By Jason Perlow
The holiday season is quickly coming upon us. If you have children (of any age) living in your household, you've likely heard the name "Sega Dreamcast" mentioned to you a few times as a strong suggestion for a Christmas or Hanukkah present. We've all seen the ads with the mind-blowing video game graphics and sound effects -- but we've seen this stuff before, right? Nintendo 64? Playstation, anyone? Not to be outdone by the Joneses and to satisfy my inner child's never-ending quest for the ultimate video game system, I bought a Dreamcast last month just after its North American launch.
It's not just a toy
The Sega Dreamcast, shown in Figure A, is not just an expensive toy or the latest $200 video game system. (Special thanks to IGN.com for allowing us to use their Dreamcast screenshots. For more information on the Dreamcast, check out http://dreamcast.ign.com.)
The Sega Dreamcast is an information appliance that represents the first generation of advanced Windows CE set-top information appliances that we'll be seeing in the years to come. These appliances will allow us to interact with the Internet, interactive media, and have programming on demand in millions of households.
FIGURE A
This is what the Dreamcast console looks like. (click for larger image)
Wait -- is this the same Windows CE we're used to hearing about? Surely, the Palm OS (Operating System), the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) crowd, and the mass media would lead us to believe that Windows CE has been a miserable failure. If you look at the raw numbers of Windows CE PDAs sold vs. the number of Palm devices sold, it doesn't seem too far from the truth.
We might be forgetting, though, that Windows CE is a general purpose OS that can do so much more than a PDA OS. In the low-cost information appliance market, it may very well come to dominate the industry. Microsoft spent five billion dollars investing in AT&T last year so they could ensure that Windows CE interactive digital cable boxes would be available in up to ten million households. And let's not forget that the next generation WebTV is also slated to run Windows CE. Combine that with the Sega Dreamcast and the future of Windows CE starts to sound very interesting!
Speeds and feeds
The Dreamcast is one hell of a serious piece of technology. It's powered by a Hitachi SH7750 SH4 32-bit RISC processor, operating at a frequency of 200Mhz rated at 360 MIPS or 1.4 billion floating point operations per second (this is key to its ability perform fast 3D graphics). This is on par, in terms of raw calculating performance, with a Pentium II PC. The Dreamcast has 16MB of main memory and uses a specially designed 12x CD-ROM drive that uses a special compression routine to store up to 1GB of data on a regular CD. You can see the guts of the Dreamcast in Figure B.
