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Comment by epcoa | Hacker News Reader

Not sure how any of these except maybe the Dreamcast (and then not by that much - it was almost literally a contemporary arcade board clone) were examples of “ahead of its time”.

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https://dcemulation.org/?title=Bleemcast%21

I bought a DC on launch week, it's one of my favourite consoles of all time. I still own one. But what has bleemcast got to do with what the parent said?

To demonstrate how powerful and far ahead it was.

The Dreamcast charm is partly how simple it is, a jellybean CPU. The PowerVR is competent but it’s not outside the norm for 3D accelerators of the period (and there was a mass produced PCI card available of it). Nothing about the Dreamcast is exotic. Though the pack in modem and VMU are neat (did say “maybe” for the DC). GD-ROM vs DVD was obviously a dumb move. Perhaps Sega didn’t have the war chest to loss leader a DVD Dreamcast (they didn’t have the vision either at that point).

A technical demo like Bleemcast doesn’t demonstrate how far ahead something is, it has to be seen relative to the hardware of a similar generation. Having said that the PS2 which had some early programming hiccups would go on to eat DC’s lunch.

...and PS2 eating the DC's lunch has more to do with Sega and their terrible decisions made in prior generations that burnt retailers and consumers alike than anything else. The things the PS2 had going for it at launch was a cheap DVD player(yes Sega didn't have the money for this. They were very close to bankruptcy at the time) and Sony's hype.

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