Next Generation article on the unreleased 'Saturn 2'

[TVC 15]

Nope never happened, like what been said that was 3DFX. SEGA did start proceeding against Lockheed Martin for the delay in the Model 3 chipset which SEGA weren't at all happy with

Also I don't think at any stage was Lockheed Martin ever going to power a home console for SEGA or any other company they were just too expensive for the the consumer Market . I think people heard about SEGA Japan making a new Cart for the Saturn and put 2 + 2 together and came up with 5 . I bet it was just people getting mixed up with the 4 Meg Cart for the Saturn

SOJ were right too to go with Power VR ( a true great compnay) I just sort of wished SEGA went with Power PC for the DC CPU instead of Hitachi

The SH-4 was a good chip, especially at only $30. And Sega's long relationship with Hitachi also probably played a big part too, porting code from older Saturn titles was made easier due to sharing the same Processor family. I could imagine it would have taken AM2 much longer to port Shenmue to a PowerPC 603e lol, after the clearly very heavily optimised engine Shenmue was using on the Saturn, I could see that as a reason why the SH-4 was attractive, cross-code portability. I honestly feel the DC's SH-4's only primary disadvantage against the competition was clock speed (both for CPU+GPU), bandwidth and ram, all of which are down to when the DC spec was finalised in 97'-98'. The PS2, XBOX, and GC all had faster Cpu's and front side buses with faster and larger amounts of memory. But there was nothing fundamentally wrong with DC's setup, it was merely a product of tech at the time, maybe a year or two longer waiting on the hardware would have afforded more and faster ram, and a bumped CPU+GPU clock.

I'd say the Dreamcast was a Sega home-run technically, only bested by moore's law i.e later developed designs with faster clock speeds. It was fine as a chip.

[sheath]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The Dreamcast only would have eventually needed a 16MB RAM upgrade to be very competitive with that generation of hardware and remain better than the PS2 with it's measly 4MB VRAM/Cache. Resident Evil 4 Gamecube being only around 1.5 Million polys per second, and the PS2 game being stripped down to the 900k range is proof of that. Without the RAM upgrade the Dreamcast only would have suffered in Sandbox games.

[Team Andromeda]

The SH-4 was a good chip, especially at only $30. And Sega's long relationship with Hitachi also probably played a big part too, porting code from older Saturn titles was made easier due to sharing the same Processor family. I could imagine it would have taken AM2 much longer to port Shenmue to a PowerPC 603e lol, after the clearly very heavily optimised engine Shenmue was using on the Saturn, I could see that as a reason why the SH-4 was attractive, cross-code portability.

I'm not saying SH-4 is that bad and I know full well about how close SEGA and Hitachi were, just I would have liked to have seen SEGA gone with Power PC from a bit more grunt , and if you want to make the point about Shenmue then having Power PC would have made porting Model 3 coin ups easier ?. From what I read with developers it seems most wished for a bit more bandwidth and faster memory on the DC, that seemed to be the only major issues

[parallaxscroll]

SH-4 had a massively powerful floating point unit for it's time, if I'm not mistaken. It had to, because PowerVR2DC was not a GPU, it could not provide it's own geometry processing like the Real3D Pro-1000 GPUs in Model 3. The SH-4 had to feed PowerVR2DC all the T&L data.

[Zoltor]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The Dreamcast only would have eventually needed a 16MB RAM upgrade to be very competitive with that generation of hardware and remain better than the PS2 with it's measly 4MB VRAM/Cache. Resident Evil 4 Gamecube being only around 1.5 Million polys per second, and the PS2 game being stripped down to the 900k range is proof of that. Without the RAM upgrade the Dreamcast only would have suffered in Sandbox games.

I recall hearing at the very end, such a upgrade was made. However this was done only a matter of days before Sega ditched the DC. I never seen one in person, so they are probally very rare, and possibly mail order only through a magazine.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

I doubt it was released through Mail Order if it even exists. Why put an add-on up for mail order when there's no games available to support said add-on? You are probably thinking of the Zip Drive prototypes that surfaced a few years ago.

[sheath]

Yeah, Sega of America called the Dreamcast "modular" quite a bit, and promised upgrades, and it really kinda is. The power board and GD-ROM drive boards are very easy to replace. I never saw a RAM upgrade even mentioned though.

[parallaxscroll]

I remember an upgrade to Dreamcast being mentioned in the Official Dreamcast Magazine in the U.S. but I don't remember what issue. I don't see how it could be done. The Dreamcast just wasn't designed to be upgraded, AFAIK, unlike the Saturn which had the cartridge port.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

If I remember correctly the Zip Drive prototype hooked in through the same port as the Modem. So I would guess that you could do expansions with that port and make the Modem or BBA part of that expansion unit.

[Da_Shocker]

If I remember correctly the Zip Drive prototype hooked in through the same port as the Modem. So I would guess that you could do expansions with that port and make the Modem or BBA part of that expansion unit.

It used the serial port not the modem port.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

http://the-dreamcast-junkyard.blogsp...zip-drive.html

The pictures there show it clearly hooking into the expansion port with it's own port for the modem to go into. The cord in the back appears to be for power.

[Da_Shocker]

http://the-dreamcast-junkyard.blogsp...zip-drive.html

The pictures there show it clearly hooking into the expansion port with it's own port for the modem to go into. The cord in the back appears to be for power.

My bad.

[Zoltor]

I doubt it was released through Mail Order if it even exists. Why put an add-on up for mail order when there's no games available to support said add-on? You are probably thinking of the Zip Drive prototypes that surfaced a few years ago.

hm, I guess It's possible the person was confused, but the person I heard about it clearly said it was the ram upgrade.

[TVC 15]

The G2 bus, (the one the modem was connected through on the DC) was rated at 50MB's a second which is pretty pathetic, even the sound bus, at a measly 66MB's was faster, main ram was 800MB's a second in comparison. Thats the fastest external port to the DC, so I don't see any point putting an add-on with the DC tbh which such a slow interface.

[parallaxscroll]

Exactly^