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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.
Uh, you may have loved it, but this is often cited as the exact reason the DC failed.
You see, the DC does not allow you to boot with your own code... those ripped games you burned are abusing a backdoor boot trick put in by the DC's designers to test software on a system before it was burned as a copy-protected GD-ROM. People always claim to love the DC, but I think that has more to do with the ease of piracy than it's (admittedly great) library of software or excellent hardware.
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.
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!
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"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."