The Rise and Fall of the Dreamcast (2009) | Hacker News Reader

The Rise and Fall of the Dreamcast (2009)

gamasutra.com

60 pointstosh26 comments

> In 1996, 3Dfx began building wide acclaim for its powerful graphics chips, one of which ran in arcade machines, including Atari's San Francisco Rush and Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey. In 1997, 3Dfx went public, announcing its IPO. In the process it revealed the details of its contract with Sega, required by U.S. law. The announcement, however, had undesired effects. It publicly revealed Sega's blueprint for a new, unannounced console, and angered executives at Sega Japan.

> Numerous reports indicate Yamamoto's Blackbelt chipset using the 3Dfx chips was the more powerful of the two. Sega executives, however, still fuming at 3Dfx, severed their contract with the chip maker. (Soon thereafter, 3Dfx sued Sega and both companies settled out of court.)

> In the end, Sega of Japan selected Sato's design, codenamed it "Katana," and announced it publicly on September 7, 1997. To this day, it's unclear whether Sega would have chosen the Blackbelt 3Dfx solution, had 3Dfx not revealed Sega's plans publicly.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132517/the_rise_and_fa...

seems like the executives took it personally

Having worked in the US office of a Japanese company, this does not surprise me in the least. Neither does their choice to use weird hardware with poor library support. The company I worked for did not understand that, if you sell a premade hardware device, you must also provide good, sensible tools and modern library support. They're currently doing very well in markets where this isn't the case like OEM hardware.

Ironically the major selling point of their products in Mexico is that the Mexican users won't steal the products because they're too ugly.

heh. Reminds me of agency break-ins in London. All of the Apple gear would be taken, and some of the better looking screens. But the ugly 5 times more expensive PC laptops were left there.

I got a Dreamcast well into its decline, and I was blown away by the quality of the software. It was the true successor to the N64, in terms of a delivering end-to-end quality. I remember Shenmue, Crazy Taxi, Virtua Tennis, and Soul Caliber as being nearly as immersive as arcade games games of the era. It was the last video game system I played to any significant degree. A truly underrated platform.

I got one on launch day; I had bypassed the Saturn as a teen, but everything about the Dreamcast screamed "this is your next console". I had as much fun trying to run GNU/Linux and NetBSD on it as I did playing games. And yes, it was as close as one could get to the Sega Arcade experience at home.

I really wish I still had mine.

>>> I really wish I still had mine.

Simple, get one again.

Collecting Dreamcast hardware and games is still affordable - compared to, say, SNES games (which can get pretty pricey if you insist on having them CIB).

The beauty of the DC is that you can get all regions work on an unmodified (as in hardware) Console using a DC-X bootdisk and the games are as close to their arcade counterparts as they can get...

I'm sure I'll pick one up one day soon. There is an independent (as in not Gamestop) used game store near me, and they always have a few on the shelf. If I do I'll try to track down a VGA converter for it so I can do higher resolution on the games that supported it.

The reason I say I wish I still had mine, though, is purely nostalgic. Like I said, I bought it on launch day, and it worked perfectly to the day my ex-wife took it and all my games in the divorce. It's probably in a landfill somewhere now.

Madden is just catching up to the realism Dreamcast's NFL 2k series had in the early 2000s.

Games were still released after the death of Dreamcast.

The library of schmups is particularly impressive - Rez, Ikaruga, Bangai-O, etc were excellent games.

It also had quirky weird games. "BomberHehHe" was Japanese only game where you place explosive to destroy buildings. You get points for maximum destruction. It didn't get a western release because it came out just before 9/11 and people were wary of games about destroying tower blocks. It deserves a remake. Or at least, a loose clone.

It had a few good driving games, but it struggled to compete against Gran Turismo. (The first game is actually hard and avoids the shovelware problem of later versions). Sega Rally looks nice, but wasn't as good as sega Rally on the Saturn which, with 3 cars and tracks was perfect with the driving experience.

One thig people haven't mentioned is the ease of piracy. Usenet news groups could distribute roms easily enough. Some games needed a loader disc, but eventually most didn't.

That time - N64; Dreamcast; Playstation one - was brilliant for console gaming.

>>Games were still released after the death of Dreamcast. >>The library of schmups is particularly impressive - Rez, Ikaruga, Bangai-O, etc were excellent games.

Indeed, one Shmup that has been released in mid 2013 is "Sturmwind" - See a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zy2k_iwJDY

Obligatory Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmwind

The Dreamcast was easily the best console of that generation. The only console that came close to arcade games back then. It's too bad it wasn't a success...

The console completely succeeded at what it set out to do, which was to create an amazing home arcade experience. Unfortunately, the market quickly moved away from arcade style games.

In a sense it was. It sold almost 11 million units and was selling more consoles and software than the N64 and the PS1.

But a troubled launch at home and the PS2 launch put Sega in the position of basically hemorrhaging money. The normal response in the face of a new competitor was to cut the console price, but they simply couldn't afford it and they killed it to save the company.

On top of it, people had figured out how to pirate games, and broadband was starting to become a thing.

The Mil-CD piracy was really bad. The Dreamcast used GD-ROMs: 1GB optical discs which were effectively unpiratable as they were custom to the console. Almost as an afterthought though SEGA added a secondary executable disc format: Mil-CD. These were meant to be audio CD singles with a Dreamcast executable embedded. They never really caught on though, and only a few titles were released. The support for booting DC code from a CD remained in the console though, so people were able to rip the bootloader from a Mil-CD, append the data from a ripped GD-ROM (extracted with a buffer overflow in a game and the modem / later ethernet adaptor) and boot that. Took a manual process to set up, but after that it was freely distributable and burnable, and played without any modification to the console. The only games that were safe were those bigger than 760mb, and even then the assets could be resampled down to a smaller size.

It was this same feature that made it so easy to run alternate OSes on the DC too. That was one of my favorite things about the system; I could switch from Unreal Tournament to Linux to NetBSD to classic PC Doom to a NES/SNES emulator, just by switching discs and rebooting.

To me, the DC is the first recognizable "modern" 3d console. The Playstation 1, the N64 and the Saturn all had issues and compromises and the games from that generation really haven't held up terribly well.

But Dreamcast games largely have held up, in the way that perhaps NES and Turbografx games have held up from the 2d console era.

If somebody were to fire up SoulCalibur or Crazy Taxi on the DC today, it might require a double take to realize it's not on a modern console.

I mean, once it gets into the gameplay, does this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjqKJw_TOko look or play really appreciably better than this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S9Gqspnd2Q

Other than HD and widescreen, I'd argue that it isn't knock your socks off better, not in the way the move from the Atari 2600 is to the SNES (in fact the time from the DC to the PS4 and the XBone is longer than the time from the 2600 to the SNES). But the jump from the PS1 to the DC was huge.

Of course there's lots of improvement today, but nice models and art assets have become hideously expensive to produce...so modern consoles just don't end up with that much of an improvement in many comparable games.

The DC has pretty much every recognizable component of a modern console, fancy controller with an analog stick, internet connectivity, optical disks, and a tiny tiny console.

Could the DC provide every modern game type? Of course not. But for games that have a lineage back to the DC (or earlier), there's just not that huge leap you'd expect when looking back.

On top of that, there's an absolutely incredible library of really innovative games on the console. Unbelievably fun and exciting and you can't really find them anywhere else. Unlike today where virtually every game is released on pretty much every console.

It's a shame Sega couldn't make the economics work, because the industry would be far more interesting with them in the mix.

edit oh yeah, and it was gorgeous on a VGA monitor.

looking back, I had both a PS2 and a DC, and I played the DC way more, the games were just more fun.

Some more info

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awg3UZs9J_E&feature=youtu.be

http://www.polygon.com/2013/8/7/4599588/why-did-the-dreamcas...

Some of my best memories of me and my late brother were playing Soul Calibur together on my DC. He was a master at fighting games, and we'd spend hours together every week learning all the combos and moves of each character. I was better at deathmatch FPS games though, so the roles were reversed when we played Unreal Tournament. I was a natural on the keyboard and mouse, and he preferred the gamepad anyway. He still got good enough to take me down half the time.

Good times...

    'Oh my God, I don't know anybody who has even
    heard of this chip. It's non-standard and
    there are no libraries for it.'

Sounds like a precursor to Sony's 'fall from grace' with the PS3. I think it's telling that Microsoft and Sony ended up basically with the same hardware for their current-gen devices.

PS3's RSX was based on an off the shelf popular Nvidia GPU [1] while PS2 (the console that sold the most [2]) used a completely custom GPU[3]). It's parity on the CPU - both used a popular ISA CPU (MIPS and PowerPC) with custom additional PUs (VUs and SPEs).

As for the same hardware in Xbox1 and PS4... it depends on what degree you make the distinction. Both have AMD's SoC however other than the ISA they are very different from programmer's PoV: one is a NUMA (DDR3 + ESRAM) another is UMA (GDDR5), which is quite a difference even to a layperson when multi-platform titles compared.

My point is that while it makes a good soundbite in journalism, the availability of libraries is pretty irrelevant for a console's success.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSX_%27Reality_Synthesizer%27

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_million-selling_game_co...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2_hardware#Graphics...

You clearly know a lot about the details here, but from a high up perspective I think the ease of development is one of a few key factors (others being games, price, brand loyalty and features). With the PS2 Sony had a strong enough foothold in the market for developers to have to suppor the platform, and the initial under performing games to not be an issue.

If the PS4 and Xbox One were released with the PS4 being harder to develope for (lets just say flip the UMA to PS4) we would see the Xbox One with 1080p/60fps games and the PS4 lagging behind. I think this would cause the Xbox one to be on top in terms of sales.

When the first xbox was released it had a very familiar PC architecture, I think if they had gone with something bespoke it would have been an instant flop.

While it's not the only factor in a console's success I think to say it's irrelevant is an over statement.

In terms of being unnecessarily hard to program, that was the Saturn. Which Sega learned from and made the Dreamcast relatively easy to program. They just chose the a newer revision of the CPU architecture they used in the Saturn, which wasn't a terrible choice.

Interestingly, developers complained about the N64's difficulty too, so Nintendo also made the GameCube easier to program. Which just goes to show that a console's success has little to do with how easy it is to program.

Dreamcast was the second system I learned about embedded systems with, after working on 1.5-megabyte Linux distros for old 486's turned into routers and terminal server clients. Nowadays Android provides a similar experience for many new people, but Dreamcast had to be hacked and reverse engineered and have custom drivers written for it... it was a romantic time.

Also the games kicked ass. The only flaw was the GDROM was literally not fast enough to keep up with how fast I played Crazy Taxi, and you'd get occasional jutters from the GDROM as it worked hard to seek to the next data segment. (I always wondered why GDROMs didn't become a new consumer device, since it had expanded capacity on CDROM without a change in media?)

It's too bad Console Wars (http://www.consolewarsbook.com/) doesn't cover Dreamcast times. This Gamasutra writeup fills in neatly. Otherwise that's a book I can recommend. I'm hopeing there would be a sequel covering PlayStations, GameCube and Wii, Xbox and Dreamcast.

I just threw out my Dreamcast after finding it in my parent's garage. The internal battery was completely drained and was soldered to the controller board. So that wasn't going to be an easy fix. The fan was much louder than I remembered. I can't remember if it was always that way. The 2 games I really wanted to play, Soul Caliber and Virtual On, were missing from their jewel case.

My son and I did have a great time playing Sonic Adventures. One of the things I noticed is the games held up really well and they went on for hours! None of this 2 hour single player and then online that is the norm now.

Sadly, it died 4 months after rediscovery. Something about spending almost a decade in a humid, Florida garage probably didn't help. I did keep the VMUs for the day when I'll find another in a thriftshop in middle america somewhere.

You threw it out? facepalm

If you had sold it or given it away on ebay or craigslist, there's a good chance that someone could have fixed it or at least used it for spare parts (like transplanting a working console with a damaged case into it). We've got a bad enough e-waste problem as it is with all of the obsolete DVD players, mobile phones, etc. in our landfills, don't add things that people actually want to keep for decades and run cottage industries around the maintenance of to that mix.

I gave a lot of things away or recycled the rest. Unfortunately, the number of people with the technical skills that monitor those websites at the same moment I post is quite small. And since I was moving to a smaller apartment I couldn't afford to keep it until it was convenient. My move out date was fixed and no one responded in that time. I did get a few queries after the fact but it was already too late.

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