Yuji Naka Wanted SEGA To Stay In The Hardware Biz.

[Commando]

[edit] Technical specifications

Internal view of a Dreamcast console
Mainboard of the DreamcastProcessor

200 MHz SH-4 with an on-die 128-bit vector graphics engine, 360 MIPS and 1.4 GFLOPS (single precision), using the vector graphics engine
Graphics Engine

PowerVR2
CLX2, 7.0 million polygons/second peak performance, supports trilinear filtering. Actual maximum in game performance (with full textures, lighting, gameplay, etc.) is 5 million polygons/second or more.
Tile Based Deferred Rendering eliminates overdraw by only drawing visible fragments. This makes required fillrate almost independent from scene depth complexity, thus making up for a low, compared to other 6th generation consoles, nominal fillrate of 100 MPixels/s as effective fillrate can be triple that amount.
Graphics hardware effects include gouraud shading, z-buffering, anti-aliasing and bump mapping.
Memory

Main RAM: 16 MB[16] 64 Bit 100 MHz
Video RAM: 8 MB 4x16-bit 100 MHz
Sound RAM: 2 MB 16-bit 66 MHz
VQ Texture Compression (5:1 texture compression)[17]
Sound Engine

Yamaha AICA Sound Processor: 22.5 MHz 32-Bit ARM7 RISC CPU: 45 MHz,[17] 64 channel PCM/ADPCM sampler (4:1 compression), XG MIDI support, 128 step DSP
Storage

Yamaha GD-ROM Drive: 12x maximum speed (Constant Angular Velocity)
GD-ROM: Holds up to 1.2 GB
Visual Memory Unit ("VMU") 1 Mbit (128 KB[16]) removable storage device and 4x memory cards that hold four times as much data.
Input/Output

Inputs: USB-like "Maple Bus". Four ports support devices such as digital and analog controllers, steering wheels, joysticks, keyboards, mice, and more.
Color Output: Approx. 16.78 million colors (24-bit)
Video resolution: 640x480 interlaced or progressive scan
Dimensions

189 mm × 195 mm × 76 mm (7 7/16in × 7 11/16in × 3in)
Weight: 1.9 kg (4.2 lb)
Color: Majority are white.
Japan: Various limited edition designs and colored consoles were produced
North America: Only a black "Sega Sports"-labeled model and a blue model from Electronics Boutique were officially available
PAL: No known alternate designs or colors
Networking


A black 56k Dreamcast modemModem: Removable; speed varied among regions:
Original Asia/Japan model had a 33.6 kbit/s; consoles sold after September 9, 1999 had a 56 kbit/s modem
All American models had a 56 kbit/s
All PAL models had a 33.6 kbit/s
Broadband: these adapters are available separately and replace the removable modem
HIT-0400: "Broadband Adapter", the more common model, this used a Realtek 8139 chip and supported 10 and 100 Mbit speeds, this device was released in Japan and the US. It is a common misunderstanding that the Japanese broadband adaptor has the code HIT-0401, but this code actually refers to the Japanese adaptors packaging and documentation - not the broadband adaptor itself.
HIT-0300: "LAN Adapter", this version used a Fujitsu MB86967 chip and supported only 10 Mbit speed. The LAN Adaptor does not work with any retail games and was only compatible with the included web browser disk.