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Dreamcast On a Chip
rsw writes "I'm still reeling from Sega's decision to discontinue the greatest console ever made. So when I saw this story about a forthcoming Dreamcast-on-a-chip, my thoughts turned immediately to the possibilities: a portable 2nd-generation backwards-compatible Dreamcast?"
Woohoo! 3D console that can do 2D well! Yay!
Hey...portable NFL2Kx.....gimme gimme gimme!
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
What I liked about the dreamcast, you could play burnt cd's for mp3 and svcd's without any hacking. Even MAME direct from CD.
Wish more consoles allowed you too boot with your own code.
Though the fact that they managed to fit much of the Dreamcast's core hardware on a single is signifigant in the fact that we can miniturize oh so much, there really isn't anything too impressive about this. No companies have bought into this chip and until some homebrew people manage to turn this into a Portadream, all there exists is some chip that could do great things.
Hmmm, I gotten used to stories here on /. about people doing all sorts of technically interesting things, like Unix on a GBA, for example. But this story isn't about some hobbyist with too much time on their hands. Presumably, Renesas would like to make some money on their work. So what is going on here? Who would be interested in a souped up DC on a chip? Who would know what to do with it? Hmmm, could it be....Sega (now Sega-Sammy I believe)!?
Why not? This chip could be the basis for cheap arcade boards, or maybe a handheld. The arcade angle is a bit more believable as the handheld battle heating up between Nintendo and Sony makes the field too crowded (and don't forget Nokia). A new console though would not be out of the question. The small chip might even make it possible to sell the console hardware (DCtwo anyone?) at a profit. And backwards compatibility to the DC library is very easy, rereleases of popular titles could be profitable too. Just some things that make you go, hmmmm.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I've always thought it would be superlative if there was a standard games platform available on DVD players. This could be it - with wirless controllers you'd have a fantastic platform for games. I'd love to see it adopted as some kind of DVD player standard.
...is anyone going to buy a DC-on-a-chip when a used DC runs about $20-$40? The Dreamcast is the only gaming system I ever bought on opening day, but I just don't see the desire to get a DC-in-a-DVD when I can just get a DC and a DVD separately.
Maybe some of the bargain-priced DVD players and other electronic components can hook someone on a sale by throwing a DC in it, but somehow I doubt it. Also, I believe that the power problems currently in the PSP will probably also be present in a DC portable.
Maybe this would have worked out well back when the DC was still pumping out games, but I don't see anything but a hobbyist interest for a DC-on-a-Chip.
"Specifically, the Dreamcast console contained a 200-MHz Hitachi SH4 with the capability to perform 360 million instructions per second (MIPS)"
:) Impressive!
360 Minstructions/s at 200MHz? Something paralell going on or is it really nearly 2 instructions per cycle?
"... and 1.4 million megaflops, or floating-point operations per second."
1.4*10^12 floating point operations per second
Perhaps what is more interesting about this development is that Sega's Naomi arcade board(s) were based on Dreamcast hardware.
Why is this more interesting? Because these arcade boards could talk to each other - each arcade cab could have up to 16 Naomi boards! Theoretically, a Naomi cab fully decked out could do over 56 million polys per second.
Many of the arcade units with Naomi hardware had a seperate memory module, too - so, you could load the whole game into memory (instant access times).
Impressive for an arcade cabinet? Well, imagine this POWER in the PALM of your HAND. With enough memory and a few chips instead of one...
In short - imagine a Naomi cluster of these!
Video Game News, FAQs, etc
If they release this as a standard system with free games it would totally blow other systems away.
The game makers aren't making money on the old titles anyway so getting a lump sum to package them with the dreamcast doesn't seem far out of line.
Doh! Everyone knows the greatest console ever was Sega Genesis. :)
I don't feel like it...
when I saw this the other day, a friend and I were thinking it would be cool to put the chip on a PCI card, for use in a PC so that you could get direct VGA output to your monitor from the DC graphics processor, rather than through a VGA box like I do now with my DC console..
Unfortunately that same code is probably one of the reasons that it died so prematurely
A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth. This is a common sentiment, but untrue.
Sega decided to halt production of Dreamcast at the beginning of 2001 and the cited reason was lack of hardware sales. They didn't get enough of an installed user base to justify continued production.
Software sales were actually brisk for the DC during its lifetime -- which is one of the reasons Sega decided to maximize profits by becoming a software-only company. (Do you think that's a decision a company burned by software piracy would immediately leap to? It would make no sense.)
Finally, DC piracy didn't really kick into gear until after the decision to halt production was made. The Dreamcast didn't really enter mainstream warez-dood awareness until the price dropped to $80 in Fall 2001 as Sega cleared out warehouses full of already-produced units that didn't sell. When it hit $50 in 2002, DC piracy was rampant - but the DC'd been officially deceased for almost 2 years by then.
Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not defending piracy as being healthy for any IP-oriented industry. But in this specific instance, the system's demise - and subsequent price slashes - is what led to its widespread piracy, rather than the other way around.
It's revisionist history from the guilt-ridden, self-loathing IP pirates that, Swaggart-like, uphold the status quo vehemently in any topic regarding copyright or piracy.
Now since, to hear it told, copying's in the process of destroying the livelihoods of all artists everywhere, it of course stands to reason that any past failure occuring synchronously in the presence of potential copying must then have been due to it. We have always been at war with Eastasia, &c.
Did anyone ever write an OSS driver for the PowerVR? It actually was a very nice chip but drivers were an issue, for Linux and Windows.
Sega developed the "Dreamcast-on-a-chip" idea way back in early 2001. They intended to use it for set top devices like cable boxes and DVD players, but it just never panned out. They were losing big money and something that crazy just didn't make financial sense. This seems to just be the same design revisited and with up to date manufacturing for smaller die and higher clock speed. An old IGN story has similar illusions of grandeur for the technology.
The first one is set top boxes. It's a single-chip solution that can handle everything but your media decoding. If you put a hardware MPEG2/4 decoder in there you can play an absolute shitload of media on it, not the least of which is DVDs. Your graphics generator is in there too, and if the price is right you don't even need to feel compelled to do 3D. However, 3D menus are going to be the norm in consumer electronics soon enough.
The other one is pirate dreamcast boxes which will come along sooner or later. Someone has to make an optical drive that'll read GD-ROMs first, though, and then someone will railroad sega's code and make a competing box. Have you noticed the pirate playstations that you can get at basically any flea market in the USA? Dreamcast could go the same way eventually. I don't think there's enough money in it, though. Maybe by the time handhelds have gigabytes of storage someone will make a handheld (pirate) dreamcast with ten games in it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"... and 1.4 million megaflops, or floating-point operations per second."
Well that was definitely wrong. It's out by a factor of 1000!
DC's SH4 FPU peaked at 1.4 Gflops when doing a 4 component dot product (i.e. 7 floating point operations) per clock. (== a 4x4 matrix * vector multiply in 4 clocks)
I know that the plural of anecdote is not data, but every single Dreamcast owner I know had more pirated games than legitimate ones.
In fact, apart from the friend I bought mine from, I can't recall any of them actually having any legitimate games at all. The one I bought came with a roughly 25% original, 75% bootleg mix of discs.
I only have 100% legit' games, so there's a counter example for you.