Dreamcast history rectifiction

[MODEL 3]

Dreamcast, what a missed opportunity for SEGA.Let's see some things that SEGA could have done differently:
1)Launch date Q4 98
NEW Launch date Q3 99
2)CPU Hitachi SH4 0.25 nm 200Mhz 360Mips 1.4Gflops 10.5 million polygons per second 640x240 24bit 30fps MPEG1 decompression.
SEGA made to Hitachi specific requirements for SH4 before SH4 design complete so for Hitachi it would be possible to change the design for SH4 in order to be 50% faster clock for clock in relation with the original if SEGA made such requirement.If it wasn't possible there always be the Power PC camp although more expensive.
NEW CPU Hitachi SH4 0.25nm 267Mhz 720Mips 2.8Gflops 21 million polygons per second 640x480 24bit 30fps MPEG1 decompression.
3)GPU Videologic CLX1 PVR2 0.25 nm 100Mhz 6-7.5 million polygons per second (1 pixel unit) actual in game polygon performans 4.5 million polygon per second (Melbourne house programmer claimed that in Le mans 24h achieved 5 million polygons per sec only 2 years after launch)
NEW GPU Videologic CLX2 PVR3 0.25 nm 133Mhz 16-20 million polygons per second (2 pixel unit) actual in game polygon performans 12 million polygon per second
4)Memory 16Mb 100Mhz CPU ram 8Mb 100Mhz Video ram 2mb audio ram
NEW Memory 24Mb 133Mhz CPU ram 12Mb 133Mhz Video ram 2mb audio ram
5)Storage device CD-ROM 12X custom format 1Gb
NEW Storage device DVD-ROM 2X (16X CD-ROM) 4,5Gb
6)V33 or V56 conventional modem (Built in)
NEW broadband modem 512kbps (Optional Q3 01)
Killer specifications on par with Gamecube performance 2 years earlier with lower cost of goods than all the competition.Since the launch would take place a year after the original took place all the changes have marginall increase in cost except DVD-ROM although 2X NOT 4X as SONY had in PS2.
What do you think would be the situation today with a senario such as this?

 

[linthat22]

As much as I'd love to speculate, it's beating a dead horse. Just like Bitboys and the Glaze 3D or the 3Df/x monster card you had to plug in the wall. I did love me Dreamcast though

 

[Megadrive1988]

interesting.

but I would much rather have had Dreamcast with a Lockheed Martin Real3D GPU - say a hypothetical 'Real3D-500' with more pixel & polygon pushing power than the twin Real3D-Pro/1000s, in Model 3.

The 'Real3D-500' has 4 pixel pipes, is clocked around 133 Mhz so that gives us well over 500M pixels of fillrate. there is 1, or perhaps 2 TMUs per pipe. there are 4 geometry engines, 1 infront of each pipe. each GE has a few FPUs. we get 7~10 million triangles or 3.5~5 million square polys. with lighting, filtering 4x FSAA. not quite as strong as Xbox, but close.

I'd go with a 300 or 400 Mhz PowerPC 604 custom varient
(with boosted FP power) with 48 MB SDRAM instead of 16 MB in the real DC.

40 MB VRAM (SDRAM) for the Lockheed GPU instead of 8 MB

8 MB for audio instead of 2 MB

some kind of solid-state disc media for games that's close in speed to ROM boards in arcades, instead of GD-ROM

fast CD-ROM for back compatiblity with MegaCD/SegaCD and Saturn.

or maybe DVD-ROM

small harddrive.

high quality web browser from either MS or Access
(whoever did DreamPassport)

built in 56k modem and ethernet (no rare BBA to hunt down later)

launch in fall 1999 in Japan (rather than 1998) and USA and Europe.

(later release allows for better GPU, more memory, etc)

port over some Mac productivity software so console is even more useful as a non-games machine, like the real Dreamcast is, but more so.

the arcade variant of this consoles sits at the lowend of a potent high/low mix of Sega arcade technology. like the USAF's high/low mix of F-15s and F-16s. at the highend, is Model 4. with about 3-4x as much power as the Dreamcast. the Dreamcast has 3x the performance of Model 3.

too much fun to say "what if" 8)

 

[Evil_Cloud]

Dreamcast was doomed even before it was released, thank Sega's ex-management for that. Everything went wrong with Saturn, if they wouldn't have screwed Saturn up, there would still be a Sega.

 

[Teasy]

MODEL 3

Problem is that's pure speculation. You can never know if that console would have been possible 1 year later at around the same cost. I very much doubt it in fact.

Killer specifications on par with Gamecube performance 2 years earlier with lower cost of goods than all the competition

Nah those specs aren't quite on par with GC. The main problem I see is lack of a dedicated T&L unit.

 

[PC-Engine]

Why speculate when there was NAOMI 2???

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Dreamcast was the only console that was ahead of the technology curve IMO. Those specs are reasonable and would have made a nice system.

 

[Megadrive1988]

indeed. dreamcast...excuse me, DREAMCAST, was really the only system technologically ahead of it's time. N64 was behind the curve. PS1 was about par. PS2,Cube,Xbox...about par. Genesis was par, SNES was behind. the only other machines i can think of that were ahead of their time... the original Amiga and the Sharp X68000.

 

[Deadmeat]

...

DC's demise had nothing to do with its spec and everything to do with Sega's poor financial health, changing the spec would not have made any difference. Hardware doesn't matter anymore but the marketing prowess(Hype your console shamelessly) and winning the developer mindset does, Kutaragi Ken and his "one-of-a-kind" PSX2 proved it.

 

[LogisticX]

I hate to beat another dead horse here but the terminology "PSX2" is incorrect Deadmeat. For the love of god, please take a little extra care to backspace that "X" everytime you feel the need to put it in there.

Dreamcast was on par I think with the times. I was blown away by Soul Calibur (bought it relatively blindly at DC launch pretty much, despite loving the original anyway I guess) but its pretty much what I expected out of a first entry to the "next gen" line. Saturn beat PSone to the punch in the beginning as I really didn't think PSone was that much more advanced than Saturn.

PS2 (notice the lack of "X" deadmeat) was more ahead of its time I believe despite the software not really displaying in the beginning. It's really stood the test of time for the most part and has its own contenders with the much younger Xbox and GC. All I remember hearing was the banter of PS2-critics who stuck with the slogan "Just wait till Xbox and GC come out...".

I'm not particularily sure how much power was left untapped in the DC.... I'm sure there could be some pretty sharp stuff if it had still had development support today, but I really don't feel that it would've been too big of a leap.

Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 are probably among the best looking on the DC I think. Beautiful games and very fast.

 

[PC-Engine]

I'm currently playing SCII on GCN and I have to honestly say that SC on the DC has better image quality on my VGA monitor with the exception of the visible mipmapping levels on the ground. The textures are a lot sharper and the overall image is just sharper. I wonder what SCII would look like on DC with a couple of more years of development from Namco. Then there is the NAOMI 2 version of VF4 with far superior lighting than any console fighter.

 

[CIN]

Dreamcast was on par I think with the times. I was blown away by Soul Calibur (bought it relatively blindly at DC launch pretty much, despite loving the original anyway I guess) but its pretty much what I expected out of a first entry to the "next gen" line. Saturn beat PSone to the punch in the beginning as I really didn't think PSone was that much more advanced than Saturn.

PS2 (notice the lack of "X" deadmeat) was more ahead of its time I believe despite the software not really displaying in the beginning. It's really stood the test of time for the most part and has its own contenders with the much younger Xbox and GC. All I remember hearing was the banter of PS2-critics who stuck with the slogan "Just wait till Xbox and GC come out...".

I'm not particularily sure how much power was left untapped in the DC.... I'm sure there could be some pretty sharp stuff if it had still had development support today, but I really don't feel that it would've been too big of a leap.

Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 are probably among the best looking on the DC I think. Beautiful games and very fast.

I disagree. The DC was IMO the only console to be ahead of its time tech wise. When it was released there was no affordable consumer hardware that coud do what DC could. That is the only reason why with only 100mpix/s it could keep up gfx wise with the PS2 at realease.

The PS2 is very powerful but its feature set is barely superior to a 3Dfx Voodoo 1 gfx card which is rather embarassing IMO. DC still can do things that the PS2 cant.

JMO

Lets hope that PS3 is better developed this time.

 

[wazoo]

indeed. dreamcast...excuse me, DREAMCAST, was really the only system technologically ahead of it's time. N64 was behind the curve.

N64 was not behind. Everybody was blown away by the launch games. The only problem with N64 was the cartdridge. Imagine a 32MB N64 at launch, or a CDRM based N64.

 

[Reznor007]

I'd say N64 was pretty far ahead of it's time. N64 emulators are starting to use pixel shaders to do some of the texture effects used by some games.

It was also the only console to have texture filtering up until late 1999.

I would put SNES a little ahead, but only in certain areas. The CPU was of course archaic, but the video hardware had scaling/rotaion for backgrounds, and transparencies(both of which even NeoGeo was missing). The sound system was even better, an 8 channel 32KHz 16bit pure digital system back in 91? Beat anything else up until PSX(SPU is apparently an evolved version of it).

 

[MODEL 3]

Megadrive1988 wrote:
"but I would much rather have had Dreamcast with a Lockheed Martin Real3D GPU..."
The twin Real 3D PRO/1000 was extremely expensive.If I rember correctly each was capable to calculate 750.000 squares (1.500.000 triangles) with 24bit textures, trilinear filtering, high specular Gourand shading as standard with 4 samples per pixel and geometry power of 16Gflops (Maybe I am not so sure about the 16Gflpos)
Some games that used these features like Scud Race (Q3 96) or Daytona 2 (Q3 98) looked absolutely fantastic.
I still don't know a console game (Even XBOX) that uses 24bit textures, trilinear filtering, high specular Gourand shading as standard with 4 samples per pixel in ALL polygons (Also the size of the polygons in Model 3 was bloody big in relation with console standard polygon sizes and the clarity and density of the image and texture quality was unbelievable)
But we can keep dreaming.

Teasy wrote:
"Nah those specs aren't quite on par with GC. The main problem I see is lack of a dedicated T&L unit."
Well yes the specs aren't quite on par with GC but pretty close in order to be competitive(Well anyway the difference would be smaller than the difference PS2 has with XBOX).Also don't forget that we are talking about a Q3 99 hardware with cost saving philosophy design.

Deadmeat wrote:
"Hardware doesn't matter anymore but the marketing prowess(Hype your console shamelessly) and winning the developer mindset does"
Well yes marketing has became much more important, I agree.

 

[Squeak]

I'm currently playing SCII on GCN and I have to honestly say that SC on the DC has better image quality on my VGA monitor with the exception of the visible mipmapping levels on the ground. The textures are a lot sharper and the overall image is just sharper.

What about the obvious Gouraud shading artefacts on DC SC?
To me that detracts a whole lot from overall impressiveness.

I'd say N64 was pretty far ahead of it's time. N64 emulators are starting to use pixel shaders to do some of the texture effects used by some games.

Didn't it have some kind of early register combiner hardware too?

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Not to toot Simon's horn too loudly here, but the PVR hardware was amazing, especially at the time when memory pricing was ridiculously expensive. I'll admit I used to be too much of DC cheerleader, mostly when I was employed at SegaWeb , but I'll always stand by my opinion that the DC has better image quality than nearly all PS2 games.

I also think that people who can't see the clear difference between Xbox/Cube graphics and PS2 graphics either don't have a decent TV or are simply blind. Tons of PS2 games are a shimmering mess on my HDTV.

I actually think the PS2 is a little behind the technology curve, merely because of how unbalanced the system is. Poor texturing (8-bit - blah), massive fillrate, great polygon performance, but no multi-texturing so tons of multipass algorithms need to be coded, hard to use VU0 micro-code, load times are horrid... It just isn't at all elegant.

Cube/Xbox are about what I expected, but the A-Ram on the Cube is next to useless and the Xbox should have had 128MB of RAM.

 

[Megadrive1988]

it is true that Sega's dimise as a console maker had little or nothing to do with Dreamcast's specifications.

the higher specs hypothosized here...it just would have made Dreamcast an absolutely stunning, knock-out console, instead of "only" just exellent and ahead of its time.

 

[Megadrive1988]

The twin Real 3D PRO/1000 was extremely expensive.If I rember correctly each was capable to calculate 750.000 squares (1.500.000 triangles) with 24bit textures, trilinear filtering, high specular Gourand shading as standard with 4 samples per pixel and geometry power of 16Gflops (Maybe I am not so sure about the 16Gflpos)

yes the twin R3D Pro/1000s were incredibly expensive. from what I've read many times, they could handle 750,000 rectangle polygons per second with basicly everything turned on, in terms of features, some of which you mentioned above. that gave Model 3 a max performance of 1.5 million square or rectrangle polygons/sec, and easily over 1 million sustained. Dreamcast needed its 3 million triangle polygons/sec to rival Model 3 in geometry. it was either the SoJ Pres or some other high ranking SoJ official, who said it took two Dreamcast polygons (triangles)
for each Model 3 polygon (square/rectangles).

I don't recall the 16 Gflops for Model 3 though. maybe you are remembering Model 2, which was said to have 16 Mflops of computational power, I suppose for its FPUs or DSPs.

to defend PowerVR, in 1997 and early 1998 when Katana/DC specifications were coming to light, the PowerVR2DC was absolutely unbeatable as far as its price to performance ratio. it almost rivaled and in many ways surpassed, the Model 3 board, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

 

[jvd]

Dreamcast was doomed even before it was released, thank Sega's ex-management for that. Everything went wrong with Saturn, if they wouldn't have screwed Saturn up, there would still be a Sega.

It wasn't the saturns fault .

Get history right


It was the sega cd / 32x fiasco that went wrong. Thus having sega in a bad spot with the saturn.

If they never put out the 32x things would have gone much better .


Esp since they made a hand full of games and then dumped it . The saturn had a steady amount of good quality games for 3-4 years . Some of the 2d games being leaps and bounds above the psx even with out the 4 meg upgrade