Sega Dreamcast | Code Like It's 198x

The Dreamcast came with a modem in the box. Sega unveiled it in Tokyo on 21 May 1998, less than four years after the Saturn, and Sega promised developers an easier machine to write for. It had one main processor instead of two, graphics from a chip family already sold on PC cards, and an operating system from Microsoft to make PC games easy to convert. In America it sold 514,000 in its first two weeks, more than any console launch there before it. Less than a year and a half after that, Sega announced that it would stop making it, and it became the last console Sega made.

Fast facts

Manufacturer: Sega.
Launched: Japan, 27 November 1998 (¥29,800); North America, 9 September 1999 ($199); Europe, 14 October 1999 (£199).
CPU: Hitachi SH-4 at 200 MHz, rated at 360 MIPS and 1.4 GFLOPS.
Graphics: PowerVR Second Generation, from NEC and VideoLogic.
Sound: Yamaha chip built round an ARM7 RISC core, 64 channels, with 2 MB of its own RAM.
Memory: 16 MB main, 8 MB video, 2 MB sound.
Media: GD-ROM, Sega’s own one-gigabyte disc format.
Online: built-in modem: 33.6 Kbps in Japan and Europe, 56 Kbps in North America.
Memory card: the Visual Memory System (VMS), with an LCD screen, an 8-bit processor and 128 KB of memory, ¥2,500 in Japan.
Production ended: March 2001.

Katana

The machine was built by partners. At the launch in Tokyo’s New Otani Hotel, Edge reported, “Spokesmen for Hitachi (CPU), Yamaha (audio, CD-ROM), and NEC/Videologic (co-suppliers of the PowerVR Second Generation graphics card) were wheeled on stage for a photo shoot, prior to the meat of the announcement.” Sega’s president, Shoichiro Irimajiri, explained that the development name, Katana, had been dropped for Dreamcast, and that Dreamcast was a brand of its own: Edge noticed that “the Sega name was nowhere to be seen”.

Getting there had not been smooth. Sega had first commissioned a graphics chipset for the Saturn’s successor from 3Dfx, which Edge called “the leading graphics technology company”, and funded the work from March 1997. According to 3Dfx, Sega of America’s Bernie Stolar telephoned on 22 July 1997 to end the contract. “3Dfx was disappointed, and somewhat confused by Sega’s decision,” its marketing manager, Chris Kramer, told Edge. “Our contract with Sega was considered to be gospel right up until we received the call.” Its chief executive, Greg Ballard, said in a press release that the decision was “without legal justification”, while noting that Sega represented “less than 10% of our projected 1998 revenue”. Sega gave no official reason, and would not discuss a console it had not yet announced. By December 1997 Edge had seen development documents for the machine, then known as Dural, and developers were being told to start work on PCs fitted with PowerVR cards.

Microsoft was the other partner. Bill Gates appeared by video at the launch to say that the Dreamcast would “lead to the broadest selection of games ever seen on a console system”. It came with a version of Windows CE, stripped of its graphical interface, with DirectX. Edge noted that developers could use as much or as little of it as they liked, and were “free to install their own code, writing directly to the metal”. Porting PC games was the attraction.

What the hardware did

The SH-4 was a single 200 MHz processor with fast floating-point arithmetic, the kind of calculation 3D geometry needs. Edge put it at “around ten times more powerful than each of the Hitachi SH2’s that powered Saturn”. The PowerVR chip worked on the screen in tiles, which Edge explained was what made it possible to run several chips side by side. Sega built its NAOMI arcade board from the same parts, with more memory, and by June 1998 Edge was reporting that games were being made for the arcade hardware first “and then quickly ported” to the console.

The GD-ROM held a gigabyte, in a proprietary format that Edge saw at the announcement as “a move to limit piracy”, adding that cynics “might also suggest that this gives the company complete control over software pressing for the console, Nintendo-style”. The protection was broken early in the machine’s life, as Fabien Sanglard notes in his Game Engine Black Book: DOOM.

The VMS memory card had its own screen and processor. Plugged into the controller, it worked as a second display; unplugged, it was, in Edge’s words, “a standalone miniature console”, and two could be joined to swap data. Sega also meant it to carry data between a player’s Dreamcast and NAOMI arcade machines.

Online from the start

Sega promised a modem as standard in every territory, upgradeable by swapping a board, and the Japanese machine launched with a 33.6 Kbps modem. American machines got a faster 56 Kbps modem. The European version kept 33.6 Kbps, which Sega Europe’s chief executive, Jean-François Cecillon, defended to Edge: “A 33.6K modem is a fine speed for the market at present.” Sega Europe worked with BT and ICL on its online service, and its web browser and home page, Dreamarena, came with free email.

The games that used the modem came later. Online play was Sega’s main theme at the spring 2000 Tokyo Game Show, where Edge listed Quake III Arena, Sonic Team’s Phantasy Star Online and ChuChu Rocket!, and Capcom’s Marvel vs. Capcom 2 among the games lined up to show them off. Europe’s plans, it added, lagged behind those for America and Japan.

Launches

In Japan, Edge joined the queue in Akihabara on 27 November 1998. Sega had meant to deliver 500,000 consoles for the launch, but managed to gather “a claimed 150,500, including 80,000 pre-ordered sales”, and all were sold. Irimajiri appeared outside the shops alongside Hidekazu Yukawa, the Sega manager who had become the star of its television adverts. Japan had a harder time, and the games Sega was counting on slipped: Shenmue was put back from October 1999, although Sega then brought it forward to 29 December 1999.

America was different. The console went on sale on 9 September 1999, “9/9/99”, at $199, and after two weeks Sega of America announced 514,000 sales. It boasted that the PlayStation had taken four months and the Nintendo 64 two to reach that number, though Edge thought the comparison “slightly misleading” because the market had changed so much. Britain followed on 14 October. UK pre-orders topped 40,000, about a tenth of what Sega expected to sell there in a year, and the Oxford Street Virgin Megastore renamed itself the “Virgin Segastore” for the day.

The games

Because NAOMI shared its design, Sega’s arcade games came home closely matched. Crazy Taxi, “one of the first arcade machines to use the Naomi board”, was on its way to the Dreamcast by the end of 1999, and the NAOMI games Virtua Tennis and Tecmo’s Dead or Alive 2 followed. The game that convinced Edge was a conversion from another company’s arcade board. Reviewing Namco’s Soul Calibur in October 1999, it wrote: “The next generation has finally arrived. After picking up Soul Calibur, no one could deny that Namco’s latest creation is anything other than a work of art - beautiful, fascinating, enthralling and downright thrilling.” Sega’s own Shenmue had reached Japan by early 2000. Edge called Yu Suzuki’s game “one of the most expensive and graphically impressive videogaming projects to be undertaken”.

The end

On 24 January 2001 Sega announced that it would stop making the Dreamcast, and a week later that it would publish its games for other companies’ consoles. No more machines would be made after the end of its financial year in March. Edge reported that the cost of stopping production was ¥80 billion. The price fell to $99 in America and ¥9,900 in Japan, and Sega promised 100 more games before March 2002. It also licensed the design to Pace, which was developing a set-top box with a video recorder and a Dreamcast built in.

Wikipedia, a secondary source, gives a lifetime total of 9.13 million consoles and says licensed games were released in America until mid-2002. The machine kept a community after that. Independent developers have gone on releasing new games for it on disc, and fans have run private servers to bring its online games back.

Sources

Edge issue 60, July 1998: the announcement on 21 May 1998 at the New Otani Hotel; the hardware partners; the specification box (SH-4 at 200 MHz, PowerVR Second Generation, Yamaha 32-bit RISC sound with 64 channels and 2 MB of RAM, 33.6 Kbps modem); Bill Gates and Windows CE; the SH-4’s 360 MIPS and 1.4 GFLOPS; PowerVR’s tiles; the one-gigabyte disc format; Shoichiro Irimajiri’s interview, pp. 74–75.
Edge issue 59, June 1998: games made for NAOMI and ported to the console.
Edge issue 62, September 1998: the Yamaha ARM7 sound chip, 64 channels and ADPCM compression on 2 MB of RAM.
Edge issue 64, November 1998: VMS data transfer between Dreamcast and NAOMI machines.
Edge issue 73, July 1999: the £199 and $199 prices.
Fabien Sanglard, Game Engine Black Book: DOOM (2018), p. 353: the early copy-protection hack.
Edge issue 61, August 1998: 16 MB of main memory and 8 MB of video memory.
Edge issue 49, September 1997: the end of the 3Dfx contract; Chris Kramer and Greg Ballard.
Edge issue 52, December 1997: “Dural”, its SH-4, PowerVR2 and Yamaha ARM7 sound chip, and PowerVR development PCs.
Edge issue 65, December 1998: the Japanese launch date and price; the VMS specification.
Edge issue 67, January 1999: the Japanese launch in Akihabara.
Edge issue 72, June 1999: the 33.6K Japanese modem and 56K plans for the West.
Edge issue 74, August 1999: interview with Jean-François Cecillon, Sega Europe, on the 33.6K modem, BT and ICL.
Edge issue 76, October 1999: the US launch on 9/9/99; the Soul Calibur review.
Edge issue 78, November 1999, pp. 8–9: the European launch, UK pre-orders, the “Virgin Segastore”, 514,000 American sales in two weeks and the delay to Shenmue.
Edge issue 85, June 2000, p. 6: online games at the spring Tokyo Game Show, including Quake III Arena, Phantasy Star Online, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and ChuChu Rocket!; Sega Europe’s plans.
Edge issue 78, November 1999: Crazy Taxi for Dreamcast.
Edge issue 84, May 2000: Virtua Tennis, NAOMI and Dreamcast; Dead or Alive 2 on Dreamcast.
Edge issue 81, February 2000: Shenmue in Japan.
Wikipedia, “Sega NAOMI” (web, secondary): Dead or Alive 2 as a NAOMI game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_NAOMI
Edge issue 95, March 2001: the end of production, its cost, the new prices, the Pace set-top box and the promise of 100 games.
Wikipedia, “Dreamcast” (web, secondary): 9.13 million sold, licensed releases in America until mid-2002, later homebrew games and private servers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast
Edge issue 82, March 2000, and Dreamcast Magazine issue 4, p. 10: Shenmue brought forward to 29 December 1999.