Sleepy Gamer » Flashback http://www.sleepygamer.com By gamers, for gamers Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:17:36 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Tribute to the Sega Dreamcast http://www.sleepygamer.com/2008/11/07/tribute-to-the-sega-dreamcast/ http://www.sleepygamer.com/2008/11/07/tribute-to-the-sega-dreamcast/#comments Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:35:21 +0000 Van http://www.sleepygamer.com/?p=190

Just thinking about the Dreamcast brings back lots of fond memories.  Witnessing the red swirl as you powered it on, you knew that there was something special about it.   This was the first system that truly felt “next gen”.  The thought of playing an arcade-perfect Marvel vs. Capcom at the comfort of your home was simply marvelous.  Resident Evil sent chills down my spine as I was blasting zombies away in beautiful real-time graphics.  So, where did it all go wrong?

History in the Making
Towards the later part of the 90s, Sega was in a rut.  With the previous blunders of the Sega CD and 32X, Sega’s current console, the Saturn, was on the verge of yet another failure.  Despite some modest success in Japan, the Saturn only sold a mere 9 million units worldwide.  In comparison, the original Sony PlayStation dominated the sales charts with over 100 million units sold.  The public was starting to lose faith in Sega, and they needed a way to revitalize the Sega name.  Towards the end of the Saturn lifecycle, Sega had a secret project with 2 of their internal groups.  With one group in Japan, and the other in the U.S, they would be competing against each other to develop a new console system.  In the end, Sega crowned the Japanese team the victor, and thus the Dreamcast was born.

Revolutionary Specs
At the time, the Dreamcast specs were unparalleled.  Powered by a powerful 200MHz 128-bit Hitachi SH4 processor, 16MB of RAM, and a 12x GD-ROM drive, it was capable of crunching a whopping 7 million polygons per second.  To provide a different perspective, the original PlayStation only featured a 33MHz 32-bit MIPS processor, 2MB of RAM, and a 2x CD-ROM drive only capable of processing 360,000 polygons per second.  Clearly, nothing came close to the Dreamcast power.  What’s even more impressive was that it came boxed with a 56k modem.  You may scoff at the thought of dial-up Internet, but back then, playing games online was something simply ahead of its time.  Online game play was always a PC commodity up until the Dreamcast, since no prior consoles offered anything like it.  Contrary to prior beliefs, it was actually Sega who pioneered console online gameplay, not Microsoft.
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