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Comment by thevagrant | Hacker News Reader

Dreamcast was amazing. Unfortunately most gamers didn't give it a look as they were too hyped for PS2 due to specs. Funny that for quite a while the dreamcast games were performing and looking better.

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This right here. Gamers were burnt by SEGA's past consoles and SONY's hype machine was running on all cylinders. SONY was promising Toy Story level graphic and all sorts of nonsense with their "emotion engine".

What was the emotion engine actually

The PS2 had two CPUs inside, one of which had GPU-like features. To differentiate them, one was called the IOP = Input Output Processor and the other the EE = Emotion Engine.

It was a surprisingly powerful system at the time and it took developers years to understand it well enough to take full advantage of the hardware. But the ability to have 2 CPUs run simultaneously and interact with each other allowed for A LOT of crazy optimizations that I haven't seen since.

Interesting, what were some of those unique optimizations?

Marketing nonsense. Sony was trying to sell the idea that the PS2 cpu had... magic in them.

It was a MIPS CPU with special proprietary vector units.

Oh... boring

Booting up DC and Ps2 games in an emulator shows you just how much better textures looked on the Dreamcast, and how most DC games ran at 60fps instead of 30.

Dreamcast was doing great in the US. Unfortunately, it was tanking in Japan, and Sega made the decision to pull the plug based on that.

PS2 hype was one thing, but CD x32 and Saturn failures were mayor burns turning customers away from SEGA.

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