Does anybody have any inside info on "Project Pheonix"?

"New revolutionary 3D rendering hardware"

I've heard this term quite a lot when speaking of the Pheonix Dreamcast successor that was in the works between 1999-2001.

Does anybody in here have an info, any info even in the slightest on the system?

 

Was it using IMGtec PowerVR?

Or was it in-house custom 3D like Hikaru?

 

I remember reading about Sega's Project Pheonix on the old Dreamcast Technical Pages aka SegaTech and Sega BlastCity, Beyond3D, maybe Gaming-Age Forum also.

a guy called Sonic talked about it now and then. I'm sure he hangs around here sometimes. IIRC, He said Pheonix would most likely be used for ARCADES only, at least for some time - and that it would indeed provide revolutionary new 3D rendering capabilities - he seemed to be doubtful that Pheonix would form the basis of a new home system but it was possible if Sega was once again hugely successful.

Pheonix was Sonic's given name for the technology, not SEGA's actual internal codename.


I do not know if the following is related to whatever Pheonix was or not, but back in 2000, Sega publicly announced that then-President Shoichiro Irimajiri was stepping down as president to head up and oversee the effort to create Dreamcast's successor. Sega most definitally was working on a home console beyond Dreamcast in 1999-2001 - since Dreamcast hardware was completed sometime in early to mid 1998 - It would make complete sense for Sega to have started on the successor in 1999 and publicly admit to it by 2000.

of course, in 2001, any talk of a successor to Dreamcast was virtually dead when Sega publicly announced they were walking away from hardware.


I do not know what technology Project Pheonix used - it sounded exotic from what I remember of Sonic's comments about it.

as for the sucessor to Dreamcast that Sega was working on, whether or not it had anything to do with Project Pheonix or not, I would think that Dreamcast2 would have used PowerVR technology. perhaps Sega's upcoming high-end PowerVR based arcade board, known as LindBergh, also known as System SP, might been an indication of where Sega was going with a Dreamcast successor.

 

kind of off topic but didnt sega have a dreamcast on a chip that they were going to use for a handheld? i cant remember where i saw it, on the internet or in person but im allmost positive they had working prototypes...am i on crack?

 

No there really was a DC on-a-chip reported in Edge years ago. Not sure if it was ever used for anything though, which is a shame.

 

My guess is (about DC on a chip) that Sega saw the PSP and just said "Ah fuck. We're not doing that again"

 

That was way before the psp.

 

The dreamcast wasn't on a chip and just the powervr and superH chipset, this lead a lot of sites to state the dreamcast was on a chip when it was really just the graphics chip and main cpu.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1667467,00.asp

 

Yea a whole DC on a single chip would be very expensive.

 

Well, I don't know - the SH2 and PVR are certainly the most complicated components, sound is "just" an ARM7 core that is available as design component (that's why there's about 356236326345 cellphones using it, as well as the GBA, MP3 players, PSP, DS, etcera) and another sound chip that - in terms of production process or logic characteristics - isn't terribly complicated. Then there's probably some ASICs such as the drive and Maple controller. I don't think the cost of this process would be in a higher order of magnitude than the integration we saw in the Megadrive 2 (68k+VDP IIRC), PSX (CPU+GTE) or NES-on-a-chip as used in clones. The SDRAM/VRAM will probably be kept off-chip, I suppose.