Redirected from Dreamcast
Dreamcast used a proprietary format called GD-ROM for storing games in order to foil software pirates, a strategy that ultimately backfired when the first run of discs had a high rate of defects, and pirates managed to pirate the games anyway (in some cases the pirated games were released before the legitimate versions!).
Microsoft cooperated with Sega hoping to promote its Windows CE for video games, but Windows CE for the Dreamcast showed bad performance and because of that was only used for very few games. The libraries Sega offered much more performance, but they were more difficult to program.
The Dreamcast has a modest hacking enthusiast community. The Availability of Windows CE software development kits on the internet, as well as ports of Linux and NetBSD operating systems to the Dreamcast gave programmers a selection of familiar development tools to work with, even though they do not really support the high speed graphics. A home brew minimal Operating System called Kallistios (http://sourceforge.net/projects/cadcdev/) offers support for most hardware, while not offering multi-tasking, which is superfluous for games.
Sega build a Arcade board based on the same technic as the Dreamcast called Sega NAOMI.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump