SEGA Dreamcast

About the SEGA Dreamcast

The Sega Dreamcast was released back on November 27, 1998 in Japan, September 9, 1999 in November and finally 1999 in Europe. It is also the final console that Sega released with no successors afterwards.

After the setback Sega had with the Saturn system such as high production costs and very complex hardware they decided to take a different approach. The outcome of this decision was a console that was designed to be much more intelligent with subsystems working in parallel.

The console was originally very successful as the U.S launch was highly backed by a large marketing campaign but interest in the console rapidly declined once Sony started to build the hype for their upcoming console.

There were many factors to why Sega exited the console market but the Dreamcast was one of the leading issues with failing to meet sales expectations and the rise in tough competition such as the Playstation 2, Xbox and Nintendo’s latest console.

Even though it had such as short lifespan and very limited support the console was still praised as being ahead of its time.

There were some pretty awesome games that were released for the Sega Dreamcast just to name a few Crazy Taxi, Shenmue, Jet Set Radio and as well of some great high quality ports from the Naomi arcade system board.

SEGA Dreamcast Emulators

NullDC   – NullDC is one of the best available Dreamcast emulators, boasting a high compatability rate while also having solid performance. Development has now ceased however with focus now on there new Dreamcast emulator, Reicast.

Reicast   – Reicast is developed by the same team that brought everyone the excellent NullDC. But this time its focus is on trying to make a fast and highly portable emulator. Reicast is primarily for Android only, while there is a windows build you are recommended to use an emulator like NullDC or DEmul instead for now.

DEmul – DEmul is regarded as one of the best Dreamcast emulators available, with a focus on compatibility and modern rendering techniques to bring the games to a more modern era it has quickly settled itself in at the top. However DEmul is a lot more demanding then its counterpart NullDC as DEmul does make use of DX11.

Chankast – Chankast was the first Dreamcast emulator to actually achieve the ability to play commercial games. It had a short lived development but achieved an awful lot. Your better off now using an emulator such as NullDC or Demul.

SEGA Dreamcast Specifications

CPU Specifications

• Processor: Hitachi SH-4 (128-bit)
• Processor Speed: 200 MHz
• Millions of instructions per second: 360
• Floating-point operations per seccond: 1.4 billion
• Main RAM: 16MB SDRAM

GPU Specifications

• Processor: NEC PowerVR2 DC
• Polygons per second: 7.0 Million
• Video RAM: 8 MiB 4x16 Bit
• Fillrate: 100 MPixels/s

Audio Specifications

• Processor: Yamaha AICA (32-bit)
• Processor Speed: 22.5 MHz
• Co-Processor: ARM7 RISC
• Co-Processor Speed: 45 MHz
• Channels: 64
• Audio RAM: 2 MiB (16-bit)