The
Dreamcast (
Japaneseis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family. There are a number of proposed relationships with other languages, but none have gained general acceptance...
: ドリームキャスト
Doriimukaasuto?) is the last
video game consoleA video game console is an interactive entertainment computer or electronic device that produces a video display signal which can be used with a display device to display a video game...
made by
Segais a multinational video game software and hardware development company, and a home computer and console manufacturer headquartered in Ōta, Tokyo, Japan...
, and is the successor to the
Sega SaturnThe is a 32-bit video game console that was first released on November 22 1994 in Japan, May 11 1995 in North America, and July 8 1995 in Europe...
. The Dreamcast is part of the
sixth generation of video game consolesThe sixth-generation era refers to the computer and video games, video game consoles, and video game handhelds available at the turn of the 21st century. Platforms of the sixth generation include Sega's Dreamcast, Sony's PlayStation 2, the Nintendo GameCube, and Microsoft's Xbox...
and was released in late
1998-Events:*Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences hosts 1st Annual Interactive Achievement Awards; inducts Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo to the AIAS Hall of Fame*British Academy of Film and Television Arts hosts the 1st annual BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards...
, before its contemporaries - the
PlayStation 2The PlayStation 2 is a sixth-generation video game console manufactured by Sony. The PS2 console is the sequel to the original PlayStation console. The successor to the PlayStation, and the predecessor to the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation 2 forms part of the PlayStation series of video game...
, the
Nintendo GameCubeThe is Nintendo's fourth home video game console with Wii being fifth, and is part of the sixth generation console era. It is the successor to the Nintendo 64 and predecessor to Nintendo's Wii....
and the
XboxThe Xbox is a video game console produced by Microsoft. It was Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console market, and competed with Sony's PlayStation 2, Sega's Dreamcast, and Nintendo's GameCube...
.
Sega discontinued the Dreamcast in
North AmericaNorth America is the northern continent of the Americas, situated in the Earth's northern hemisphere and in the western hemisphere. It is bordered on the north by the Arctic Ocean, on the east by the North Atlantic Ocean, on the southeast by the Caribbean Sea, and on the west by the North Pacific...
in March
2001-Events:* Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences hosts the 4th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards; inducts John Carmack of id Software to the AIAS Hall of Fame...
and withdrew entirely from the console hardware business. However, support of the system continued in
EuropeEurope is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus Mountains , and the Black Sea to the southeast...
and
OceaniaOceania is a geographical, often geopolitical, region consisting of numerous lands—mostly islands in the Pacific Ocean and vicinity. The term "Oceania" was coined in 1831 by French explorer Dumont d'Urville...
until
2002The year 2002 in video gaming saw the release of many games to sixth-generation video game consoles, predominately, the Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox.-Events:...
and
Japanis an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, People's Republic of China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
; where consoles were still sold until
2006-Events:* January 26 2006 -- Nintendo announces its newly redesigned handheld, the Nintendo DS Lite. The new model is lighter, smaller, has configurable brightness and features an improved user interface.* January 26 2006 -- Konami Corp...
and new licensed games continued to be released.
According to
Bernie StolarBernard "Bernie" Stolar is an American businessman who worked in the video game industry for several important companies. His career started at Atari where he worked initially in the coin-op arcade division and eventually moved over to the home division in charge of platforms like Atari Lynx. He...
, former President and CEO of Sega of America, the Dreamcast was canceled because the new chairman of Sega wanted the company to focus on software.
Despite its short lifespan, the Dreamcast was widely hailed as ahead of its time, and is still held in high regard for pioneering online console gaming—it was the first console to include a built-in
modemModem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
and
InternetThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standardized Internet Protocol Suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
support for
online playAn online game is a game played over some forms of computer network. At the present, this almost always means the Internet or equivalent technology; but games have always used whatever technology was current: modems before the internet, and hard wired terminals before modems...
. As of
2009The year 2009 will see many new video games, including several sequels such as Resident Evil 5, Halo Wars, Assassin's Creed II, F.E.A.R...
, the console is still supported through various
homebrew video gameHomebrew is a term frequently applied to video games or other software produced by consumers to target proprietary hardware platforms not typically user-programmable or that use proprietary storage methods. This might include games developed with official development kits, such as Net Yaroze or...
releases.
History
In 1997, the
SaturnThe is a 32-bit video game console that was first released on November 22 1994 in Japan, May 11 1995 in North America, and July 8 1995 in Europe...
was struggling in North America, and Sega of America president
Bernie StolarBernard "Bernie" Stolar is an American businessman who worked in the video game industry for several important companies. His career started at Atari where he worked initially in the coin-op arcade division and eventually moved over to the home division in charge of platforms like Atari Lynx. He...
pressed for Sega's Japanese headquarters to develop a new platform. Two competing teams were tasked with developing the console - a
SkunkworksA skunkworks project is one typically developed by a small and loosely structured group of people who research and develop a project primarily for the sake of innovation...
group headed by
IBMInternational Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM, is a multinational computer technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, Town of North Castle, New York, United States. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating...
researcher Tatsuo Yamamoto and another team led by Sega hardware engineer Hideki Sato.
Sato and his group chose the
Hitachiis a Japanese multinational corporation specializing in high-technology and services headquartered in Marunouchi Itchome, Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan...
SH4SuperH is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by Hitachi. It is implemented by microcontrollers and microprocessors for embedded systems.-History:...
processor architecture and the VideoLogic PowerVR2 graphics processor for their prototype. Yamamoto and his Skunkworks group also opted for the SH4, but with
3dfx3dfx Interactive was a company that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics processing units and, later, graphics cards. It was a pioneer in the field for several years in the late 1990s until 2000 when it underwent one of the most high-profile demises in the history of the PC industry...
hardware. Initially Sega opted to use the Skunkworks group's 3dfx-based hardware, even suggesting to 3dfx that they would do so. However, they eventually chose Sato's PowerVR based design. Sega's shift in design prompted a lawsuit by 3dfx that was eventually settled.
The operating system used by some Dreamcast titles was developed by Microsoft after 2 years of work with Sega. It was an optimized version of Windows CE supporting Direct X.
The Dreamcast was released in November 1998 in
Japanis an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, People's Republic of China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
; in September 1999 in
North AmericaNorth America is the northern continent of the Americas, situated in the Earth's northern hemisphere and in the western hemisphere. It is bordered on the north by the Arctic Ocean, on the east by the North Atlantic Ocean, on the southeast by the Caribbean Sea, and on the west by the North Pacific...
and on October 14, 1999 in
EuropeEurope is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus Mountains , and the Black Sea to the southeast...
. Despite problems with the Japan launch, the system's launch in the United States was successful. In the United States alone, a record 300,000 units had been pre-ordered and Sega sold 500,000 consoles in just two weeks (including a record 225,132 sold during the first 24 hours). In fact, due to brisk sales and hardware shortages, Sega was unable to fulfill all of the advance orders. Sega confirmed that it made US$98.4 million on combined hardware and software sales with Dreamcast with its September 9, 1999 launch.
Four days after its launch in the US, Sega stated 372,000 units were sold bringing in
US$The United States dollar is the unit of currency of the United States. The U.S. dollar is normally abbreviated as the dollar sign, $, or as USD or US$ to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies and from others that use the $ symbol. It is divided into 100 cents .The U.S...
132 million in sales.
Launch titles such as
Soul Caliburis a fighting game developed and produced by Namco. It is the second game in the Soul series. Originally released in the arcades running on the Namco System 12 hardware, Soulcalibur was ported to the Sega Dreamcast with improved graphics and new features...
,
Sonic Adventureis a video game developed by Sonic Team and released on December 23, 1998 in Japan by Sega for the Sega Dreamcast and is the first game in the Sonic Adventure series. One of its development titles was Sonic RPG,...
,
Power StonePower Stone is a fully 3D arena fighting game series made by Capcom. Power Stone was initially released on the Sega NAOMI hardware and later ported to the Dreamcast. In February 2006 Capcom ported the entire series to the PSP with a few enhancements: most notably, the PSP version of the original...
, and
Hydro ThunderHydro Thunder is a powerboat racing game, originally an arcade game and later released for the Sega Dreamcast in November 1999. It was also released for PlayStation and Nintendo 64 in early 2000...
helped Dreamcast succeed in the first year. Sega Sports titles helped fill the void left by a lack of
Electronic ArtsElectronic Arts is an international developer, marketer, publisher and distributor of video games. Founded and incorporated on May 28, 1982 by Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer games industry and was notable for promoting the designers and programmers responsible...
sports games on the system. Dreamcast sales grew 156.5% from July 23, 2000 to September 30, 2000 putting Sega ahead of the
Nintendo 64The , often abbreviated as N64, is Nintendo's third home video game console for the international market. Named for its 64-bit CPU, it was released on June 23, 1996 in Japan, September 29, 1996 in North America, March 1, 1997 in Europe and Australia, September 1, 1997 in France and December 10,...
in that period. However, Sony's launch of the much-hyped
PlayStation 2The PlayStation 2 is a sixth-generation video game console manufactured by Sony. The PS2 console is the sequel to the original PlayStation console. The successor to the PlayStation, and the predecessor to the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation 2 forms part of the PlayStation series of video game...
that year marked the beginning of the end for the Dreamcast.
On January 31, 2001, Sega announced that it was ending production of Dreamcast hardware by March of that year although the 50 to 60 titles still in production would be published. The last North American release was
NHL 2K2, which was released in February 2002. With the company announcing no plans to develop a next-generation successor to Dreamcast, this was Sega's last foray into the home console business.
During the following years, unreleased games like
Propeller ArenaPropeller Arena: Aviation Battle Championship is a videogame for the Dreamcast console. It was developed by Sega-AM2, completed, but never officially released...
and
Half-Life were leaked on the Internet through
warez"Warez" refers primarily to copyrighted works traded in violation of copyright law. The term generally refers to illegal releases by organized groups, as opposed to file sharing between friends or large groups of people with similar interest using a darknet. It usually does not refer to commercial...
groups and independent hackers.
Although production of the Dreamcast ended, commercial games were still developed and published by Sega of Japan. Many of these were initially developed for Sega's
NAOMINaomi is a female given name meaning "enjoyment, pleasure, or gratification" in Hebrew and Arabic. Noémie is a version used in French-speaking countries....
arcade hardware, including Sega's final
first-partyFirst-party may stand for:*First-party logistics provider, a 1PL in supply chain management*Video game development parties...
Dreamcast game,
Sonic Teamis a Japanese computer and video game developer established in Ota, Tokyo, Japan in 1990, originally known as Sega AM8. The Japan-based division is also known as G.E. Department Global Entertainment...
's
Puyo Pop FeverPuyo Pop Fever, or in Japan, is the fifth installment in the popular Puyo Puyo puzzle game series, developed by Sonic Team, released on a wide variety of systems in several regions. Sega published all the Japanese versions of the game, but due to a reluctance to carry it over to other countries,...
, released on February 24, 2004.
The last Dreamcast units were sold through the
Sega DirectSega Direct was an online and Japanese video game business. It was primarily for the Sega Dreamcast system and was the last place gamers could buy a New Dreamcast system in 2006....
division of Japan in early 2006. These refurbished units were bundled with
Radilgy, also known as Radirgy and Radio Allergy , is an arcade video game developed by Milestone Inc. in 2005 using the Sega NAOMI arcade system board....
, and a phone card. The last Dreamcast games published by Sega of Japan were the 2007 releases
Trigger Heart Exelicais a shoot 'em up by Warashi, makers of the Sega Saturn shooting game Shienryu. It was released in Japanese arcades in early 2006. The game runs on Sega's Naomi hardware.-Story:...
and
KarousKarous is a video game by Milestone Inc. intended for the Sega NAOMI. The game is a vertical scrolling shooter, similar in this fashion to Radilgy. A Dreamcast version was released in March 2007.-Game play:...
.
Through a
freeFree software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also...
software development kitA software development kit is typically a set of development tools that allows a software engineer to create applications for a certain software package, software framework, hardware platform, computer system, video game console, operating system, or similar platform.It may be something as simple...
called KallistiOS, software support of the console continues with homebrew games,
emulatorAn emulator in computer sciences duplicates the functions of one system using a different system, so that the second system behaves like the first system...
s and utilities being released for the system. These include the 2009 unlicensed commercial releases
Last Hope: Pink BulletsLast Hope is a single-player side-scrolling shoot 'em up video game for the Neo Geo AES, Neo Geo CD, and Sega Dreamcast systems. It was developed by German indie developer NG:DEV.TEAM in 2006...
,
Wind and Water: Puzzle BattlesWind and Water: Puzzle Battles is a commercial videogame developed by Yuan Works, a company based in Costa Rica. It is a puzzle game for the GP2X that combines strategy and action. The game was nominated as a Finalist for the Independent Games Festival Mobile 2008, and was invited to the GDC 2008....
and
DUXDUX is a scrolling shooter video game developed by HUCAST.net & KonTechs Ltd. for the Sega Dreamcast. The game was released on 17 June 2009 worldwide. There is also a 500-print limited edition DUX with a game soundtrack on a separate disk. The game is available from HUCAST.net, Play-Asia...
. Several Dreamcast emulation projects have also emerged including Chankast and
nullDCnullDC is a freeware Sega Dreamcast and NAOMI videogame systems emulator for Microsoft Windows under active development, though the release timeline tends to be uncertain and widen through time.-Features:...
.
Models
Due to its short production span, only a few official Dreamcast models were released. The primary models released in 1999 had a grey tint and a weaker and quieter system fan while the later models of 2000 were white colored with a stronger system fan and a faster, louder laser disc reader. The later model disc drives did not feature faster load times but protected against piracy somewhat since some CD-R and CD-RW discs would not load on these drives, while discs burned at certain speeds will not load at all.
The power light, like the Dreamcast logo in
NTSCNTSC, named for the National Television System Committee is the analog television system used in most of the Americas, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Burma, and some Pacific island nations and territories . is also the name of the U.S. standardization body that developed the broadcast standard...
regions, was
orangeThe colour orange occurs between red and yellow in the visible spectrum at a wavelength of about 585–620 nm, and has a hue of 30° in HSV colour space. It is numerically halfway between red and yellow in a gamma-compressed RGB colour space The complementary colour of orange is azure, a slightly...
. In the PAL Regions, the orange logo on the system was changed to blue due to trademark issues.
Some special Dreamcast models were released in certain regions. In North America, a limited edition black Dreamcast was released with a Sega Sports logo below the Dreamcast logo on the lid, along with matching Sega Sports-branded black controllers.
Electronics BoutiqueEB Games is an American computer and video games retailer. First established as an American company in 1977 by James Kim with a single electronics-focused kiosk located in the King of Prussia Mall near Philadelphia, the company has grown into an international corporation.-History:Originally, the...
offered a blue Dreamcast through its website. In Japan, Sega released many varieties of the system, including a limited edition
SonicSonic the Hedgehog is a franchise of video games released by Sega starring and named after its mascot character, Sonic the Hedgehog. The series began in 1991 with the release of Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, in addition to an 8-bit version of the game for the Master System and...
anniversary version, a pink
Sakura Taisenis a Japanese media franchise created by Ouji Hiroi, with original character designs by Kōsuke Fujishima and owned by Red Entertainment and Sega that includes video games and other merchandise. The series began in 1996 as an eponymous dramatic adventure video game developed by Sega with a gameplay...
version, and a
Hello Kitty, is a fictional character produced by the Japanese company Sanrio. Designed by Ikuko Shimizu, the first product, a vinyl coin purse, was introduced in Japan in 1974, and in the United States in 1976....
version released in 2000 in
Japanis an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, People's Republic of China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
which, due to its limited production, has become an extremely rare collector's piece. The package contains a keyboard,
controllerA game controller is an input device used to control a video game. A controller is typically connected to a video game console or a personal computer. A game controller can be a keyboard, mouse, gamepad, joystick, paddle, or any other device designed for gaming that can receive input...
,
VMUThe VMU, or Visual Memory Unit is a memory card peripheral for the Sega Dreamcast. Its official name was changed by Sega for each of the three key regions:-* Japan = Visual Memory System * USA = Visual Memory Unit...
, mouse, and a Hello Kitty
triviaTrivia are unimportant items, especially of information.In the late 20th century the expression came to apply more to information of the kind useful almost exclusively for answering quiz questions: a perfect "trivia question" is one that initially stumps the listener, but the answer subsequently...
game. The console and accessories came in both translucent
pinkPink is a pale red color; the use of the word for the color was first recorded in the late 17th century, describing the flowers of pinks, flowering plants in the genus Dianthus. Pink itself is a combination of red and white...
and
blueBlue is a colour, the perception of which is evoked by light having a spectrum dominated by energy with a wavelength of roughly 440–490 nm. It is considered one of the additive primary colours. On the HSV Colour Wheel, the complement of blue is yellow; that is, a colour corresponding to an equal...
in color with some printed designs.
Technical specifications
The system's processor is a 200 MHz
SH-4SuperH is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by Hitachi. It is implemented by microcontrollers and microprocessors for embedded systems.-History:...
with an on-die 128-bit vector graphics engine, 360
MIPSInstructions per second is a measure of a computer's processor speed. Many reported IPS values have represented "peak" execution rates on artificial instruction sequences with few branches, whereas realistic workloads consist of a mix of instructions and applications, some of which take longer to...
and 1.4 GFLOPS (single precision), using the vector graphics engine. The graphics hardware is a
PowerVRPowerVR is a division of Imagination Technologies that develops hardware and software for 2D and 3D rendering, and for video encoding, decoding, and associated image processing...
2 CLX2 chipset, capable of 7.0 million polygons/second peak performance and
trilinear filteringTrilinear filtering is an extension of the bilinear texture filtering method, which also performs linear interpolation between mipmaps.Bilinear filtering has several weaknesses that make it an unattractive choice in many cases: using it on a full-detail texture when scaling to a very small size...
. Graphics hardware effects include
gouraud shadingGouraud shading,named after Henri Gouraud, is a method used in computer graphics to simulate the differing effects of light and colour across the surface of an object. In practice, Gouraud shading is used to achieve smooth lighting on low-polygon surfaces without the heavy computational...
,
z-bufferingIn computer graphics, z-buffering is the management of image depth coordinates in three-dimensional graphics, usually done in hardware, sometimes in software. It is one solution to the visibility problem, which is the problem of deciding which elements of a rendered scene are visible, and which...
,
anti-aliasingIn digital signal processing, anti-aliasing is the technique of minimizing the distortion artifacts known as aliasing when representing a high-resolution signal at a lower resolution...
, per-pixel translucency sorting and
bump mappingBump mapping is a computer graphics technique where at each pixel, a perturbation to the surface normal of the object being rendered is looked up in a texture map and applied before the illumination calculation is done...
. The system supports approximately
16.78 million colors (24-bit)Truecolor is a method of representing and storing graphical image information in an RGB color space such that a very large number of colors, shades, and hues can be displayed in an image, such as in high quality photographic images or complex graphics...
color outputColor depth or bit depth, is a computer graphics term describing the number of bits used to represent the color of a single pixel in a bitmapped image or video frame buffer. This concept is also known as bits per pixel , particularly when specified along with the number of bits used...
and displays interlaced or progressive scan video at 640x480 video resolution.
For sound, the system features a Yamaha AICA Sound Processor with a 22.5 MHz 32-Bit
ARM7The ARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by ARM Limited. It was known as the Advanced RISC Machine, and before that as the Acorn RISC Machine. The ARM architecture is the most widely used 32-bit ISA in terms of numbers produced...
RISC CPU operating at 45 MHz,, 64 channel
PCM/ADPCMPulse-code modulation is a digital representation of an analog signal where the magnitude of the signal is sampled regularly at uniform intervals, then quantized to a series of symbols in a numeric code. PCM has been used in digital telephone systems and 1980s-era electronic musical keyboards...
sampler (4:1 compression), XG MIDI support and 128 step DSP.
The Dreamcast has 16
MBThe megabyte is an SI-multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission and is equal to 10
6 bytes. However, due to historical usage in computer-related fields it is still often used to represent 2
20 bytes. In rare cases, it is used to mean...
64 Bit 100 MHz of main RAM, 8 MB 4x16-bit 100 MHz
video RAMVRAM, or Video RAM, is a dual-ported variant of DRAM, or Dynamic RAM, which was once commonly used to store the frame-buffer in some graphics adaptors....
and 2 MB 16-bit 66 MHz sound RAM. The hardware supports VQ
Texture CompressionImage compression is the application of data compression on digital images. In effect, the objective is to reduce redundancy of the image data in order to be able to store or transmit data in an efficient form....
at either asymptotically 2bpp or even 1bpp
The system reads media using a 12x maximum speed (
Constant Angular VelocityIn optical storage, constant angular velocity is a qualifier for the rated speed of an optical disc drive, and may also be applied to the writing speed of recordable discs...
)
YamahaYamaha may refer to:* Yamaha Corporation, a Japanese company with a wide range of products and services** Yamaha Motor Company, a Japanese motorized vehicle-producing company...
GD-ROMGD-ROM is the proprietary optical disc format used by the Sega Dreamcast. It is similar to the standard CD-ROM except that the pits on the disc are packed more closely together, resulting in a higher storage capacity: around 1.2 gigabytes, which is almost double the storage capacity of a typical...
Drive. The Dreamcast can also read data from a
Visual Memory UnitThe VMU, or Visual Memory Unit is a memory card peripheral for the Sega Dreamcast. Its official name was changed by Sega for each of the three key regions:-* Japan = Visual Memory System * USA = Visual Memory Unit...
("VMU") removable storage device and 4x memory cards that hold four times as much data. Input devices such as game controllers are connected to four
USBUSB is a way of setting up communication between a computer and peripheral devices. USB is intended to replace many varieties of serial and parallel ports. USB can connect computer peripherals such as mice, keyboards, PDAs, gamepads and joysticks, scanners, digital cameras, printers, personal...
-like "Maple Bus" ports.
Built in Modem
In most regions, the Dreamcast included a removable
modemModem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
. The original Asia/Japan model had a 33.6 kbit/s; consoles sold in Japan after September 9, 1999 had a
56 kbit/sA 56 kbit/s line is a digital connection capable of carrying 56 kilobits per second , or 56,000 bit/s, the data rate of a classical single channel digital telephone line in North America...
modem. All American models had a 56 kbit/s modem, while all PAL models had a 33.6 kbit/s modem.
BrazilBrazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is a country in South America. It is the fifth largest country by geographical area, occupying nearly half of South America, the fifth most populous country, and the fourth most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean...
ian models manufactured under license by
Tec ToyTectoy is a Brazilian videogame and electronics company. They are best known for publishing and distributing Sega's consoles and video games in that country. The company stock is also traded at Bovespa...
did not include a modem, which was available separately. The regular modem could be replaced with a
broadband adapterThe Dreamcast Broadband Adapter is an accessory that was released for the Sega Dreamcast. The console originally came equipped with a 56 or 33.6K modem for use with dial-up Internet access but the release of the broadband adapter on January 10, 2001 allowed the Dreamcast to utilize broadband...
that was sold separately.
Accessories
Various accessories for the Dreamcast were released, by both third parties and Sega itself. Among the most notable ones are the
Dreamcast VGA adapterThe Dreamcast video game console is able to output VGA to a computer display or HDTV using a first- or third-party peripheral usually referred to as "VGA box", "VGA cable" or "VGA adapter".-Functionality:...
which allowed Dreamcast games to be played on computer displays or
High-definition televisionHigh-definition television is a digital television broadcasting system with higher resolution than traditional television systems...
sets in
480p480p is the shorthand name for a video display resolution. The p stands for progressive scan, i.e. non-interlaced. The 480 denotes a vertical resolution of 480 vertically scanning lines, usually with a horizontal resolution of 640 pixels and 4:3 aspect ratio or a horizontal resolution of 852 pixels...
(
progressive scanProgressive or noninterlaced scanning is a method for displaying, storing or transmitting moving images in which all the lines of each frame are drawn in sequence...
) and the
VMUThe VMU, or Visual Memory Unit is a memory card peripheral for the Sega Dreamcast. Its official name was changed by Sega for each of the three key regions:-* Japan = Visual Memory System * USA = Visual Memory Unit...
accessory - a memory card with a small screen that provided a variety of functions for various games. Also made available for specific games were the arcade stick and light gun controllers.
Games
As of November 2007, the Dreamcast has 688 official games available in its library. There are also numerous homebrew games for the Dreamcast and games continue to be released by certain companies. Games were sold in jewel cases; jewel cases in Europe were twice as thick as their North American counterparts, possibly to have space for thick, multilingual instruction manuals.
Among the official games are
Dreamcast online games that could be played over the Internet. The online servers were run by
SegaNetSegaNet was an internet service provided by Sega for the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast video game consoles.-Saturn:SegaNet is Sega's online service for the Sega Saturn in Japan. Unlike other online services, one doesn't connect to a central service, but instead tells the dial-up modem connected to the...
,
DreamarenaThe Dreamarena was a free online gaming service provided with all Sega Dreamcast consoles in Europe. As the console had a bundled 33.6 kbit/s modem built in , it was a dial-up service...
, and
GameSpyGameSpy, also known as GameSpy Industries, is a division of IGN Entertainment, which operates a network of game websites and provides online video game-related services and software. GameSpy dates back to the 1996 release of an internet Quake server search program named QSpy. The current company...
networks. Online game support was particularly popular in Japan, with releases of network compatible games such as
Tech Romanceris a 1998 3D fighting arcade game by Capcom that draws heavily from the various sub-genres of Mecha anime. It has been ported to the Sega Dreamcast console. The player controls a giant robot which is used to fight another robot in one-on-one combat...
and
Project JusticeProject Justice , is a fighting game developed by Capcom...
.
Web browserA web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
s were developed by independent companies such as Planetweb to allow access to web sites and included features like Java, uploads, movies, and mouse support. Dreamarena came with games such as
Sonic Adventureis a video game developed by Sonic Team and released on December 23, 1998 in Japan by Sega for the Sega Dreamcast and is the first game in the Sonic Adventure series. One of its development titles was Sonic RPG,...
, and
Chu Chu Rocket.
There are five games that can still be played online.
Quake III Arena and
Maximum Pool are still accessible via various
serversA server is an application running on a computer that delivers a service. For example, a web server will deliver web pages when requested by a browser . The way a server and a client dialogs is called a protocol...
.
4x4 Evolution and
Starlancer are still online through Gamespy.
SEGA Swirl can be also be played online with its play by e-mail game.
External links