The is the last video game console made by Sega, and is the successor to the Sega Saturn. An attempt to recapture the console market with a next-generation system, it was designed to supersede the PlayStation and Nintendo 64. Originally released in late 1998, sixteen months before the PlayStation 2 (PS2) and three years before the Nintendo GameCube and the Xbox, the Dreamcast is part of the sixth generation of video game consoles. Dreamcast was widely hailed as ahead of its time, and is still held in high regard for pioneering online console gaming. Sega discontinued the Dreamcast in March 2001, and withdrew entirely from the console hardware business; however, support continued in Japan where consoles were still sold until 2006 and new licensed games were still being made by companies of the arcade market until 2008. As of 2009, there are several games in active development for the console, such as Dux , Rush Rush Rally RacingGames, Age of the Beast and Little Ninja. The latest released game as of 2009 is Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles.

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. At the 1997 E3, Stolar made public his opinion on the Saturn with his comment, "The Saturn is not our future" and referred to the doomed console as "the stillbirth".

Design

The then newly-appointed president of SEGA, Shoichiro Irimajiri, took the step of appointing researcher Tatsuo Yamamoto from International Business Machines Austin Research Laboratory as the head of a newly-created Skunkworks project named the "US Skunk works group", which was responsible for the research and development of a next-generation SEGA console. However, due to SEGA hardware engineer Hideki Sato and his group refusing to relinquish control of the internal hardware department, competing designs for the console were established by each team.

Sato and his group opted to use the Hitachi SH4 processor architecture, along with the VideoLogic PowerVR2 graphics processor in the production of their mainboard, which was originally given the codename "White Belt", with later prototype boards being named "Guppy" and eventually "Katana". Yamamoto and his "Skunkworks" group opted to use the then-3dfx Voodoo 2 and Voodoo Banshee family graphics processors, and after initially trialing other RISC processors, settled on the SH4 as Sato and his group had. The codenames given for the "Skunkworks" project were firstly "Black Belt", followed by "Shark" and lastly "Dural"; the latter referring eponymously to a character from the Virtua Fighter series.

Initially, SEGA had decided to opt for the design of the "Skunkworks" project, and had suggested to manufacturer 3Dfx that they would be using their graphics chipsets in their upcoming console, but later opted to using the PowerVR graphics chipset as suggested in Hideki Sato's design which was then renamed the Dreamcast. This was supposedly due to 3Dfx mistakenly revealing the details of SEGA's then-secret development project, the Dreamcast, and its technical specifications when declaring their Initial Public Offering (IPO) in June 1997.Fact: date=February 2009