2 Dreamcast questions

[Lerxstnj]

1 - What made Sega go to Microsoft for the operating system?

2 - Why did they go with the GD-Rom format?
Was it for higher capacity than CD-Rom? or for anti-piracy reasons?

[plastic]

I'm not sure about the OS, but I do know GD-ROM was used to prevent piracy.

... Fail.

[dao2]

I'm not sure about the OS, but I do know GD-ROM was used to prevent piracy.

... Fail.

If it was made to prevent piracy I'm sure they would have tried harder to make it not able to read CD-roms..... cause it was piss easy to pirate for the DC. Probably the easiest system ever

[crazyjackcsa]

In the beginning the GD rom was used to prevent piracy. At it's release date, the CD writers of the time couldn't read GD-Roms. Furthermore, with the GD rom, the CD copies would often drop the FMV and Sound quality. Which is one of the reasons there is no Skies of Arcadia copy. No FMV to drop.

The DC had to operating Systems. The Sega one, and the mircosoft one. They wen't with the mircosoft one so that PC ports could be done with relative ease, and any programmer that was familiar with Windows would be familiar with the DC.

[dao2]

In the beginning the GD rom was used to prevent piracy. At it's release date, the CD writers of the time couldn't read GD-Roms. Furthermore, with the GD rom, the CD copies would often drop the FMV and Sound quality. Which is one of the reasons there is no Skies of Arcadia copy. No FMV to drop.

The DC had to operating Systems. The Sega one, and the mircosoft one. They wen't with the mircosoft one so that PC ports could be done with relative ease, and any programmer that was familiar with Windows would be familiar with the DC.

never knew that :P

[otaku]

makes sense. Quite a few good pc ports/developers on DC to.

They probably should have thought ahead for when technology caught up/became less expensive to avoid the piracy.

[dao2]

makes sense. Quite a few good pc ports/developers on DC to.

They probably should have thought ahead for when technology caught up/became less expensive to avoid the piracy.

wasnt piracy that killed the system anyway :P

[plastic]

If it was made to prevent piracy I'm sure they would have tried harder to make it not able to read CD-roms..... cause it was piss easy to pirate for the DC. Probably the easiest system ever

Hence the 'fail.'

[Pantechnicon]

I remember being giddily mystified by that Windows CE logo when I got my first Dreamcast. Knowing there was a keyboard, mouse and modem all available for the DC, I reckoned somehow there might have been a way to run a bona fide GUI version of CE on a Dreamcast. If no official version was ever released, then maybe some ingenious homebrewer might figure out the trick. Alas, as far as I know nothing ever materialized on that front, official or unofficial, and the CE support was really only there as a development platform.

[InsaneDavid]

and the CE support was really only there as a development platform.

Yeah, it was just to allow fast development of smaller content games.

[OldSchoolGamer]

wasnt piracy that killed the system anyway :P

Every system has or ends up having piracy, I would suggest lack of 3rd party support from big guns like EA (DAMN YOU EA) combined with distrust of SEGA over past mistakes (Early release of Saturn, poor support for SegaCD and 32x causing market confusion) as well as the hype machine from Sony who ended up releasing the PS2 WITH DVD compatability were far greater factors in the DREAMCAST demise!

[Ze_ro]

I remember being giddily mystified by that Windows CE logo when I got my first Dreamcast.

A lot of people seem to be confused by this, but there's no real such thing as "Windows CE for Dreamcast". It was basically just a set of libraries that you could use to port PC games to the Dreamcast a bit faster. Games running off these libraries usually ran slower (maybe the Win CE kernel was just too much overhead, or maybe it just weren't optimized well, I don't know), but it worked fine for games like Bust-A-Move 4 that didn't need a whole lot of power. The vast majority of Dreamcast games don't use Windows CE, and there's no Windows CE code inside the Dreamcast hardware.

I think the whole thing stems from the Saturn. The general feeling was that the Saturn was very difficult to program for, so Sega went out of their way to make sure Dreamcast programming was as easy as they could possibly make it. Microsoft has a lot of experience with programming environment, so it must have seemed like a great partnership for Sega. If I'm not mistaken, Microsoft also had a hand in Sega's native development libraries. It makes me wonder if this experience had any effect on luring Microsoft into the console business.

--Zero

[Frankie_Says_Relax]

Every system has or ends up having piracy, I would suggest lack of 3rd party support from big guns like EA (DAMN YOU EA) combined with distrust of SEGA over past mistakes (Early release of Saturn, poor support for SegaCD and 32x causing market confusion) as well as the hype machine from Sony who ended up releasing the PS2 WITH DVD compatability were far greater factors in the DREAMCAST demise!

I wouldn't underplay the actual amount of rampant piracy going on for that system.

When it comes to the Dreamcast - it was a genuinely rare and awful combination of factors that converged at one particular moment in time.

1.) A no-hardware-mod method of copying/playing games was devised, and the system had virtually no upgradeable firmware to combat this.

2.) Games could be copied on the CD Rom media, which had just hit a lifetime low in terms of cost-per-disc.

3.) High-speed internet services were becoming a more standard service in place of dial-up.

4.) P2P services like Napster and Kazaa were still in their infancy and going largely unchecked by governments and ISPs.

I was in game retail during the entire lifespan of the Dreamcast, and I'd recon that in it's second year, most people I knew didn't purchase a single game at retail yet had every major release.

[plastic]

I wouldn't underplay the actual amount of rampant piracy going on for that system.

When it comes to the Dreamcast - it was a genuinely rare and awful combination of factors that converged at one particular moment in time.

1.) A no-hardware-mod method of copying/playing games was devised, and the system had virtually no upgradeable firmware to combat this.

2.) Games could be copied on the CD Rom media, which had just hit a lifetime low in terms of cost-per-disc.

3.) High-speed internet services were becoming a more standard service in place of dial-up.

4.) P2P services like Napster and Kazaa were still in their infancy and going largely unchecked by governments and ISPs.

I was in game retail during the entire lifespan of the Dreamcast, and I'd recon that in it's second year, most people I knew didn't purchase a single game at retail yet had every major release.

That's honestly depressing.

I consistently play my Dreamcast, and consistently make note of how "ahead of its time" it truly was. I often think similarly of the Saturn, but that's a whole separate story.