Dreamcast/Xbox hybrid? Surely not!
Apparently, the Dreamcast is going to be welded to a PIII chip
The Xbox needs no help
As the rumour mill chased its tail over Sega halting Dreamcast production, the world’s assortment of news weasels began to publish their own ideas about what might happen. One of the more interesting of the rumours was the one about Microsoft deciding to include a complete Dreamcast chipset in the company’s upcoming Xbox console.
On the surface this seems plausible, but, as your friend and mine Lloyd Grossman is fond of saying, lets look at the evidence. Sega will shortly be announcing its intentions to license out Dreamcast technology to anyone that wants to buy it. The deal with Pace, the set-top box manufacturer, will be announced on Monday along with a declaration from the company that it will begin to develop games for any viable platform. It would be understandable if Sega did want to include Dreamcast hardware with the Xbox. Microsoft’s console is likely to become the market leader, meaning that any tie-in or collaboration would result in a sweet slice of the cake.
How Microsoft would benefit from the arrangement is a little more difficult to figure out. The Xbox will be about eight times more powerful than the Dreamcast and easily capable of emulating it. Sega’s only trump card would have been supplying Microsoft’s user base with its impressive back catalogue. As for future Dreamcast titles, well, so what? They could all be emulated. When you consider that Sega will be announcing its plans to develop its games for Xbox, the whole thing seems completely ridiculous. Who would benefit from this? Not the consumer for a start. Having to fork out the extra money for a lump of obsolete hardware to be grafted onto your brand new state of the art games machine is not an appealing prospect. Microsoft had this to say. "The Xbox will only include the Intel CPU and two Nvidia chips to handle graphics and sound capabilities, and it will have three times the power of any game console available at launch."
As ever, if something sounds implausible, it probably is.
On the surface this seems plausible, but, as your friend and mine Lloyd Grossman is fond of saying, lets look at the evidence. Sega will shortly be announcing its intentions to license out Dreamcast technology to anyone that wants to buy it. The deal with Pace, the set-top box manufacturer, will be announced on Monday along with a declaration from the company that it will begin to develop games for any viable platform. It would be understandable if Sega did want to include Dreamcast hardware with the Xbox. Microsoft’s console is likely to become the market leader, meaning that any tie-in or collaboration would result in a sweet slice of the cake.
How Microsoft would benefit from the arrangement is a little more difficult to figure out. The Xbox will be about eight times more powerful than the Dreamcast and easily capable of emulating it. Sega’s only trump card would have been supplying Microsoft’s user base with its impressive back catalogue. As for future Dreamcast titles, well, so what? They could all be emulated. When you consider that Sega will be announcing its plans to develop its games for Xbox, the whole thing seems completely ridiculous. Who would benefit from this? Not the consumer for a start. Having to fork out the extra money for a lump of obsolete hardware to be grafted onto your brand new state of the art games machine is not an appealing prospect. Microsoft had this to say. "The Xbox will only include the Intel CPU and two Nvidia chips to handle graphics and sound capabilities, and it will have three times the power of any game console available at launch."
As ever, if something sounds implausible, it probably is.
Companies:
Microsoft
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