Dreamcast is a gaming console by Sega, a leading company in the gaming industry around the world. Released in Japan in November of 1998, Dreamcast enjoyed a mega successful launch across the world, selling half a million consoles in just two days, with a record sale of more than 200,000 consoles on the first day itself. The console houses a 64-bit 200 MHz Hitachi processor, with a bus speed of 800 Mbps. Its Million instructions per second (MIPS) rating is an awesome 360, and supports 128 bit 100 MHz graphics onboard. It also comes with a 45 MHz Yamaha Super Intelligent sound processor, offering surround sound for an incredible gaming experience. It has an inbuilt modem with 56 Kbps speed and a storage capacity of 1.2 GB for GD-ROM or gigabyte disc, with a 16 Mb memory and 128 Kb memory buffer.
The best thing about Dreamcast is that it does not have an operating system onboard. Why, you will ask? The answer is that the OS has to be loaded with each game disc, thus allowing the company to ship products that run the newest version of the OS with the latest tweaks and updates installed. Like Sony’s PlayStation, the Dreamcast CPU has an RISC processor, which stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer. This technology allows superscalar performance, meaning that the console can process multiple instructions at the same time simultaneously, thus allowing the CPU to perform better than other processor chips which might have a faster clock speed. The instructions are simpler and fewer, making gaming more responsive and realistic than ever before.
Sega’s geometry engine in the console supported alpha blending, anisotropic and bilinear mapping and other processes, which accounted for never seen before great gaming graphics. With its inbuilt modem and RISC processor chip, Dreamcast was way ahead of its time when it was launched in 1998.
