Was the Dreamcast actually powerful at launch? Or the beneficiary of no competition?>Support for Sega's own fast/streamlined/documented SDK or Windows CE (to make porting games from the PC easier)>Hitachi SH4 chips>Designed by Hideki Sato, the "father of Sega hardware", with input from Naka and Iizuka >PVR on Dreamcast was much better than Saturn GPU>Rarely-used volumetric per-pixel shadows and volumetric fog features>Order Independent Transparency and is the only system to date that came with OIT at the hardware level>Main RAM: 16 MB SDRAM · VRAM: 8 MB SDRAM>Native VGA out support>independent filesharing between memory cards without the console needing to be present>a large (again, for the time) optical disc format that stored up to 1GB of data>Plans to download Dreamcast games directly to the 40GB HDD, a feature that Xbox 360 realized >Modern game controller is heavily inspired by Dreamcast>Major figures in the industry like John Carmack, Mikami and Itagaki even loved it for how easy and fun it was to work on the system >Doom 64 and Sonic Mania ports to Dreamcast
The Dreamcast had amazing arcade ports except for Daytona. Soul Calibur on Dreamcast was the best looking game for a good bit. Of course the PC could render better stuff but even then, Soul Calibur looked better than Half-Life it’s just Half-Life had more stuff going on.
It's comparable to other 6th gen consoles. It might've struggled with some ports if it lasted a few years more (especially with GD-ROM capacity compared to DVD,) but it was way easier for developers to squeeze performance out of it compared to the PS2.
It was very powerful both in its time and had its strengths even years after, its GPU was exceptionally powerful for its time and had hardware level Antialiasing, also multiplat games looked much more vibrant than their PS2 port, but most importantly it was so well designed that it was very easy to extract all the performance potential from it, honestly, it was the closest thing to a perfect console
>>733763867>Was the Dreamcast actually powerful at launch?No. The graphics might have been advanced but the RAM was insufficient for 1998. You'd see 16MB RAM on a Windows 95 PC, but most 98 optimized prebuilds had at least 32 by this point. RAM limitations are the reason why Dreamcast games often only looked impressive when there were barely any objects on screen, i.e. fighting games. The PS2 had twice the RAM, and more importantly, it's graphical streaming and shader cache courtesy of the insanely ahead of its time Graphics Synthesizer made it 2x more powerful than even the OG Xbox in practice.
>>733763867The Dreamcast came out just before the PS1 and was significantly more powerful. It's actually comparable to a PS2 in how strong it is, though the PS2 is stronger.
>>733766138Wait I'm talking shite, got it mixed up with the Sega Saturn. But yeah, the Dreamcast was fairly powerful, comparable to a PS2 but with the PS2 slightly stronger. The Gamecube was stronger than a PS2 and the Xbox was the most powerful of that generation..
All things considered, the Dreamcast could've probably been the weakest competitor but still managed to keep a course with the PS2 or Xbox in terms of being an interesting platform with more room for PC ports thanks to the Windows CE stuff. It's entirely Sega fumbling the ball on its market that doomed it, but I genuinely think even if it wasn't as powerful as the competition, Sega knew how to leverage the hardware in ways that still kept pace
>>733763867why does this look so nice, the blue filter over the clean naturally lit room is just so nice. maybe if i get white seethru curtains with a slight light blue tint my room will look like this
>>733763867It was great for 1998 and had more vram than ps2 and gamcube, but tech was advancing so quickly that it was weak by the time the 6th gen actually started.
I love PSO like you wouldn't believe bros
It was a really great console. I don't think anybody had anything bad to say about it besides wishing it lasted longer
It was an excellent console. But Segas dumb asses forgot to include copy protection on early consoles so if your console had a 1 in a circle on its underside you could straight up burn iso's to a disc and it would play them thinking it was a retail disc. No third party bootdisc or some other form of injection software needed. You would go to car boots and flea markets and the usual eastern europeans selling vhs camprips of the latest movies had stacks of blank discs with "grandia 2" or "seaman" written on in sharpie.Hell of a time for us but for the company catastrophic. Then sony came out with the greatest console of all time that was also the first affordable home dvd player and the rest was history.
>>733763867https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA0BQqQ2Ih4The Dreamcast was a powerhouse. Here it is running an Xbox game from 2002 with few cutbacks. You wouldn't be able to do this on an N64.
