Sega Dreamcast became the first 128-bit console in the console market. For the first time, information about a new Sega set-top box leaked to the Internet on March 12, 1997, and initially there was a rumor that Sega was going to upgrade its Saturn to 128 bits. Today it sounds ridiculous, but then many gamers really believed that it would be so, and true fans of the company expected that now Sega would not miss its chance and finally show what it is capable of. But by March 31 of that year, the situation had cleared up, and the whole world knew that Sega had begun developing a completely new console. By June 1997, it became known that Sega was considering two technical projects that, in principle, were not so radically different from each other. One project was called Black Belt, the second - Dural. Black Belt had an IBM / Motorola Power PC 603 E processor with the 3Dfx Voodoo 2 graphics chipset. Dural included a Hitachi SH4 processor with the NEC / Videologic PowerVR 2 chipset. Both projects were good in their own way, but time passed and it was necessary to dwell on one of them. As a result, the Dural project was chosen, although the American branch of Sega until the last insisted on Black Belt. The future prefix was given the working name KATANA. Sega also enlisted the support of independent game developers, who gladly agreed to develop games for the new console. Fortunately, the architecture of the new console was an order of magnitude simpler than that of Saturn. A large number of world-famous companies participated in the development of the console, including Microsoft, Hitachi, Nec, Video logic and Yamaha. The console worked on Microsoft software, namely, running Windows CE. A 56 KB modem was built into the set-top box, which allows you to play on the network or simply "surf" on the Internet, using an optional keyboard and mouse. The console was built into the usual 12-speed GD-ROM. Dreamcast could process up to 3 million polygons per second. The prefix was first presented to the public on September 7, 1997 under the name Katana, but a year later, by the time the console was officially released, the name was once again changed to all of us the usual Dreamcast. The prefix exit time was repeatedly postponed and finally came on November 25, 1998. All 150,000 consoles produced at that time were sold out on the first day, and the deficit remained until mid-December, until the next batch of consoles arrived.

The start in America was scheduled for a mystical date; judge for yourself - 09.09.99. The price was set at $ 199. I must say that it met the expectations of the company's management - the prefix was very successfully sold. Sales in Europe began on October 14, 1999, and were also successful. And only in Australia the launch of the console, scheduled for November 30, 1999 was a failure, and even that was mainly due to the terrible shortage of the consoles themselves.

By October 1999, the Sega US branch sold 518,000 consoles in America, by November this figure had grown to 750,000, and by the end of the year it was possible to reach a figure of one million. This pace of sales encouraged the company. It seemed that the second million would not be long in coming.

But happiness could not last forever. Sony, of course, could not calmly watch the success of its competitor and in every way added fuel to the fire, promising that its new console - Playstation 2 - would be an order of magnitude superior to Dreamcast. Sony even lowered the estimated price for its new set-top box, thereby trapping Sega. After all, Sega could not do the same; the cost of the console was too high.

Another alarming bell for Sega rang when many gamers began to show dissatisfaction with the constant delay in launching online games. This was because the project has not yet been fully developed. But still, by January 2000, Sega Net was launched, and 30% of the Japanese were able to enjoy the game on the network. By February 17, this figure has grown to 50%. 300,000 people used the network in America, and 200,000 in Europe.

But, whatever one may say, and since the release of Playstation 2, Dreamcast sales began to fall steadily, and this despite the fact that Sega lowered the price of the console. People still preferred to overpay and buy a better product from Sony. Dreamcast sales continued to fall until the end of 2000, and in February 2001 it was decided to permanently stop its release, and the remaining consoles should be sold at an insanely low price of $ 49.

After that, Sega decided to no longer produce consoles, and concentrated on developing games, becoming an independent developer.

Processor SH4 RISC 7750 CPU @ 206 MHz (360 MIPS / 1.4 GFLOPS) + 128-bit vector registers for graphics processing
PowerVR CLX2 Series II @ 100 Mhz video accelerator (3.5 million rectangles per second) with 24-bit TrueColor screen
16 MB primary, 8 MB video and 2 MB audio memory
GD-ROM game media (Yamaha technology) with capacities up to 1.2 GB.
128K Virtual Memory Storage
Sound chip Yamaha AICA, 32-bit
Dimensions and weight 189 x 195 x 76 cm; 1.9 kg
Color White, Black (US only, limited edition with SEGA Sports logo)
Other: A modem operating at a speed of 33.6 Kbps for Europe, and at a speed of 56 Kbps (only after 9/9/99). It is removed and replaced by a third-party network adapter.

DreamShell is a Unix-like operating system designed for the Sega Dreamcast game console. Based on the KallistiOS libraries. Originally it was a command line interface, with the ability to run your own applications. In other words, an alternative OS that allows you to run games and applications from your hard drive or from SD to the Dreamcast console.

G1-ATA (IDE) Connecting HDD to Dreamcast
1 Option The cheapest and easiest, but you need to be able to solder. Open the prefix and solder the cable to the motherboard to which through the optional power supply connect the HDD. You will have both a drive and an HDD.
Option 2 Buy or solder the OzOnE PCB board yourself. You will have both a drive and an HDD, only without a cover.
Option 3 Buy a USB-GDROM Controller board from MNEMO Dreamcast drive emulator. There will be only HDD.
Option 4 Buy a GDemu board Dreamcast drive emulator. There will be only SD.

Comparison:
With GDEmu, almost everything is simple, connected it instead of a drive and threw it onto the games SD card. Compatibility can be said complete. With regions and a choice of games, this is a separate song, but it seems that all the inconvenience is more or less smoothed out by inquisitive users. But one fat minus still remained - this is the price. At the current rate, it costs around 8500 rubles, which seems somewhat ridiculous. At the same time, SD cards are still very limited in size, and high-capacity flash drives are not cheap, especially of good quality, which are generally needed.
Almost the same goes for the adapter from MNEMO, its main difference is that it has USB, not SD, which reduces the cost of a gigabyte. There are still nuances with the format of images and a change of disk for this adapter, but not very critical. The price is somewhat cheaper, but still the order is about the same.

Pros:
1) Compatibility about 100%
2) No installation problems, set instead of the drive and that's it
3) High download speed for GDEmu and normal for MNEMO

Minuses:
1) Very expensive
2) Does not start games in other regions without shamanism (GDEmu)
3) Expensive large amounts of memory (GDEmu)
4) Only supports GDI and ISO (MNEMO)
5) Overhead of interface pairing reduces speed (MNEMO)

With DreamShell, the picture is completely different. Compatibility is certainly not at that level, but it may turn out to be quite enough for a specific person, the main thing is to understand what games are in principle needed. True, to boot without a drive, you need a BIOS mod and this is of course a minus, But this is not a problem if you know how to solder. But there are undeniable advantages.

Pros:
1) It's free
2) A gigabyte of space is much cheaper (or even free, because you can find old IDE HDDs, in principle, for free). You can hook SATA through the adapter.
3) No problems with regions and VGA forcing (where it is generally supported)
4) The download speed of games is equivalent to GDEmu
5) There is a chance)) get extra. functionality that cannot be implemented using iron emulators

Minuses:
1) Compatibility more than 80%
2) You need to be able to hold a soldering iron in your hands to solder a dozen wires
3) If there is no drive, you need a BIOS mod (basically equal to the second point)

More to the advantages of DreamShell.

With the boards of the aforementioned comrades (GDEmu, MNEMO), the console is fenced off, losing its native drive, and after all, many people still have stamping / license collections, to this day people continue to collect.

With DreamShell, it’s just the opposite, when installing HDD, SD-Card, Bios Flash,
the console retains everything that was originally in it, plus acquires new
functions, and these are just the pros in hardware, not to mention the functionality of DreamShell.

In general, if everything is averaged and rounded, it turns out that the difference in money is in fact. A paid solution is simpler and works better, a free solution is more complicated and it still does not work as well as iron emulators, that’s the whole difference ...

At the same time, you get a full-fledged console, instead of one emulator board, which without a console is generally useless.
The main thing here is to understand how critical 100% compatibility is, whether it is worth the money in your case. For some, this may be the main argument in the decision, and if there is extra money, then why not simplify your life And some have both at the same time.


In more detail with pictures how to do IDE, BIOS mod and region changer here -http://www.dc-swat.ru/forum/thread-2260.html

Program for converting images in .cdiDiscJuggler Version 6.rar(53.65 MB)

Program for optimizing and converting images for DreamShellISO_Make_pack_v2.4.7z(10.1 MB)

Full video review of the consoleSega Dreamcast (Post Narcosis-doom # 79950896)
How to put a laser from a CD Rom -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yxlK0MYEy4