/Output
Dimensions
Networking
See also
References
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