The is Sega's most recent video game console and 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 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 2007.

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" and referred to the doomed console as "The Denzel".

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.

The Japanese group led by Hideki Sato settled on an Hitachi SH4 processor with a PowerVR7 graphics chip developed by VideoLogic (now Imagination Technologies) and manufactured by NEC. This was originally codenamed "White Belt". The first Japanese prototype boards were silkscreened "Gluppy", and the later ones "Katana".

The U.S. skunk works group (11 people in a secret suite away from the Sega of America headquarters) led by Tatsuo Yamamoto settled on a Hitachi SH4 processor with a custom 3dfx Voodoo 2 or Banshee graphics chip, which was originally codenamed "Black Belt". After evaluating other contemporary RISC architectures from companies such as Intel, MIPS Technologies, ARM Limited, the team selected the SH4 due to its vector floating point unit's class leading processing capabilities. The first U.S. prototype boards were silkscreened "Shark" and later "Dural" (whose name was taken from the shiny character from Sega's own Virtua Fighter series). An alpha version of the board was delivered to Sega-AM2 for evaluation purposes.

When 3dfx declared its Initial Public Offering (IPO) in April 1997, it revealed every detail of the contract with Sega. Sega had been keeping the development of its next-generation console secret during this competition, and was supposedly outraged when 3dfx publicly laid out its deal with Sega over the new system in the IPO.