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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?"
Unfortunately that same code is probably one of the reasons that it died so prematurely.
I was at an acquaitence's house one time and we were talking about games. We brought up the Dreamcast and he said "Oh yeah I LOVE the Dreamcast! I have a bunch of games for it!" Then he picked up a spindle of 50 CDR's and looked down and sighed as he lamented, "It's a shame they don't make games for it anymore..."
He thought it was a great system since he didn't have to do anything but buy the hardware...Since it booted up downloaded games immediately without hacking (unlike the other consoles which require SOME type of modding) he just downloaded them all to save his money.
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.
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.
"Uh, you may have loved it, but this is often cited as the exact reason the DC failed."
Too bad that isn't what made it fail. What made it fail was that Sega didn't have enough money to put out enough machines to make enough profit on the games that would eventually come down. The people who were saavy enough to download and rip games were unlikely to be high enough in number to cause Sega to pull back.
"Derp de derp."