There are many consoles that have succeeded each other over the various generations. Some have remained stuck in the mesh of time and lie forgotten in a corner of our memory, others have marked our path as gamers and represent an ever vivid memory that we keep in our hearts.
In this article we analyze the technical choices made by
SEGA with its Dreamcast and the reasons that sanctioned the commercial flop of
a console that, despite everything, retains a special place in the hearts of
fans.
The failure of SEGA Saturn
At the end of the 80s and for most of the 90s, SEGA was one
of the most important players in the videogame market . His Mega Drive (Genesis
in America) was a huge commercial success, managing to place over 30 million
consoles around the world. The SEGA Saturn b2b marketing successor to the Mega Drive, in the
intentions of SEGA, should have equaled its success, but there were some
unexpected events in the formula put in place by the Japanese giant. The Saturn
was a console on which it was difficult to develop due to its dual CPU
architecture: at the time it was a pioneering solution and the developers did
not know how to make the most of its qualities.
The Saturn also competed directly with the Sony Playstation,
which thanks to its really aggressive price tag ($ 299 against Saturn's $ 399)
and a very well orchestrated marketing campaign managed to outclass the SEGA
console on every front which represented a real debacle on the commercial level
.
The backlash of the Saturn bankruptcy not only resulted in
very serious economic losses but also a total change at the top: both Tom
Kalinske and Hayao Nakayama, respectively presidents of the American and
Japanese divisions of SEGA, resigned and were replaced by Shoichiro Irimajiri.
The biggest problem of SEGA had become to relaunch its
company, initially it was thought to produce a 64-bit addon for the Saturn or a
Saturn 2, but the poor sales and the negative perception of the public of the
unfortunate console convinced the Japanese leaders to design something totally
new.
The SEGA Dreamcast
In 1997 Irimajiri commissioned IBM designer Tatsuo Yamamoto
to begin development of SEGA's new gaming hardware, Saturn's poor success,
stemming in part from questionable technical solutions , convinced the new
president to turn to external resources to design a new console. The story is
further complicated when Hideki Sato, SEGA's in-house designer, also began
developing a new console .
It is not clear whether Irimajiri directly appointed both
teams or was an independent choice of Sato, but in fact there were two parallel
projects for the development of the new SEGA console. Yamamoto's project,
codenamed "Blackbelt", was based on a 3DFX Vodoo 2 graphics processor
(In this article we retrace the history of 3DFX ) and a CPU
Motorola PowerPC 603e while that of Sato, initially called
"Whitebelt" and later renamed "Dural" (in honor of the
metal fighter of the Virtua Fighter series), on a Hitachi SH-4 processor and a
Videologic powerVR2 graphics card. The solution to this dualism was found when 3DFX,
intending to go public, was forced to reveal the agreement with SEGA , an event
that greatly angered the management and which was used as a pretext to cut all
ties with 3DFX and continue with the project developed "in house",
certainly the most economical and congenial solution for SEGA's Japanese
leaders. Having chosen the project on which to direct its efforts, SEGA created
a final code name: Katana.
Incredible Hardware
Keeping in mind the mistakes made with the Saturn in terms
of technical choices and production costs, SEGA this time focused on a very
simple and clean system. In fact, the designers chose not to use totally custom
components , as always done in the console environment, but to put together
existing hardware to which to make very slight changes in order to maximize
performance.
The beating heart of the Dreamcast was in fact a Hitachi
SH-4 CPU - a direct evolution of the SH-2 used on the Saturn - but with a whole
series of important technological evolutions, pioneering at the time for the
entire industry. The SH-4 had a five-stage pipeline that allowed it to process
up to five instructions simultaneously and integrated a superscaler that
further doubled the processable instructions for each cycle of the pipeline.
Thanks to this design, the CPU of the Dreamcast, with its
200 MHz, generated 360 MIPS (Millions of instructions per second) or 1.8 IPC,
about 6 times the performance of Saturn and 2.8 that of Nintendo 64 . In
addition, the SH-4 integrated a powerful FPU unit that allowed 32-bit precision
and 64-bit double precision operations, with a 128-bit bus handling four 32-bit
operations simultaneously.
In practice, the FPU unit alone was able to generate five
million polygons per second, drastically improving the graphics potential of
the console.
The GPU chosen by SEGA was a VideoLogic PowerVR CLX2, less
powerful than the Voodoo 2 to which it was preferred, but still the most
performing in the console field in 1998, the year of the Dreamcast's launch.
The Dreamcast in fact managed to keep up with the best gaming PCs, managing to
generate images at 640 × 480 pixels (VGA), just think that Soul Calibur, launch
title, was a rare example of a console port that ran better. of its original
arcade counterpart.
Videologic's GPU used an alternative approach to 3D
rendering employing a system called Tile-Based Deferred Rendering or
"TBDR".
The TBDR, instead of totally rendering a frame, divided the
rendering areas into different sections called "tiles", thus
increasing the parallelization of the processes.
This system brought two great advantages: the first was to
reduce the use of bandwidth and required energy thanks to the division of the
rendering into small parallel processes, the second was to solve the age-old
problem of the visibility of polygons by going to order them starting from the
closest ones and arriving at the farthest ones, so as to calculate only those
necessary to generate the image and avoid the rendering of non-visible
polygons, obtaining a further performance gain. In addition to this the
Dreamcast GPU could use Alpha blending, Mip-Mapping, Environment mapping, Bump
mapping and bilinear and trilinear anisotropic filter.
The audio chip chosen by SEGA was called AICA. Manufactured
by Yamaha, it was capable of handling 64 8-bit or 16-bit PCM channels, with
44.1 kHz sampling and had 2 MB of SDRAM, plus there was an ADPCM decoder to
help reduce the computational load on the CPU. The audio chip was also
responsible for providing the console's bios with the Real Time Clock (or RTC)
thanks to the use of a buffer battery.
DREAMCAST:
DISCOVERING THE HARDWARE OF THE SEGA CONSOLE
The Dreamcast had the possibility of using two distinct
operating systems, the first was a normal operating system with icons that
allowed you to launch the game inserted in the console, manage the save files,
launch the music player or modify simple settings.
The second was a custom version of Windows CE , which in
SEGA's intentions should have attracted a lot of developers. Windows CE in fact
made the Dreamcast compatible with Visual Studio and DirectX and greatly
facilitated porting from PC.
One of SEGA's most revolutionary choices was to integrate a
dialup modem and the possibility of using an optional LAN adapter, this made
the Dreamcast the first console to allow online gaming , through the
proprietary Dreamarena platform (SegaNet in America and Japan) and even the
ability to navigate with an internal browser. Phantasy Star Online was in fact
the first MMORPG for consoles in the world and NFL 2K1 was the first sportsman
to allow online gaming.
SEGA chose GD-ROMs as storage media for its Dreamcast, a
proprietary format developed in partnership with Yamaha very similar to the
common CD-Rom, but with almost doubled bit density, which translated into
approximately 1.2 GB of available space. on disk.
Also with regard to memory cards for saving game data, SEGA
chose to innovate drastically. The Visual Memory Units or "VMUs" were
in fact interactive memory cards that were positioned in a proprietary slot on
the Dreamcast pad: during game sessions they allowed data to be saved and
displayed some additional information on the title in execution (on Resident
evil 2 for example showed the bullets left in the magazine). When disconnected
from the pad instead, thanks to the display and controls present, it could run
small software that allowed to obtain some benefits in game, small adventures
or Tamagotchi-style games. VMUs could also be linked together to exchange items
or save.
A sweet memory
The Dreamcast, on balance, was a jewel of hardware and
innovation but which had the misfortune to deal with that giant that was the
Playstation 2, which arrived after the enormous success of Playstation sales
and audiences. From the moment of the commercialization of the second Sony console,
the sales of the Dreamcast suffered a heavy backlash, also due to the fact that
the PS2 at the time of release was the cheapest DVD player in the world, a
factor that further directed the market.
After only three years from the date of marketing on March
31, 2001, SEGA decided to stop the distribution of what would be its last
console. The SEGA Dreamcast, in its short life cycle, sold 9.13 million units
and can be considered a huge commercial flop, which effectively spelled the end
of SEGA as we have known it up to that point.
Many historical sagas have seen their birth on the SEGA
console and are still fondly remembered by fans. The Dreamcast had the merit of
laying the foundations for the future of console gaming with the adoption of
fewer proprietary components, later also Nintendo Gamecube with its ATI video
card and Microsoft with Xbox, a console totally based on PC hardware, followed
the same path taken pioneering by SEGA. The last generations of consoles and
the current one have further consolidated this trend and fully use components
and solutions created for PCs.
For some, the failure of the Dreamcast also sanctioned the
end of arcade gaming, despite this the latest SEGA console still has a special
place in the hearts of many fans today, twenty years later.