29 Facts About Dreamcast

Dreamcast is a home video game console released by Sega on November 27, 1998, in Japan, September 9, 1999, in North America, and October 14, 1999, in Europe.

The Dreamcast was discontinued in 2001, as Sega's final console after the company's eighteen years in the console market.

In contrast to the expensive hardware of the unsuccessful Saturn, the Dreamcast was designed to reduce costs with "off-the-shelf" components, including a Hitachi SH-4 CPU and an NEC PowerVR2 GPU.

The Dreamcast was the first console to include a built-in modular modem for Internet access and online play.

Rumors about the upcoming Dreamcast—spread mainly by Sega—leaked to the public before the last Saturn games were released.

Related searches

Dreamcast said that Sega's relationship with NEC, a Japanese company, likely influenced the decision to use its hardware rather than the architecture developed in America.

On November 27, 1998, the Dreamcast launched in Japan at a price of, and the stock sold out by the end of the day.

Sega had announced that Sonic Adventure, the next game starring its mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog, would launch with the Dreamcast and promoted it with a large-scale public demonstration at the Tokyo Kokusai Forum Hall, but it and Sega Rally Championship 2 were delayed.

Sega employed aggressive pricing strategies around online gaming; in Japan, every Dreamcast sold included a free year of internet access, which Okawa personally paid for.

Dreamcast was on fire - we really thought that we could do it.

Dreamcast's sentiments were not unique; Sega co-founder David Rosen had "always felt it was a bit of a folly for them to be limiting their potential to Sega hardware", and Stolar had suggested Sega should have sold their company to Microsoft.

The final Dreamcast unit manufactured was autographed by the heads of all nine of Sega's internal game development studios, plus the heads of Visual Concepts and Sega's sound studio Wave Master, and given away with 55 first-party Dreamcast games through a competition organized by GamePro.

Sega estimated the Dreamcast's theoretical rendering capability at 7 million raw polygons per second, or 6 million with textures and lighting, but noted that "game logic and physics reduce peak graphic performance".

The Dreamcast has 16 MB main RAM, along with an additional 8 MB of RAM for graphic textures and 2 MB of RAM for sound.

The R7, a refurbished Dreamcast, was originally used as a network console in Japanese pachinko parlors.

In North America, a limited edition black Dreamcast was released with a Sega Sports logo on the lid, which included matching Sega Sports-branded black controllers and two games.

Dreamcast has four ports for controller inputs, and was sold with one controller.

The Dreamcast can connect to SNK's Neo Geo Pocket Color, predating Nintendo's GameCube – Game Boy Advance link cable.

In most regions, the Dreamcast includes a removable modem for online connectivity, which is modular for future upgrades.

Sega produced the Dreameye, a digital camera that could be connected to the Dreamcast and used to exchange pictures and participate in video chat over the internet.

In contrast to the Sega CD and Sega Saturn, which included internal backup memory, the Dreamcast uses a 128 kbyte memory card, the VMU, for data storage.

The Dreamcast used parts similar to those found in personal computers with Pentium II and III processors, allowing a handful of ports of PC games.

Capcom produced a number of fighting games for the Dreamcast, including the Power Stone series, and a temporarily exclusive entry in the popular Resident Evil series, Resident Evil – Code: Veronica.

The Dreamcast is known for several shoot 'em ups, most notably Treasure's Bangai-O and Ikaruga.

In GamePro, Blake Snow wrote of "the much beloved [Dreamcast] launched years ahead of the competition but ultimately struggled to shed the negative reputation [Sega] had gained during the Saturn, Sega 32X, and Sega CD days.

Related searches

Dreamcast concluded that "Sega's misadventures during the 1990s had left both gamers and publishers wary of any new platform bearing its name".

The staff of Edge agreed with this assessment of Dreamcast games, including Sega's arcade conversions, stating that the system "delivered the first games that could meaningfully be described as arcade perfect".

Damien McFerran of Retro Gamer praised Dreamcast's NAOMI arcade ports, and wrote: "The thrill of playing Crazy Taxi in the arcade knowing full well that a pixel-perfect conversion was set to arrive on the Dreamcast is an experience gamers are unlikely to witness again.

Fahs noted, "The Dreamcast's life was fleeting, but it was saturated with memorable titles, most of which were completely new properties.