Dreamcast Zip Drive Found!

The Zip drive didn't fail in the same way the floppy drive didn't fail. The Zip drive at the time was a good way of storing large amounts of data quickly and cheaply. CD-R drives were still expensive and the media was also expensive compared to the RW nature of Zip discs.

Sadly with USB and Flash media getting cheaper and larger, Zip discs looked slow, unrealible, bulky and cumbersome so it died. Sad that a memory card the size of a penny stores much more then the 8" floppies I remember using in the olde days.

 

Sad? I beg to differ. USB Flash media is heaven-sent.

Now all that is needed is to remove the legacy floppy-drive support from PC motherboards or emulate it on the Flash drive through some bootable .bin file.

It's retarded to need/use floppy drives in this day and age to restore hard drives or flash/backup BIOS.

 

LOL Lately floppy drives have been my worst nightmare . I removed them in all my computers in favour of USB memory pendrives... And just after that, I've needed them to do certain operations, like being able to configure a RAID or setting a Windows XP installation with AHCI support.

I think it's a contradiction that the market remove any support for these kind of units (or reduce it) and however they still force the user to have one to set up certain features of a RAID controller and such things. If we take a look to some apps distributed by companies like Asus, they still are focused to floppy drives :S .

But hey, let's go back to the main theme or Assembler will box our ears (I think this is the expression in English, Right? LOL).

 

Besides the defects taucias mentioned, the Zip disk was mostly used to make cheap backups (remember its 1994 and most PCs had less than half a GB of HDD) of files too big for floppy disks, and to offload stuff from the PC when the HDD reached the limit.

With CDs and DVDs making backups was far cheaper and even easier since you didnt have to get the damn Zip drive.

About the DC, you can avoid piracy by making transfer speeds lower than those from the GDROM, therefore making gameplay jerky and unstable.

Thats what I was talking about, simply becos it makes more sense to sell a DC with DVD built-in than say an addon or a standalone DVD player.

Anyway, heres the article but from extreme tech:

SAN JOSE -- Renesas Technology has taken many of the technologies used in the Sega Dreamcast game console and combined them into a single core.

Officials from Japan's Renesas, which assumed control over the development of the SH processor from ST Microelectronics on Sept. 28, announced the SH3707 embedded processor at the Fall Processor Forum here today. The SH3707 combines both an advanced SuperH core and a PowerVR graphics core, the components found in the original Dreamcast.

Specifically, the Dreamcast console contained a 200-MHz Hitachi SH4 with the capability to perform 360 million instructions per second (MIPS) and 1.4 million megaflops, or floating-point operations per second. The Dreamcast also contained an NEC PowerVR2 graphics chip.

The new SH3707 uses a faster 540 MIPS/2.1 gigaflops engine, with a 64-bit interface to memory. The core also contains a PowerVR MBX chip, a core that Imagination Technologies has licensed to Intel and Texas Instruments, among others.

Sega's decision to exit the console business in 2001 was met with dismay with gamers, who admired the system's graphics capabilities. However, the console's sales slipped after rival Sony released the PS2 in the U.S., Microsoft announced plans for the Xbox, and Nintendo launched the Gameboy Advance, providing another outlet for gamer dollars. Even today, the console is actively traded on sites like eBay.

Renesas officials said they actually designed the chip with game consoles or other entertainment devices in mind, although they didn't announce any customers for the chip.

"Our goal was to accomplish second-generation (console) performance and first-generation cost," said Mitsuhiro Miyazaki, the project deputy manager for Renesas, based in Tokyo.
According to Miyazaki, the target specification for the platform is to achieve up to 1024 x 768 resolution, 10 million to 13 million vertices or 5 million to 6 million triangles per second, with up to 20 percent translucency per scene – in other words, anticipating a game where some of the polygons would be enhanced with transparency effects. That would place the SH3707 at somewhat over twice the performance of the Dreamcast, which could handle up to 3 million triangles per second. The SH3707 also has the capability of processing MPEG-1, -2, and -4 video and eight-channel PCM/ADCPM audio.

As far as I know Renesas never delivered the chip, something they should've done in 2005...

Anyway, a mobile phone? do you have a link or something?h:

I'm not talking about yet another addon but a another SKU which has DVD movie playback built-in, like the Panasonic Q.


SEGA could have sold that SKU at even less than the PS2, thus killing the whole DVD excuse...

 

Shadowlayer: When I've done some tasks this morning, I promise to look for that mobile phone news. I think they appeared one or one and half year ago. What I doubt much is that phone was finally released... Anyway, let's to search!

EDITION 1: I haven't found the official press note where they announced several variants of the SuperH and PowerVR integration (there was a model which even surpassed the Dreamcast main features), but I've found these news, http://www.us.design-reuse.com/news/news4928.html , which comments something similar. I'll keep looking for that note anyway. It was a short PDF.

EDITION 2: Ok, the SH-Mobile3 (SH73180) seems to be the REAL chip which is nearest to what was announced that year. Like it tends to happen in these cases, the features are inferior than what was promissed at the beginning. The high class chips, surely, haven't been incorporated in any mobile phone :/ .

 

Anyone else notice all the shilling going on?

 

Cheese: What do you mean exactly?

 

Some have bid multiple times in a row.
EDIT: I figured out part of it.

 

I think what you're seeing are the maximum bids and bids to increase the maximum bid. All of that shows up now. So, if an item is reserved at $100 and someone starts off by putting in a maximum bid of $50, changes it to $75, and another bidder puts in $25, here's what the record would look like:

bidder 1: bid 1 - $1 (maximum of $50)
bidder 1: bid 1 - $1 (bidded again to raise maximum to $75)
bidder 2: bid 2 - $25
bidder 1: bid 3 - $26 (eBay automatically bids for bidder 1 up until the maximum bid is outbid)

so on and so forth until either bidder #1 increases the maximum bid or is outbid.

 

Cheese: Well, when the same bidder seems to bid several consecutive times it's because other person has bid, but not enough to surpass that user.

If the current price is $1400, I'm the current winner having bid $1500 and someone bids $1450, eBay automatically will bid by me up to $1500. So it will show:

$1500 negora
$1400 negora
... ...

Anyway, I agree with you in general: You never know when these auctions have been manipulated. Mass resellers have enough power to have several "high class" accounts or even do side-to-side favours. But unfortunately we have no other option than trusting and bid as much as we can .

PD: Dreamcast TM was faster than me LOL. Well, already explained then .

 

I guess no one is going to get this ZIP unit, because the auction has ended and it didn't reach the reserve price... Except if someone negotiates in the "darkness" LOL .

 

I guess the market has spoken on this one. It didn't even break $2,000, nor was there a bidding frenzy in the end (only one more bid).

 

Does anyone what has happened finally? Is the seller going to relist it?

 

dreamcast zip drive on eBay

Checkout here mate:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Sega-Dreamcast-...ryZ62054QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

 

I thought that I had commented it, but have checked the thread and haven't found that message from me, so I'm going to do it now... The item was removed because the account was suppossed to have been "stolen" and the real user wasn't auctioning that item. Just to "clear" what happened really.

 

I placed a bid at 1000 but the auction got cancelled. Does anyone here know the seller? Is he going tor elist?

 

he wants way too much for it, so no matter what, unless someone puts down $5,000 he will have someone with another ebay account bid close to your maximum bid so he can get the most out of it. That's why he's constantly relisting.

 

It's actually quite hard to get someone to bid close to your maximum.

You normally end up with a second chance offer instead, which if there were only two bidders then I usually refuse.

 

I'm not so sure the reason the auctions were cancelled is because it wasn't the seller's account (I agree on the shilling theory. Either that or Sega / Iomega came down hard on eBay.). It just seems odd that these new, never before seen images would surface and then the seller decides to list under a fake account. The only way I could see that happening was if the seller really did have the item, but didn't intend on shipping it or the item was a replica.

Where did you get that information from, Negora?

 

Well, being sincere, I don't believe the official theory from eBay either. It's not that I don't believe eBay, but the reason which the seller could have claimed to such company in order to remove the auction. Using such an inactive and old account could have been a good strategy to make them believe that it had been hacked and used by other people. Maybe the choice of this account was something planned to protect himself.

But, What's the reason behind that "withdrawal"? Either the seller was threatened by a company, or he got repented... Late. In my opinion, I bet for the second one.

Dreamcast: eBay contacted me.