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Games Entertainment

Dreamcast On a Chip 54

Posted by Zonk from the late-lamented-console-casualty dept.
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?"
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Dreamcast On a Chip More

Dreamcast On a Chip

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  • Woohoo! 3D console that can do 2D well! Yay!

    Hey...portable NFL2Kx.....gimme gimme gimme!
  • 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.

    • Re:Dreamcast (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Blackwulf ( 34848 ) on Friday October 08, 2004 @12:28PM (#10471613) Homepage
      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.

      • The Dreamcast Piracy Myth (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        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

    • Re:Dreamcast (Score:3, Informative)

      by ShinSugoi ( 783392 )
      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.
      • "... 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."

        Pretty stupid of them to put backdoor code into *shipping* systems. Why didn't they make special test units for that purpose?
      • Plus, the GD-ROMs were 1GB. A CD-R is 650 or 700. Where does this space go? Rips.

      • Re:Dreamcast (Score:4, Insightful)

        by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Friday October 08, 2004 @02:14PM (#10473115) Homepage Journal
        "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.
        • 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.

          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 actually thought the tools used to pirate games
          • 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.

  • No buyers so far? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by chrispyman ( 710460 ) on Friday October 08, 2004 @12:34PM (#10471714)
    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.

  • Is Sega Coming Back to the Hardware Business? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by blueZhift ( 652272 ) on Friday October 08, 2004 @12:50PM (#10471918) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Stick it in DVD players if it's cheap enough (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bear pimp ( 695195 ) on Friday October 08, 2004 @01:00PM (#10472090)
    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.

    May
    • There are a limited number of systems, and that number can only decrease because no more are being made. There is still a demand for them, though, and that creates market opportunity. A DC no bigger than a CD walkman (even though the DC is already pretty dang small) would certaintly have appeal to some people, power requirements aside.

      There are a limited number of games, and even with a fairly goos homebrew community, there will be no new big-name titles if there is no console being sold. If someone comes
  • "Specifically, the Dreamcast console contained a 200-MHz Hitachi SH4 with the capability to perform 360 million instructions per second (MIPS)"

    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 :) Impressive!
    • Many specialised micros have parallel to-memory moves for quickly moving stuff in and out of the L1 cache. DSPs are an excellent example of this.
    • Most modern processors have the ability to do multiple instructions per clock. The Athlons do at least 3, I believe. The trick is to have code without collisions so that the multiple ALUs can all be utilized, or to have reordering hardware to increase utilization. Most likely it rarely gets the full 360.

      • Most x86 instructions take multiple cycles to execute. The processor is superscalar, meaning it is working on multiple instructions at once; the instructions themselves are probably internally broken down into multiple single-cycle instructions, ALA RISC. It is well-known that AMD has been using RISC strategies internally since the AMD 586, and Intel has been doing something similar (Not sure how RISCy they are/were) since the Pentium.

        Multiple "instructions" can be processed simultaneously by handling v

        • I'm not intimately familiar with the SH4, but some marketing departments insist that a multiply-add instruction really counts as two instructions. It may be something like that to get the theoretical peak number on the SH4, "the equivalent of X instructions..."
        • It doesn't matter that an instruction takes multiple clock cycles to execute- thats just the latency. What matters is the number of instructions completed per clock. This is >>1 on Athlons (which is why lower speed Athlons are competitive with P4s- they have a higher IPC). I would suspect its >1 on P4s as well, although I'm not sure.
    • Most of those numbers are based on the fast matrix-multiply operation that the FPU can perform. It was still pretty fast for a console at the time, but the numbers are somewhat unrealistic.
    • "... 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)

  • Naomi (System 16) - The "Arcade Dreamcast" (Score:3, Funny)

    by larsoncc ( 461660 ) on Friday October 08, 2004 @01:49PM (#10472763) Homepage
    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!
  • 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.
    • Actually, a lot of them exist on current systems. Specifically the more popular ones.

      Examples would be:
      Sonic Adventure 1&2(GC)
      Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (XB, PS2)
      Resident Evil - Code: Veronica (GC, PS2)
      Skies of Arcadia (GC)
      Crazy Taxi (GC, PS2)
      Shenemue 1&2 (XB)
      Space Channel 5 (PS2)

      Just because the DC isn't getting new games, doesn't mean that the games that were on the system aren't still around.
  • Doh! Everyone knows the greatest console ever was Sega Genesis. :)
    • Honestly, I don't think there ever was a "greatest console."

      There are a lot of consoles which absolutely couldn't qualify, but seriously, every major console has strengths which can't be dismissed against its contemporaries, or even later consoles. (Genesis: What console has had more good shooters? Hell, a fair chunk of the good ones on the next best system, the Saturn, were sequels to Genesis games. This despite the Genesis's color limitations and laughable sound.)
    • I'm willing to let the Genesis and DC share top place. They're both Sega afterall ;)
  • 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..
    • Some DC games support honest VGA output, and the "VGA Box" is just a dongle that does attenuation. There's also VGA Scan Converters, which convert a video signal into a VGA signal, or vice versa (depending on the type they do one or both of these things.) The "VGA Box" for the DC is the former of these two items, though. You might be using the other but that's not what it's commonly called...
  • I know this post is kind of late but...

    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

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