Sega Trolls Fans Regarding Its Next Mini Console

[matmico399]

Critic I think they re-released the Dreamcast as a whole system, of course as always it would have to be the right price, it could be a big seller. I'm not sure what the right price is though.

[VideoGameCritic]

$99 with pack-in game and controller.

See, that wasn't so hard!

[TheEagleXIII]

I was reading this Nintendo Life article recently about the chances of a Saturn Mini. The guy at the helm of the Mega Drive Mini, Hiroyuki Miyazaki, said it could be 10 years away before the powerful chips necessary to make one would be cheap enough.

In the classic/mini hacking scene the Sega Saturn is absolutely one of the hardest consoles to emulate. Not too long ago someone managed to get a few games running at an unplayable 15-20fps on the PS Classic and was praised for achieving such a high frame rate.

Anyway, Miyazaki went onto say he'd love to make a Master System Mini, but the potential roadblock would be it's lack of popularity anywhere but Europe and Brazil. Even here, where I remember so many of my friends having one in use well into the mid 90s, I think it would undersell.

I'd love to see a Dreamcast Mini. It's got a great cult following and I've seen plenty of discussions around the internet since the Mega Drive Mini's release that people want SEGA to skip the Saturn and go straight for a Dreamcast Mini. It would probably be achievable relatively soon - Dreamcast emulation on the PS Classic is surprisingly good, if unreliable, across the whole library. The trouble with that generation of games is the licensed music and other IPs - which I'm sure didn't help the PlayStation classic (hence no THPS or Gran Turismo) but I'm sure they could tweak a few of the games like they did for re-release of Jet Set Radio.

[VicViper]

Why not release a Dreamcast 2, or what the hell - re-release the original Dreamcast. That console is legendary.

I would love to see a new FULLY OFFLINE Sega Console with a selection of bright arcade titles. Dream on....

$99 with pack-in game and controller.

See, that wasn't so hard!

I don't wanna be a negative nancy, but making a 100% replica of old tech is way harder than what people would think.

The Dreamcast uses GD-Roms, they're a proprietary format that were only developed then for the Dreamcast's purposes. You can't have just a CD Drive to work on Dreamcast since all official releases wouldn't play on that, and GD Drives don't exist anywhere else than on the Dreamcast, it's basically lost and obsolete technology. Same for the GPU, same for the CPU, and so on.

Rereleasing the Dreamcast, as in, manufacturing new Dreamcast systems with the old hardware intact, would be budgetary suicide. They'd also have to make new discs of old games even if printed at a low quantity, and then the same problem would happen with manufacturing GD-Roms, while CD-Roms wouldn't be enough for a lot of games and would wear out the GD Drive faster (assuming they're supposedly the same drive and the same quality as the original).

I mean, if it were that easy to make GD-Roms and if they were that close to regular CDs, the community would've figured out something after 20 years. We've seen people cannibalizing Doom SNES cartridges to make physical bootlegs of Star Fox 2's beta before its official release, so if making new GD-Roms hasn't happened despite how active the Dreamcast community is, then there's not really any hope. The best they've done was put GD-Rom games on CD-Roms, but a lot of games have gotten compressed and are altered with that process (also same argument with the GD Drive not liking CDs)

It'd be like trying to mass produce CRTs again, it'd be way too demanding and expensive to manufacture with the usual materials that made a CRT TV what it was.
There's a reason why LCD started out as more expensive than CRTs but progressively got cheaper and cheaper as the manufacturing processes improved.

This is why mini-consoles resort to emulation with modern tech inside, instead of using the physical, old console's hardware. And that's also why if you hack a SNES Mini, it could emulate PS1 games, which obviously a regular SNES wouldn't be able run a PS1 game.

Unfortunately, creating an emulator that's 100% compatible with every game of its platform without graphical/sound quirks in a bunch of games is almost impossible. Some say the SNES/Mega Drive Mini have "pristine emulation", but once you try to add in some more games through hacking that weren't made with the mini console in mind, you can get some pretty bad results. Just because something is "powerful enough" doesn't mean it's "accurate enough".

[VideoGameCritic]

VicViper - My post was a little tongue in cheek, but you make a lot of excellent points that convinced me that resurrecting the system would not be feasible at all.

And I'm not sure what a Dreamcast 2 could possibly have to offer.

[ThePixelatedGenocide]

We already had a Dreamcast 2.

It was called the original X-Box.

As far as a Dreamcast mini collection goes, if Sega can get Namco and Capcom on board, that alone would cover most of what people remember about the system.