And now Dreamcast is TEN years old today (and info on the unreleased DC2)

[parallaxscroll]

Dreamcast launched in Japan on November 27th, 1998.

I cannot believe Mega Drive is 20 years old, and now Dreamcast is 10.

Dreamcast was a great system that started the previous generation of
consoles (DC/PS2/GCN/Xbox).

Before the Dreamcast came out though, I had been expecting a Saturn2 with PowerPC CPU and a Real3D GPU from Lockheed Martin with more power than the MODEL 3 board (but the same family of tech), and that could've been used as a MODEL 4 board, instead of NAOMI. I was kinda disappointed when Sega went with Videologic/NEC PowerVR instead of Lockheed Real3D, but it was a better choice than 3Dfx, without a doubt.

Dreamcast had alot of great games....Soul Calibur, Shenmue, Crazy Taxi,
Skies of Arcadia, PSO, just to name a few...but sadly it wasn't enough to stop the PlayStation2 war machine. Sega pulled the plug on the fast-selling Dreamcast faster than any other main console Sega killed. Thankfully Dreamcast enjoyed official game releases years after its death, upto 2007.

Sega was developing a successor, unofficially Dreamcast 2, from 1999 to 2000. The unreleased Dreamcast 2 was not based the countless stories and postings of fanboys through the years wishing/hoping/speculating on Dreamcast 2, but an absolutely real plan by Sega to create a next-gen standard entertainment/internet device with their partners.

from the book "Opening The Xbox"

'Another plan involved buying Sega, the maker of the Dreamcast console. As far back as 1998, Microsoft had initiated talks to acquire Sega. The companies already had a working relationship since Microsoft provided software for the Dreamcast, but relations had soured in part because game developers didn't use that software. Sega was in third place with its console was still losing a lot of money.

Worldwide, Sega had barely sold 5 million units as of early 2000, giving it a base far smaller than Sony's estimated 73 million units. Moreover, the older Sony machine and the Nintendo 64 continued to outsell the Dreamcast. Sega had launched dozens of games in the United States, but only one of those titles, a football game, sold over a million units. Sega didn't gave the financial wherewithal to stay in the race, and that prompted third-party publishers like Electronic Arts to support the other consoles instead.
By buying Sega or otherwise investing $2 billion in the company, Microsoft could acquire not only the Dreamcast technology but a lot of talent that it didn't have, like Sega's nine game development studios--which had consistantly created hits like Sonic The Hedgehog, key sports titles, and Virtua Fighter. Sega also had a hardware design group that crafted new consoles.

Shoichiro Irimajiri, who was the CEO of Sega Enterprises in Japan, said his company was surprised to learn first from other game developers that Microsoft was planning to enter the console business. He was angry that he hadn't heard it from Microsoft first. His complaints led to meetings to discuss whether Microsoft and Sega could work together on the next-generation console. At first, he wasn't interested in selling out to Microsoft because the Dreamcast appeared to be doing well in the United States. The Microsoft side was equally lukewarm to the idea

"Every time we looked at them, we thought all we wanted was the software," said Chris Phillips, who managed the Sega relationship until he left Microsoft in early 2000. "They weren't willing to sell just their software business. They wanted Microsoft to do a box that could combine the Xbox and the Dreamcast2."

Yet like a bad rerun, Sega kept coming back and getting audiences with Bill Gates. One of Sega's top messengers was Kay Nishi, a former Microsoft employee and the CEO of ASCII in Japan. Nishi had a very close friendship with Bill Gates. Whenever he came to town, he could get meetings on short notice with Gates. He used that influence to get Gates together with Sega's top executives, Isao Okawa and Shoichiro Irimajiri.

In some ways, Sega was appealing. Some Microsoft executives had their doubts about the feasibility of coming up with a truly killer application that would drive people to buy the console over other systems. Ed Fries, who had confidence in his own game group of 700 developers, opposed the Sega deal because he believed Microsoft could create its own hit games.
Irimajiri said Sega wanted Microsoft to make the Xbox compatible with the upcoming Dreamcast 2. Okawa also wanted the Xbox to run games made for the original Dreamcast.

Brief: Some very interesting plans may be in the works at Sega. Including Dreamcast 2.

Reporter
Michael Custer

Date
6/12/2000


The Asian Wall Street Journal is reporting that Sega is in talks to license Dreamcast technology to other companies. Also, Sega is negotiating with various semiconductor companies to to form a joint venture that would build an advanced chip to power the next incarnation of the Dreamcast, as well as other devices. The JV could open as soon as October of this year.

"The future game box will be an all-in-one, set-top box," Sega Vice Chairman Shoichiro Irimajiri said in a telephone interview. "In that case, Sega's role is one part of many functions, so we cannot do it alone. We need very good alliances or a joint venture."

Apparently, Sega is already talking to potential licensees, including automobile companies, hardware makers, and satellite-television and cable-TV providers. These talks have been confirmed by Mr. Irimajiri.

The AWSJ reports that Mr. Irimajiri traveled last week to the U.S. and this week to Europe, to meet with up to 15 companies to discuss Sega's plan. He emphasized that the discussions are preliminary and he declined to identify the companies involved. "Everything is still unclear," he said. It looks like Sega is approaching NEC Corp., Hitachi Ltd., Philips Electronics NV; chip maker STMicroelectronics NV, who is making their own next generation graphics chip based on the PowerVR technology that powers the Dreamcast, and Imagination Technologies, the Company behind the PowerVR technology itself.

According to the AWSJ, officials at NEC, Hitachi and Imagination Technologies declined to comment. A spokesman at Philips said the executives he contacted were unaware of any talks with Sega. Officials at STMicroelectronics couldn't be reached for comment.

Chip makers are the likely partners because Sega hopes to build a complex processor for use in Internet appliances, the people familiar with the plans said. Sega appears to be looking to put many functions of a game machine onto one piece of silicon, making it easy to integrate advanced computer graphics into other products.

Also, in reference to the free Dreamcast plan "If our intuition is right Sega will be the dominant force in the narrowband Internet world," Mr. Irimajiri said in the report. It was also stated that he believes broadband won't be widely available until 2005.

http://www.gaming-age.com/news/2000/6/12-69

other confirmation of never-released Dreamcast successor:

http://www.gamasutra.com/newswire/ne...ex20000522.htm
http://www.computerandvideogames.com...ry.php?id=8642
http://dreamcast.ign.com/articles/079/079837p1.html
http://dreamcast.ign.com/articles/079/079943p1.html
http://dreamcast.ign.com/articles/080/080065p1.html
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2577163.html

[atreyu187]

Nice read for my favorite console of all times. And the DC2 was and still is a dream for me

[BHvrd]

One can only imagine a beefed up Dreamcast 2.

Sure here I sit typing on my PS3 thinking it doesn't really matter cause 2 generations later Sony has picked up the ball with nice effect, but there's no doubting Sega's technology both hardware and software have always been interesting and cutting edge.

I feel PS3 is the true spiritual successor to Dreamcast which is funny cause it took an extra generation of consoles, but there's no doubt that if Sega and Microsoft had gone full steam we would have seem some amazing things.

[parallaxscroll]

I was less interested in the Dreamcast 2 and more interested in an alternate version of Dreamcast, the Black Belt or Saturn 2. It's mostly known for being the Sega of America designed system that used a 3Dfx Voodoo 2 or Banshee graphics chip in 1997. However the version of Black Belt / Saturn 2 (just called Saturn 2 at that point) that I was interested in goes back to 1995, and was going to use graphics chip from Lockheed Martin.


from Next Generation magazine 8


issue 11




It was Lockheed Martin that provided their Real3D graphic processors for Sega's Model 3 arcade board. Before that, the same graphics division of Martin Marietta provided the texture-mapping hardware in Sega's Model 2 board, first used in Daytona USA. Sega's partnership with U.S. defense contractors for the graphic elements of their arcade boards began with General Electric Aerospace, they co-designed the Model 1 board with Sega in 1992.

Now going forward in time again, GE Aerospace was bought by Martin Marietta in 1993 and MM merged with Lockheed in 1995 to form Lockheed Martin. LM re-organized the graphics part of the company into the Real3D division/company that same year. LM Real3D's purpose was to take expensive multi-million dollar military flight simulator tech and redesign it at lower cost for arcades, and even lower cost still for consumer PC graphic cards. It was also expected that they would design the GPU for Saturn 2. But this was not to be, LM would not cost-reduce its technology down to console prices. Sega's needed an alternative. After briefly taking a look at 3DO's M2 technology then walking away from a Matsushita deal for M2, Sega split the Saturn 2 project into two efforts, one by SoA, the other by SoJ, and with new graphics providers: 3Dfx and NEC/Videologic.
This is how Black Belt/Dural and Katana (Dreamcast) were developed.

The point I am trying to make here is that I feel the Lockheed Martin Real3D graphics technology, which was used to spectacular effect in Sega arcade games, was better than Videologic's PowerVR2 tech used in Dreamcast.
I cannot help but to think how much better Saturn 2 / Black Belt / Dreamcast would've been with a LM Real3D GPU, instead of PowerVR.

[c0ldb33r]

Just keep in mind - the Dreamcast 2 is unreleased yet.

Give it time boys, give it time.

[Tupin]

Yep, the Sega Vision is testing the waters.

[Gamebrain]

Ahh the good old Dreamcast. A system that died too young.

[parallaxscroll]

Just keep in mind - the Dreamcast 2 is unreleased yet.

Give it time boys, give it time.

If Sega comes out with a new console in 2009 or later, I'll concider it Dreamcast 3 ^__^

[Jorpho]

The Triforce arcade hardware was sort of a successor, no?

[parallaxscroll]

Well, the NAOMI 2 (with two PowerVR2DC graphic chips, a seperate geometry engine chip and more memory), the System 246 (PS2 based), the Chihiro (Xbox based) and the TriForce (GameCube based) arcade boards were all used "as" successors to the Dreamcast based NAOMI board, in arcades, but none of those were true successors to the Dreamcast console in the consumer space.


The true Dreamcast 2 that Sega was working on, circa 1999-2001, would have been more powerful than Dreamcast/NAOMI, NAOMI 2, PS2/System246 (as well as Namco's System 258, System Super 256), Xbox/Chihiro and GameCube/TriForce (and Wii). DC2 probably would've been something a bit less powerful than Xbox 360 and PlayStation3, but closer to those consoles than any last-gen console or arcade board.