This is miscellaneous info that I have picked up from various sources off the internet, concerning the DreamCast, listed from earliest to latest.
Sega is officially business partners with Microsoft, Hitachi, Videologic, and Yamaha.
In producing/marketing/whatever with DreamCast, Sega is working with heat.net and SegaSoft.
DreamCast games can be developed on Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0; it uses Windows CE with DirectX.
The CPU performs floating point operations used for 3-D operations nine times faster than the Pentium2 226.
It has a $100 million dollar launch in the USA.
Business partners with Sega for marketing, advertising, and promotion are Foote, cone, and Belding; Alcone Marketing Group; Howard Marlboro Group; and the Catalyst Group. Those compnaies did ads for Levis, Burger King, MTV, and Mazda.
Sega of America CEO Bernard Stolar said the DreamCast mandates "kick-ass marketing."
Some announced third-party publishers for the DreamCast will be Acclaim, Midway Interplay, Microprose, and GI Interactive. This resembles Nintendo's initial Dream Team (which developed early games for the N64, I think.)
Capcom unofficially plans to develop games for the DreamCast, possibly including a separate version of Street Fighter III.
Ubisoft is officially making D-Jumb for the DreamCast, with a March 1999 release. Some possible, but unofficially announced games would be Tonic Trouble and Rayman 2.
Konami is making several projects for the DreamCast--they're officially working on Dragon, and supposedly two other games, also.
The audio chip is AICA with its own RISC CPU and DSP, developed by Yamah with significant feedback from Sega. It's complete real-time 3-D audio, with 2 megs of auido ram, and can handle 64-channel auido.
Tasks are run separately on different parts of the DreamCast hardware, so the CPU can concentrate on graphics and speed.
DreamCast demos at the press releases were a Greek island village kind of place with a zooming view, and a shooting game demo. The shooting game demo used only 20% of the DreamCast's capabilities, and the object of control looked like a flying rayfish.
The DreamCast has 16 megs of general RAM.
The shooter looked like Pysognosis's Novastorm, and Nintendo's Starfox 64, and looked as good as, if not better than, Sega's Model 3 step 2 arcade board.
The shooter had detail only previously possible in uncompressed CG animation.
It is rumored that the shooter was developed at the UK-based Argonaut, which made the original Starfox.
Some sources say that the DreamCast's online, multi-player capabilities will be part of Heat, and some say they won't be.
There will possibly be a Godzilla game as one of the first separate games to go on the LCD VMS.
Tues, 6/16/98--
Godzilla is now officially the first separate VMS game.
A new Sonic the Hedgehog game by the Sonic Team headed by Yuji Naka is in development for the DreamCast. It will be a launch title when the DreamCast comes out in America.
Half of the approximately thirty games to be released simultaneous to the DreamCast's North American late '99 launch will be produced by Sega.
NEW--Wed, 7/1/98
The Dreamcast will be compatible with a new color portable 8-bit system to be released soon by SNK called "The Neigo Pocket." Games from the Neigo Pocket would be playable on Dreamcast if hooked up to the Dreamcast with a special adapter. Also, information that had been stored on the Neigo Pocket would be able to be uploaded by the Dreamcast VMS.
NEC has officially announced it will release two Dreamcast RPGs in winter '98 approximately simultaneous to the Dreamcast's release. In "Seventh Cross" you must raise a creature so it eventually evolves, similar to the popular Tamagotchi toy. However, there are 810,000 possible different final results. "Sengoku Turb" is a humorous action/RPG game that uses a realtime 3-D engine. It has an NPC Audition System, which allows character changes to show up in the in-game movies.
Sega oficially announced that there won't be a Sega logo, or say Sega anywhere for that matter, on the Dreamcast platform. Shoichiro Irimajiri told Sega Saturn Magazine "We have been working on the brand issue for 18 months. We conducted huge market research and found that the Sega name is very strong with the hardcore
game users, but for the light gamer it is not a well-known brand name and in some cases creates some negative feelings. So this time we decided that the brand name of the platform will be the major brand name for the consumer business. So Dreamcast is the name of this platform and we will focus on that." I don't like this; the DreamCast name is stupid enough as it is. Some people in America who have been in the dark for the past year may then see no reason to buy it.
There is a rumor that Sega will release the Dreamcast early in America, maybe in spring or summer 1999. By late '98 with the Japan release, they'll have a flagship fighting game (Virtua Fighter 3--this will make it a seller with very hardcore gamers), racing game (Super GT--this will make it a seller with adults and teenagers), adventure (Sonic 3D--this will make it a seller with little kids), an action game D2, and an RPG Seventh Cross. This sounds like something the American gaming market would go for. Also, Sega has said that it is worried about the Playstation 2 and that's their main competition. So releasing the DC early would seem to combat that. I think that wouldn't be a bad move as long as Sega announces at least a month before the earlier release when they actually plan to.
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