The Sega Dreamcast was released on Novermber 27, 1998 in Japan, on September 9, 1999 in the US and on October 14, 1999 in Europe. It was the first console ever to include a built-in modem and support for online gaming. The sales of the Dreamcast boomed during its initial release( 500,000 units sold in just 2 weeks) and was one of Sega's most successful console units. Great titles including Hydro Thunder, Sonic Adventure, Power Stone, and Soul Calibur only further helped to boost sales of the Dreamcast in the first year.

However in April of 1999 Sony released information on the up and coming Playstation 2 which would also be backwards-compatible with games from the older Playstation. The Playstation 2 was released in 2000 and this took alot of the spot light away from the Dreamcast and as such Sega began to lose money because gamers waited to see which console would come out on top. Unfortunately today we know that the Playstation 2 emerged as victor, as Sony beat out yet another Sega console (Initially the original Playstation lent a hand in knocking out the Saturn) In January 2001 Sega announced that production of Dreamcast hardware would cease but new games would still be released. Puyo Puyo Fever (the last officially released Sega game) for the Dreamcast came in 2003. The Dreamcast was Sega's last attempt in the console business.

The Dreamcast used a proprietary CD format called GD-Rom (12X speed) to discourage piracy to store games, this format was able to store about 1gig (about 1000mb) of data while regular CDs can hold about 700mb. This format failed to halt piracy and in some cases pirated games were distributed before the legitimate release. For testing purposes Sega left regular CD booting code in the Bios and this was eventually exploited to allow copied games to boot on the DC without hardware modification. Toward the end of the Consoles lifecycle this this was removed, but piracy is cited as one of the major causes for failure of the Dreamcast.

The Dreamcast uses Windows CE which provides a familiar development environment for programmers. This and the fact that almost any console can boot CD-Rs without modification has led to quite a modest homebrew development scene. Many emulators (Nester DC, Genesis Plus, DreamSNES etc..), and other application such as DivX players, MP3 players, have been ported and run on the Dreamcast console.

System Specs

Processors	Memory
200MHz clock rate 360 MIPS (millions of instructions per second) 3D calculations (Can transform 5million polygons/second) 800+ MBytes/second bus bandwidth 1.4 billion floating-point operations per second In comparison, the SH4 can calculate nearly 3 times more floating point OPs per second then a 450MHz Intel Pentium II Processor.	16 MB main RAM (SDRAM) 8 MB video RAM 2 MB sound RAM
Graphics: NEC PowerVR2 DC	Audio
3 million polygons/second peak rendering rate Perspective-Correct Texture Mapping Point, Bilinear, Trilinear and Anisotropic Mip-map filtering Gouraud shading z-buffer Colored light sourcing Full scene anti-aliasing Hardware-based Fog Bump mapping 16.77 million colors Hardware-based texture compression Shadow and Light volumes Super sampling	45MHz Yamaha 32-bit RISC CPU @ 40MIPS Based on ARM7TMDI Processor Core DSP. Real-time effects (Reverb, delay, etc) 64 sound channels Surround Sound support.
Storage	Input/Output
1 GD-Rom disc: Capacity 1.0GB (1024MB) 12x Yamaha (1.8MB/s)	Four controller ports. Visual Memory Sysem data Save 33.6Kbytes/second modem (56K after Sept 1999) 640x224 NTSC via composite video or RF (Composite cables included with console) RGB/VGA, S-Video.