"The best, advanced 128-bit console with perfect graphics, music and games to play! Congratulations to SEGA!"

SEGA has really made a cool, advanced 128-bit console of the whole world, Dreamcast. Some of you may think, “Is it so cool? I rather stick with other consoles.” Yes, it is cool. Also, it is very affordable for a very, amazing console like this. Give this square, white with the unique, spiral Dreamcast logo a try.

The first thing I see of this console is the graphics. Never in my whole life ever seen such wonderful graphics played on the Dreamcast. Yes, even better than other graphics on the computer ever created. Some real-to-life graphics like from the game Shenmue is very amazing with the Dreamcast capable of 3 million polygons per second. Then, it is potentially and capable to display also 16.77 million colours too!

Move on to the music. The Dreamcast has a Digital Signal Processor hardware for real-time sound effects such as echo. It has also full 3D sound support that is considered really nice for the Dreamcast. For music lovers, you can also put in your favourite music CD to the Dreamcast and play it with the simple and normal controls like forward, play, pause, rewind and others.

Okay, some of you may also say, “What’s so great about the graphics or even the music? If there are no good games, what’s the graphics and music for?” For your information, there are dozens and dozens of games coming out and they are released already. Don’t believe me? I can list down all of them here if I want. There are Sonic Adventure, Rayman 2, Shenmue, Soul Calibur, The House of the Dead 2, Speed Devils, Toy Commander, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing, Pen Pen, NFL Blitz 2000, Seaman, Buggy Heat, Street Fighters 3 Alpha, Mortal Combat Gold, Evolution 2, Ecco the Dolphin, Power Stone 2, Virtua Fighter 3tb, Marvel vs Capcom 2, Sega Rally 2, Trickstyle, Shadowman and hundred others.

The Dreamcast is also capable to connect to the Internet with your local ISP, Dreamcast’s internal, build-in 33.6 Kilobytes per second modem and Dreamcast browser. You can surf the Internet as usual and enter special Dreamcast-only websites to download special files to your memory card, better known as the VMS (Visual Memory System for Japan and Asian Dreamcast) or VMU (Visual Memory Unit for Europe and US Dreamcast versions). SEGA is also planning to release a Zip Drive to store download files from the Internet!

Best of all, the memory card is the most unique little thing. It is very light, weighs around 45 grams and uses 2 special CR2032 type of batteries that are easily available in your nearest shop. What’s so special about it? It has a 48 x 32 dot monochrome LCD that allows the memory card to display graphics and a 1-channel PWM for sound! Its CPU is an energy-saving 8-bit and its memory is 128k. Want more specific size? It’s 47mm (W) x 80mm (H) x 16mm (D). There are also the D-pad, two action buttons and two option buttons for you to play with. It is portable and you can bring it anywhere, in your school, in the bus, in the train, in the hotel, in the airplane, in your room, in the park and a million other places. This memory card will fit in nicely in the controller! That’s how the saving process is made!

Also, SEGA pioneered the PDA (Personal Data Assistant) idea when they released their VMS before the Dreamcast in Japan. Its most basic use is to show the logo of the game you’re playing or pictures, but it can go so much further if developers take a little time to make use of it. Example, in a driving game, you can have lap data, car status and customized warnings for the driver shown on the VMS. For a fighting game, it may deliver new moves as you play by displaying them on a small screen or an RPG can feedback information on a character to the VMS, keeping it secret from other players!

These features are only for starters! The most advanced and ultimate use of the VMS is as a stand-alone console. Some software titles will download mini-games into the VMS’s 128k memory, which can be played away from the Dreamcast like Sonic Adventure’s Chao (known as A-Life). The first game known to do this was Godzilla in Japan and the VMS was actually released on 11th July, before the Dreamcast with a Godzilla game already installed. It’s a special game allowing you to train it Tamagotchi-styled and battle and connect with other users’ VMS! Connecting with other VMS allows you to transfer or receive data from other users. The clever thing is that the VMS can also plug into Naomi arcade machines to transfer data between the Dreamcast and arcade versions of games!

The Dreamcast can also support up to 4 players in a game (if the game allows four players like Toy Commander and others). That means you can bring other three friends to play with instead of one! The more people the better! There are also other types of controllers like the arcade stick for fighting games, the fishing rod for fishing games (typically special for Sega Bass Fishing), light gun for shooting game (like The House of the Dead 2) and the special Dreamcast keyboard for typing stuffs for the Internet (or for the game, The Typing of the Dead)! The joypad can be inserted with two memory cards, the same goes to other types of controllers. There is also the Rumble Pack (Puru-puru Pack in Japan) to make vibrations in the game (where you put the pack in the joypad too at the memory card slot)! Totally neat!

Okay, listing down long and endless lists and boast the large numbers of it is completely useless if you don’t know what they all mean. I will list down this system’s specifications with the explanation of each of them after some research from the unofficial Dreamcast Magazine.

CPU (Central Processing Unit):
- 128-bit Hitachi SHE-4 running at 200MHz
- Capable of 360 MIPs (millions of instructions per second)

The number of ‘bits’ in a CPU refers to the size of information the professor can handle in one hardware. The SH-4 handles four times as much information at a time compared to the SH-2 which was the CPU at the heart of the Saturn.

The Dreamcast has a clock of speed of 200MHz. It’s internal clock is responsible for keeping different parts of the processor in sync. Put in terms of a car engine, the SH-2 does a constant 200 Million revs per second… cool!
The MIPs is the most important figure in a professor specifications. It fives you the maximum power of the machine. It’s equivalent to the horsepower value for a car.

- 1.4 billion floating-point operations per second
- 3D calculations

In every 3D game, you need to perform a huge amount of mathematics to work out where all the polygons are supposed to be, what all the lighting should look like and much more besides. Therefore, the Dreamcast is equipped with a mathematics processor which can perform 1.4 billion of these is many times more than previous consoles.

- 800+ Mbytes per second bus bandwith

The ‘bus’ in a console carries information between the various chips such as CPU, graphics chip and sound chip. Therefore, a fast bus is essential to make a cutting edge console. After all, there’s no use in having a blindly fast graphics chips that can handle 3 million polygons per second if your bus can only supply the chip with 1 million! The Dreamcast has a bus which can carry 800 million bytes per second which means it’s pretty quick and can handle quite a lot.

Graphics Processor:
- NEC PowerVR2
- Capable of 3 million polygons per second peak rendering rate

The ‘peak rendering rate’ is a similar idea to a car’s top speed. The PowerVR2 is capable of drawing 3 million polygons per second under optimum conditions. That’s comparable to higher end PCs which can cost five times the price of Dreamcast!

- Perspective-correct texture mapping

This feature allows texture-mapped polygons to appear correctly regardless of the angle you view at them. On some older games, you might have noticed how walls and floors distort when you look at them from extreme angles.

- Point, bilinear, trilinear and anisotropic mip-map filtering

To improve the Dreamcast’s graphic, output artists use mip-maps. Essentially these are smaller and simpler versions of a texture which are used depending on how far away a polygon is drawn. When combined with the one of the Dreamcast’s graphic filters (which smooth out the textures on the polygons), the resulting image is of a much higher of quality.

- Gouraud shading

Gouraud shading is a system used for applying colour and transparency to individual polygons. Essentially, it allows you to set different colours for the corners of each polygon and the hardware will smoothly shade the area between the corners. This feature is used extensively in lighting.

- Z-buffer

The Z-buffer is a feature used to help the PowerVR2 display graphics correctly. Basically, when a polygon is drawn, each pixel’s depth in the scene is recorded in the Z buffer. When the renderer attempts to draw over a pixel, it checks to see the depth of the pixel already there. If the pixel already there obscures the new pixel to be drawn, the renderer doesn’t bother and moves on. This allows scenes to be drawn far neater. You may have noticed on older games and consoles that occasionally things seem to get drawn in the wrong order like a player might appear behind a wall or something when they are supposed to be in front of a wall. With the Dreamcast graphic, glitches such as these are no more.

- Coloured light sourcing

Lights can be any colour...but then, they could on the Playstation and Saturn!

- Full scene anti-aliasing

This feature is used to make the final image look more natural. It basically smooths out the edges of polygons so they look more part of the scene.

- Hardware-based fog

The Dreamcast allows you to set up various settings for fog in games and subsequently, the hardware will take care of the details.

- Bump mapping

The Dreamcast has hardware support for bump mapping. This allows textures to have depth. They can actually look bumpy instead of being purely flat.

- 16.77 million colours

Wow, 16.77 million colours? Yep! 16.77 million colours are potentially displayable on screen. I say potentially because unfortunately, there are only 300 thousand pixels on a screen!

- Hardware-based texture compression

The Dreamcast’s hardware texture compression allows programmers and artists to compress textures around seven times. All this extra space means we can display more, higher detailed textures with more colours than existing consoles. This allows games to look even better!

- Shadow and light volumes

The PowerVR2 supports shadow and light volumes. This is a fantastic feature which allows the developer to create more realistic lights and shadows. Essentially, it allows you to declare an area which you want to be in the shadow and subsequently, all polygons which enter that area will be correctly shadowed.

Sound Processor:
- Yamaha Audio Core
- RISC CPU
- DSP for real-time effects
- 64 sound channels
- Full 3D sound support
- Hardware-based compression audio compression

The sound hardware in the Dreamcast has a DSP (Digital Signal Processor) for real-time effects such as echo and reverb as I had mentioned above. It has a separate CPU so it can leave the main CPU to do all the graphics and AI work. It can output 64 channels of audio and it supports hardware sound compression which allows us to use up to four times more sound memory card at once.

More Dreamcast Details:
- 12x speed GD-ROM drive with custom 1GB capacity

The GD-ROM (Gigabyte-Disc Read Only Memory) can hold 1 Gigabyte of files which include sound, graphics and data files all in one disc! Of course, longer adventure like Shenmue need more than one disc to play.

- 190mm (W) x 195mm (H) x 78mm (D)
- 2.0kg

A small and unique-shaped console with a very light weight makes it easy to take it around or even put it in your travel bag safely!

Are you interested on the original name of Dreamcast? Actually, Deramcast went through various names and companies before SEGA settled on the model and design that we see today. At one time, there were two separate teams working on a new SEGA console, American company 3Dfx was developing a console codenamed Black Belt while in Japan, VideoLogic was creating Dural, named after the end boss in the game Virtua Fighter. SEGA eventually dropped 3Dfx and VideoLogic while continuing its work, with anew codename of Katana!

The final cost of developing Dreamcast was $50-80 million, with software development estimated at $150-200 million and that's almost half a billion!

But, with the Playstation 2 appeared in the market, Dreamcast is challenged with it while Dolphin is going to make appearance. Will Dreamcast survive? For me, it's very likely. SEGA is going to develop more accessories such as DreamEye and if not, the rumoured PowerVR3 chip may be released to enhance the graphics.

If that aren't true, the ever-growing game library of Dreamcast will attract more gamers around the world (like me). SEGA needs more quality games like Shenmue in order to survive and more great RPGs to beat Square's Final Fantasy. The Dreamcast's future is only in the hands of SEGA.

Bur to me (and frankly), this is the best system up-to-date. As I had said before, it is cheap and affordable so buy it or you’ll regret.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 05/06/00, Updated 05/06/00