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Sega Drops Dreamcast Price To $50

Posted by timothy on from the good-luck-finding-the-broadband-adapter dept.

kerskine writes: "Just read this article on CNET that says Sega has just dropped the price of the Dreamcast console to US$49.95. Given past articles on Slashdot on all sorts of fun Dreamcast projects, now's the chance to get one. Why not get two (in case you break one)?" See also this article on getting Linux to run on Dreamcast, and NetBSD is another option to explore. 8ight points out even more interesting Dreamcast information.

2 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. Re:128-bit linux? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually none of the 128-bit consoles (Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube & X-Box) have a 128-bit processor, I sincerely doubt one exists, only stupid reviewers from crappy gaming sites which haven't got a single clue on hardware talk about 128-bit consoles. The Dreamcast's SuperH 4 has a 32-bit datapath, the tweaked PowerPC 750 (G3) on GameCube too, the Vr5900 (that's a tweaked R5000 from MIPS) of the PS2 on the other hand has a 64-bit datapath but that doesn't do any real difference since the PS2 will never address more than it's 32 megs of RAM. And well, X-Box, talk about mobile Celeron ;-). Everybody is shouting about 128-bit consoles just because every one of those has some vector unit inside able to crunch 128-bit vectors (that is 4 32-bit floating point vars). Well, since the SH4 can multiply 4x4 matrices directly why not talking about the powerful 512-bit CPU of the Dreamcast :-)

  2. New Dreamcasts CANNOT run linux by SuzanneA · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Don't forget that the Linux/DC and NetBSD/DC ports rely on being able to boot from a CD.

    This is a functionality that Sega took away several months ago, meaning that the newer dreamcasts cannot boot Linux/DC, NetBSD/DC, the Bleem packs, the Utopia bootdisk, or anything else that isn't on a GDROM.

    The $50 dreamcasts are a nice cheap game system, but don't buy a new DC expecting to run linux or netbsd just by burning the images on the net to a CDR.