Sega Dreamcast

The Sega Dreamcast (Japanese: ドリームキャスト; code-named Dural, Dricas and Katana during development) was Sega's fifth and final video game console and the successor to the Sega Saturn. more...

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An attempt to recapture the console market with a next-generation system, it was designed to supersede the PlayStation and Nintendo 64. Originally released fifteen months before the PlayStation 2 (PS2), and three years before the Nintendo GameCube and the Xbox, the Dreamcast was generally considered to be ahead of its time and was initially successful at restoring Sega's reputation in the gaming industry. However, it failed to gather enough momentum before the release of the PlayStation 2 in March 2000, and Sega decided to discontinue the Dreamcast the following year, withdrawing entirely from the console hardware business.

History

In 1997, the Saturn was struggling in North America, and Sega of America president Bernie Stolar pressed for Sega's Japanese headquarters to develop a new platform which eventually became the Dreamcast. At the 1997 E³, Stolar made public his opinion on the Saturn with his comment, "The Saturn is not our future."

When it was announced that Sega would be discontinuing the Saturn permanently in favor of the Dreamcast, many third-party developers in Japan were angered, as it meant that they were putting money into developing titles for what would soon be a dead system.

Design

When the time came to design the successor to the Sega Saturn, the new President of Sega, Shoichiro Irimajiri, took the unusual step of hiring an outsider, Tatsuo Yamamoto from IBM Austin, to head a "skunk works" group to develop the next-generation console. It soon became apparent that the existing Japanese hardware group led by Hideki Sato did not want to relinquish control of the hardware department, bringing rise to two competing designs led by two different groups.

A timeline of the development of the console's GPU may be found here.

The Japanese group led by Hideki Sato settled on an Hitachi SH4 processor with a PowerVR graphics processor developed by VideoLogic (now Imagination Technologies) and manufactured by NEC. This was originally codenamed "White Belt". The first Japanese prototype boards were silkscreened "Guppy", and the later ones "Katana".

The US skunk works group (in a secret suite at the Sega of America headquarters) led by Tatsuo Yamamoto settled on an IBM/Motorola PowerPC 603e processor with a 3dfx Voodoo 2 graphics processor, which was originally codenamed "Black Belt". The first US prototype boards were silkscreened "Shark".

The Japanese hardware was codenamed "Dural", then later, "Katana". "Black Belt" and "Shark" were the only codenames used by the US hardware team (the hardware team was called "Black Belt team"; the "Shark" was in response to the Japanese team's "Guppy").

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