32x murdered Sega's goodwill. Then the cost of the Saturn led to the legendary "$299" Sony E3 conference... Then Bernie Stolar and his hate for JRPGs...

> Their partner in MS wasn’t helpful.

The MS thing was actually an important PR olive branch after the Saturn.

Saturn had a somewhat deserved bad rep for API/doc issues, and doing 3D was extra painful between the VDP behavior and quads...

Microsoft was flouting around DirectX at the time, Even with it's warts at the time it was accepted by devs as 'better than what we used to deal with!'.

All of it was an attempt to signal to game developers; 'Look we know porting stuff to Saturn sucked, our API is better, but if you're worried, you are doing more PC ports now anyway, so this is a path'.

If anything, I'd say the biggest tactical 'mistake' there was that in providing that special Windows CE, Microsoft probably got a LOT of feedback and understanding of what console devs want in the process, which probably shaped future DirectX APIs as well as the original XBox.

> PS2 was coming

If the PS1 "$299" conference was the sucker punch, PS2's "Oh it's also a DVD Player" was the coupe-de-grace. I knew a LOT of folks that 'waited' but DVD was the winning factor.

Some consider the original Xbox as a sequel to the Dreamcast because it reused some of the principles and had some of the same people working on it. Heck, even the original chunky Xbox controller looks more like the Dreamcast and lesser known Saturn 3D controller than it does like modern Xbox controllers.

Coup-de-grâce. No e at the end of coup.

> the rushed Saturn launch just annoyed all partners, retail and development.

Oh yes that I definitely knew about, the rushed Saturn launch out of nowhere, as well as its early retirement to make room for the Dreamcast, soured a lot of people.

A shame too, the Dreamcast deserved so much better. It was a great system, and pretty prescient too, at least on the GPU side: Sega America wanted to go with 3dfx, Sega Japan ultimately went with PowerVR, 3dfx turned out to be a dead end, while PowerVR endured until fairly recently (if mostly in the mobile / embedded / power efficient space).

> as well as its early retirement to make room for the Dreamcast, soured a lot of people.

That was really boneheaded on Sega's part. They introduced the DC in Japan first, killing the Saturn which was quite successful there.

Had they waited, or at least launched in NA/EU in 1998, they could have kept money coming in from Saturn in JP while getting back into the market elsewhere.

I think PowerVR was a good choice even at the time.

In my teens, my older brother worked at a computer shop and back then was a hardware geek, and a Matrox M3D, and frankly compared to something like a Rush or Riva 128 the M3D was pretty good outside of some blending moire. That I'm talking about visual vs perf says something... and Dreamcast got the version AFTER that...

The biggest thing was their Tile based deferred rendering, which made it easy to create an efficient GPU with a relatively low transistor count.

Also, 3dfx pattern of 'chip per function', aside from it's future scaling issues, would have been a higher BOM.

-----

All of that said, ever wonder what the video game scene, or NVidia would be like today, if the latter didn't derp out on their shot at the Dreamcast in an SEC filing, which caused them to be relegated to the video chip for the Pico?

Credit to the PVR in Dremacast (and the entire design of DC), it was a very efficient processor considering the pricing limitations of the unit. I do love that the Saturn absolute sucked at transparency effects and the PVR was the complete opposite. Just throw the geometry at it in any order (per tile) and it would sort it out and blend it with no problem.

It was efficient but the performance was definitely the lowest of all consoles that generation.

The DC was doing well, but the bank account was already overdrawn.

Piracy wasn't a big factor, since very very few people had broadband and CD-R drives in 2000. The attach rate was reportedly better than average. And the MS thing was just the availability of middleware that a few games used.

> Piracy wasn't a big factor, since very very few people had broadband and CD-R drives in 2000.

Piracy of CD based games in the late 90s most assuredly did not require broadband or personal ownership of a CD-R drive. A lot of piracy happened via SneakerNet. As long as you knew someone with games (legit or pirated copies) and a CD-R drive you could get your own copies for the cost of a CD-R disc. Every college had at least one person with a CD binder full of CD-Rs of pirated PC and console games. I suspect a majority of high schools at the time did as well. Dorm ResNets were also loaded down with FTPs and SMB shares filled with games, porn, and warez.

Maybe so. I had an Action Replay disc from the time that presumably used MilCD. But according to this link (sadly Fandom), the attach rate was good: https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Software_tie_ratio#Consoles

So SneakerNet and dorm rooms may have been a factor, but not enough of one to kill the system.

> but not enough of one to kill the system.

Oh definitely no, IME piracy was a much better issue on the original PlayStation, very quickly every other friend had a cousin who would chip your console and had access to a CD-R.

Plus didn’t the Dreamcast use some weirdo variant of CD?

> Plus didn’t the Dreamcast use some weirdo variant of CD?

Yes, GD-ROM which through some tricks could fit something like 1GB on a disc. However what most pirated discs did was just stub out the FMV. Most games that used the full space on the disc did so because of FMV. Quite a few games would easily fit on a Mode-2 700MB CD-R with the FMV stubbed out.

This was thanks to the MIL-CD functionality of the Dreamcast which was only removed in very late models.

Perhaps things were different in my neck of the woods, but my recollection is different: By the turn of the century, CD recorders were pretty common amongst even some of the non-geek computer users I knew. Most of the extant drives were not very good, but by then there were also examples of absolutely stellar drives (some of which are still considered good for burning a proper CD-R, even though they're a ~quarter-century old, like the Plextor PR-820).

I don't recall any particular difficulty in downloading games over 56k dialup around Y2K with a modem, though it was certainly a good bit faster with ISDN (and a couple of years later, 2Mbps-ish DOCSIS).

It was not fast with dialup -- it took a day or so, or longer if slowed it down to avoid what we now call buffer bloat -- but some of us had time, and a ye olde Linux box that was going to be dialed-in ~24/7 anyway.

But usually, the route to piracy that I recall being most-utilized back then involved renting a game from the video store for a few dollars and making a copy (or a few, for friends).

I can only speak from my own experience, but I was on dialup until 2002 and had 1 friend with both broadband and a CD-R drive around the DC's lifespan. We burned many DivX files to Video CDs, but no games (his dad brought back a chipped PS1 and lots of burned games from Kosovo though)

Perhaps the availability of burning games wasn't the right lens for me to look at it, but if the attach rate of 8 games per system is true (as I linked to in another reply) then that's similar to the NES and SNES and not at all a factor in the system's demise.

Because the DC's games were on Yamaha 1GB CDs ("GD-ROM") I doubt popping the disc in a PC and running Nero would have been possible. Most dumps were probably made using chipped consoles and a coder's cable or BBA.

And I can only speak for myself, too, but: By Y2K, I had dual-B channel [128kbps] ISDN dialup with a local ISP. (As housing situations changed, it ebbed and flowed a bit after that for me at home -- at one point after ISDN, I was doing MLPPP with three 33.6k modems and hating every minute of it. But by 2001, I had unfettered access to 860/160kbps ADSL at a music studio I helped build that I could drive to in about 20 minutes, any time of day or night -- by then, "broadband" was common in my old turf. And by mid-2002, I had DOCSIS at home. Changes were happening fast back then, for me.)

The Dreamcast did use GD-ROM, which did hold up to around 1GB, and the usual way to rip those was to connect the [rooted/hacked/jailbroke/whatever-the-term-was] DC to the PC, so the Dreamcast could do all of the reading and transfer that data to the PC for processing and burning.

But even though GD-ROM could hold 1GB, a lot of DC games were (often quite a lot) less than ~650MB or ~700MB of actual-data, so they often fit well onto mostly-kinda-standard CD-R blanks of the day without loss of game data.

There were also release groups -- because of course there were -- that specialized partly in shrinking a larger (>650 or >700MB) DC title down to a size that would fit onto a CD-R, or sometimes onto two of them. (That involved Deep Magic, for the time, and implicitly involved a download stage.)

And my friends and family? I had one sibling who danced around with computers, and she had a (flaky AF, but existing) CD burner a year or two before I did, and most of my computer-geek friends were burning discs before Y2K as well -- even if it meant using a communal CD burner at a mutual friend's house.

But again, that's just my story -- which I've simplified to remove some stages from.

I don't doubt your own story even a little bit. Gaming for high-speed internet access, even in properly-large cities, was kind of the wild west around that time, and I agree that CD burning was unusual around that time.

I was a bit early for getting things done fast in my own area of small-town Ohio, and I think I was generally good at exploiting available options.

(Not all ideas were good ideas: I once helped negotiate and implement a deal to run some Ethernet cable overhead across a parking lot to a small ISP next door, so we could have access to a T1 at the shop I was working at, for $40/month. The money was right according to all parties, and we didn't abuse it too bad or too often...until it all got blown up by lightning, with huge losses on both ends of that connection.

The ISP never fully recovered and died absolutely a month or two later.

Which, incidentally, is how I learned to never, ever run Cat5 between two buildings. Woops.)

My own story is complicated by the fact that my family moved trans-Atlantic at the time. In fact, I got a DC in the UK after the PS2 because we moved back and I got a system and games for cheap from a newspaper classified ad, around late 2002.

I suspect my parents didn't feel the need to upgrade from dial-up to DSL or DOCSIS while we were planning a 5000 mile move. We went from 1p-a-minute dial up ("put a timer on the stove, you have 15 minutes!") in 1998 to unlimited (but still with one phone line; drag the cord from the PC to the kitchen and hope Grandma doesn't try to call) a year-ish after, and then got 1.2Mbps DSL once we were in Canada in mid 2002.

My friend down the street upgraded and got a new PC around 1999 or 2000. I don't remember the specs, but it was much nicer than my dad's 300MHz K6-2 with no USB ports. For a while we even needed to use CursorKeys because the V90 modem used the same COM port as the mouse! So I used their PC for Napster, then Kazaa and WinMX, for 128kbps MP3s and "which pixel is Neo?" 700MB copies of The Matrix (sidenote: I warned him against searching for xXx featuring Vin Diesel, but he had to learn the hard way...)

We were aware of "chipped" consoles, and my family even asked the local indie game store if they could do it ("That'z Entertainment" in Lakeside, if any locals are reading this) but my only experiences with game piracy at that point was my dad's friend who had a modded PSX ("holy crap it says SCEA instead of SCEE!") and then the same friend as the paragraph above getting a PSX that his Army dad brought back from Eastern Europe along with Ice Age on DVD.

DC piracy was 100% a thing in its lifetime, but I still don't think it was widespread enough to have harmed the console's chances. The company was just out of cash.

> There were also release groups -- because of course there were -- that specialized partly in shrinking a larger (>650 or >700MB) DC title down to a size that would fit onto a CD-R, or sometimes onto two of them. (That involved Deep Magic, for the time, and implicitly involved a download stage.)

Even years later I was annoyed that the CDI version of Skies of Arcadia (Echelon, maybe?) didn't support the VGA box.

You've travelled a lot more than I have. I've mostly stuck around Ohio.

I suspect that we're about the same age.

Man, com ports and IRQs: I had 14 functional RS-232 ports on one machine, once, between the BocaBoard (with 10P10C jacks), the STB serial card that 3dfx promised to never erase documentation for (it is erased -- *thanks, nVidia*), and the couple of serial ports that were built into a motherboard or multi-IO card at that time.

Once configured to be actually-working, which I did mostly as a dare to myself, I could find no combination of connected serialized stuff that would upset it.

And that was fun having a ridiculous amount of serial ports: I had dumb terminals scattered around, and I had machines connected with SLIP and PLIP. (Ethernet seemed expensive, and "spare laptops" or "closet laptops" were not at all a thing yet.)

Anyhow, piracy: My friends and I were mostly into PSX back then. I may or may not have installed a dozen mod chips for my friends so I could get a discount on my own mod chip. (I was not trying to make money.)

Aaand there may have been quite a lot of piracy. I remember coming home and checking the mailbox to find a copy of Gran Turismo 2, with a hand-written note from a friend who I didn't expect to be able to succeed in duping a disc with Nero, but he'd done it, and hand-delivered it, and it worked. I subsequently played the fuck out of that game.

But you've clearly got a different perspective. And that's interesting to me.

> Even years later I was annoyed that the CDI version of Skies of Arcadia (Echelon, maybe?) didn't support the VGA box.

I've never actually-played a CDI system (I do recall poking at them in retail displays), and I don't know what "the VGA box" is in this context. Can you elaborate?

> I've never actually-played a CDI system (I do recall poking at them in retail displays), and I don't know what "the VGA box" is in this context. Can you elaborate?

Oh, sorry for the confusion. CDI and GDI are disc images for Dreamcast games, like ISO files. Not the Philips CDi game console.

The VGA box is the video output for Dreamcast, which supported 640x480 progressive scan video, most games supported it but a few didn't.

Good information. Thanks!

I did do a little bit for/with Dreamcast at one point a long time ago, but I never actually owned one for myself. It has always seemed like a nice platform when I've played games on one -- however that happened.

At one point I probably knew the difference between formats, but I've definitely forgotten. It has been a very long time.

(In other Sega news: The thing I really miss is the Virtua Fighter port to the Sega Saturn.)

> Piracy wasn't a big factor, since very very few people had broadband and CD-R drives in 2000.

In those days the piracy threat was less "players with broadband and CD-R drives are downloading games for free" and more "flea marketeers with CD-R burners are copying games and selling them to players for a fraction of MSRP".

As the console continued on, if we assume it lived a full five years or something, piracy would have gotten worse as more and more CD burners became commonplace.

Didn’t they have to pay MS a small license fee for each unit? I’m assuming that was a drag too. Not one that killed it, but just another little kick.

The MilCD exploit was already patched in the last hardware revisions (VA2) so I imagine it would be a bit like the Switch (IIRC) where early models are vulnerable to exploits and more desirable on the second-hand market.

I'm not sure what the agreement with Microsoft was, but it was probably on a per-game basis if the developers wanted to use Windows CE.

Oh I didn’t know it was patched in hardware.

I knew it was per game whether the software actually used the windows CE stuff. I’m really not sure it was ever used much at all. I know the first version of Sega rally used it but it performed so poorly they had an updated version that didn’t that they put out later to fix the issues. And I’m not sure the bad version even came to the states.

Technically I misspoke. Some VA2 DCs used the older BIOS with the exploit still there, but most did have it patched.

One Reddit thread I see claims that Microsoft actually paid Sega for the Windows CE logo on the front of the system. But as you said, not many games used it.

You COULD d/l a game on 56k, worked best if you had a dedicated phone line. It believe it was just under 48hrs for a large game… I had almost every game! I loved DC

Railroad tycoon for the win as a WinCE game I also didn’t mind the web browser and some of the online stuff - I only had dial up on the Dreamcast - broadband adapters were extremely rare! Plus I didn’t have broadband anyway.

Crazy taxi was a real favorite as well. I worked all summer in high school and my first purchase was a Dreamcast. I was the first person I knew in town that got the utopia boot disc, and then on from there. Discjuggler burns for self boots, manual patching - unlocked Japanese games. What a fun time!

I also love DC - enough to be typing this with an arm with 2 DC tattoos :D

But I've never taken it online. I'll be getting a DreamPi at some stage, but sadly shipping to where I am takes it out of "impulse buy" territory.