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Comment by emil0r | Hacker News Reader

A combination of bad PR from Sega Saturn, fanboyism of Nintendo over Sega, Sony absolutely killing it with Playstation One and hyping Playstation Two to pieces leading to few game studios making games for Dreamcast, which lead to fewer sales, etc.

I owned one, and absolutely loved it. But the amount of games you could buy compared to the alternatives was a massive drawback, and Sega didn't have enough household names like Nintendo to pull through.

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I'd add PS2's DVD playback capability as another contributing factor to the Dreamcast's demise. Was kind of a big deal at the time.

I think PS3 was the cheapest bluray player you could buy when it was released. It probably boost sales a bit like PS2's DVD playback feature.

There were cheaper players by LG and Philips at the time, but more importantly the PS3 was the fastest to boot up and play a Blu-ray disc. Boot to playback times on 2006-era standalone Blu-ray players were abysmal, anywhere between 2 to 3 minutes.

2 to 3 minutes? Really? I never seen a Blueray disc in use but no wonder they didn't catch on.

What really hurt adoption in the early days was the Blu-ray versus HD DVD format war, not the players' startup performance. Consumers just sat it out and stuck with DVD, which still looked pretty good with upscaling players and anamorphic movies having become the norm.

Blu-ray has been a successful format, not at all like what happened to LaserDisc. Given the increase in the speed, reliability, and availability of broadband over the last decade (hence streaming) plus the aforementioned acceptability of DVD, Blu-ray's window of opportunity and overall potential were considerably narrower and more limited than DVD's.

weren't DC games easier to copy too ?

Yes, but not right away. It took a while for the knowledge and processes to become established. Piracy wasn't what sank the Dreamcast. By the time piracy became commonplace, roughly mid-late 2000, the DC was already pretty obviously going to lose in the market to both the PS1 and upcoming PS2.

Casual piracy was significantly easier on the DC, but not because GDRoms were easy to copy. What was easy to do was to convince the system to boot from a standard CD, and it turns out some games didn't take up a whole GDRom or could have their textures easily replaced with lower res or better compressed versions allowing them to fit on a self-booting CD.

Kind of? The 1ST_READ.BIN had to be re-scrambled to run off of CD-ROM, but this was trivial after the Utopia leak.

However, if this were the reason for the demise of the console, we could expect large volume sales of the (loss-leader? or close to it?) console, and limited game sales.

Instead, unfortunately for Sega and ultimately, everyone, we saw limited sales of both the Dreamcast console and its games - a sign that the console itself was simply defeated by the PS2, rather than piracy.

Another argument here is that the PS2 suffered from a similarly trivial "swap magic" exploit just after release, where as long as the disc drive never registered a disc ejection, running code could simply be switched out for another piece of running code.

By the time Dreamcast piracy was common place, the console was already cancelled.

It may be a minor quibble, but I found the DC controller to be rather hard on the hands. The edges were just sharp enough to be uncomfortable after a good round of Marvel vs. Capcom.

I quite liked the DC controller. Never felt the comfort issues you’ve reported on (but everyone’s hands are different).

That said, I do agree with your point about the fighting games. They’re definitely played better with arcade sticks (same is true for beat em ups on most systems though).

I don't think it's minor. It's a very uncomfortable controller. It certainly dampened my interest in the console a bit.

The Capcom fighting games on Dreamcast were arcade quality at the time. Absolutely stunning. My favorite was Marvel vs Capcom. I wasn't very good at it, but I was mesmerized by the graphics and great overall UX.

IIRC the Dreamcast and the Naomi arcade system are very similar. The arcade systems have about twice the ram, and can run from rom cartridges as well as optical media (read once on boot into a dedicated disc cache), and there's some variants with interesting I/O, but there wasn't a difference in compute or GPU capabilities.

Notably Soul Reaver 2 was aiming for a Dreamcast release but then moved to be a PS2 exclusive, and there was a fully playable port of Half-Life that never saw an official release.

https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Half-Life_(Dreamcast_port)

I've played the Half Life port, it is playable but had some fairly major issues. The framerate, controls, and load times were all pretty bad. The save files would become larger and larger (and took longer) as you progressed through each level to the point that in some sections a single save would occupy well over half of the VMU's capacity.

> The save files would become larger and larger (and took longer) as you progressed through each level to the point that in some sections a single save would occupy well over half of the VMU's capacity.

So, uh, like Skyrim in PS3?

I did play it as well, and noticed each of your points, although the PC I owned at the time of HL1 release barely fared better performance wise.

The hype/release of the PS2 is understated. It was massive. Since then nothing has, and nothing probably will, rival it again.

EA not supporting it did a lot of damage, though ironically almost every sega sports franchise was better than their games

EA refusing to publish games was a killer, too. Albeit 2K sports was a great line at the time, but EA owned all the important licenses.

Couldn't developers have easily ported their Windows games to Windows CE?

I don't believe Windows CE had DirectX until later, so there probably wasn't any compatibility path.

Edit: apparently wrong again! not my day today.

It's been a while but IIRC it was a cut down version of DirectX 5 ported from desktop Windows.

Windows CE as an OS has lot of peculiarities. For essentially single-tasking game console most of them are probably irrelevant, but on the other hand these peculiarities would probably make straight port of typical DirectX game from desktop windows an interesting endeavor.

> The Sega Dreamcast is known for running an optimised version of Windows CE (with DirectX) as an operating system.

From the page linked.

PC port from DC games happened for some titles but I’d imagine the other way around would have been difficult.

I think they lost because they were too easily hacked.

Most people I knew had one, but nobody payed for games because you could just use a boot cd and play pirated games endlessly.

One of my friends had hundreds upon hundreds of games. More than any of us could ever play.

That is not true. It has been debunked so many times. Sega and there poor decisions during the end of the Genesis era(add-on that cost consumers hundred and then dropping support soon after) and Saturn days(surprise early launch angering developer, consumers and retailers enough for them to never carry the Saturn) lead to the death of the Dreamcast.

Statistical data showed that people were not buying the Dreamcast even though the games were easily pirated. Therefore piracy had no bearing on the console.

The Dreamcast needed sales and Sony's hype machine and SEGA's past reputation lead to consumers avoiding the Dreamcast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d2xuRwYUt4

And being relatively hard to program for, which made many studios ignore it.

That was the Saturn you’re thinking about. The Saturn had two sprite based processors and did 3D by skewing those tiles. This also presented other problems like with transparency (morphing squares into triangles causes problems with alpha blending). It was how Sega arcade boards also worked at that time and so Sega engineers were well versed in writing 3D engines like that but the rest of the development community had settled on the now standard approach of triangles. Couple that with the lack of an SDK and a dual processor system in era before developers were used to writing for such hardware and you had a very problematic console.

The Dreamcast, however, ran a PowerVR2 chip which was much more familiar for anyone with prior dev experience.

Perversely the PlayStation 2 was more complex due to custom hardware like the “emotion engine”. But Sony already had enough momentum from developers and consumers for any such difficulties to become game changing.

As many have pointed out it was very easy to develop for. The developers of Dead or Alive 2(Tecmo), one of best looking 3D fighters on the Dreamcast state stated that developing on the Dreamcast was like writing a sentence with a pen whereas on the PlayStation 2 it was like writing a sentence with a brush.

People are still developing games for it using open source libraries. There was recently a 3D racing game released.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelheart/arcade-racin...

Was it? That’s not something I’d heard before (unlike, say, the PS2/3, Saturn, or N64, where complaints like that are common). What made the DC hard to wrangle?

Here is an overview,

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogaming/comments/dn275r/sega_sa...

Remember that Windows CE was just an alternative to the actual SDK, and it was something like DX 5.

This is about the Sega Saturn, not the Dreamcast.

Yeah I mixed it up, sorry about that.

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