Dreamcast the Father of Xbox

One of the cool things about teaching a new subject is all the stuff the teacher learns. Students seem to think we teachers just have all the info handed to us with the syllabus. Neither thing happens, we learn the subject then we write the syllabus.

I have been looking over my notes from my first semester of teaching History of Videogames. The amount of research in prepping a new history class is insane but you always end up with the neatest facts for seeming knowledgeable in later conversations.

Dreamcast, Sega`s last gasp attempt at owning a piece of the game console business ran of the Windows operating system. As such Dreamcast is the father or at least uncle of Xbox since working on Dreamcast got Bill Gates thinking about the gaming market.



The prototype Xbox system first showed was cased in a clear plastic “X” shaped case. The “X” in Xbox comes from ActiveX. The system was first called ActiveX Box after Microsoft`s video graphic language of the same name.

The original Xbox had 600 MHz Intel Pentiun III processor, 8 GB Hard drive for pre-loading Audio and Video files, 64 MB of memory shared between the CPU and Graphic Processor, could display 150 Million polygons per second and had a tendency to overheat, a number of them even burst into flames in consumers` homes.

Dreamcast really was an amazing system even if Sega has retreated into software, the way of all failed gaming console companies, the spirit of their last great console lives on. Videogame consoles don`t fail because of the hardware, they fail because of the software or lack there of. It all comes down to the games.

I will leave you with one more of those little facts. The Sega logo did not appear on the Dreamcast system because the Sega brand name had a bad rep with the gaming community. When your own marketing department tells you not to use your logo on your new product you know you are in trouble.