I'm sorry if this has been discussed to death before, but I couldn't find anything about it on the forums by searching for "gateway". Back in 2001 there were pictures of the so called "Games Gateway" floating around, stating it was the Dreamcast successor and to be released in 2002 for 600 Euro. Anyone know what happened to it? Are there more pictures available somewhere? More information about the cancellation of the development? A link to an old discussion would be fine.
It's a satellite receiver made by PACE, the idea was that you would be able to DL Dreamcast games with your satelite dish to the internal HDD. AFAIK it's a working prototype and they showcased a couple of games for it.
Hey nice pictures of the system set-up, not seen those ones before. I was pretty excited about this back when it was announced and was well up for buying one but it all went pear shaped. Hey wombat don't suppose you remember which games they demo-ed with the system? Obviously it just looks like a DC butchered to fit inside a pace box but I want to know how they are running the games from the internal HDD if at all. If the Pace box itself connected to the internet for downloads to the HDD and the games ran working with full speed sound etc they could have been coming down the BBA route from the internal HDD and then playing through the DC as normal (via new software / re-write) But if they simply swapped the GD-ROM drive for a HDD on the board and re-wrote some software that would be very interesting indeed. As it would prove feasible to run games directly from a SDHC Card through the GD-ROM drive components sans the drive assembly. If the SD Adapter that runs through the small serial port thing on the back of the DC can only play some games okay through Dreamshell because of a lack of port speed these Pace guys must have hooked it up really well using their own techniques. Of course they had access to Sega documents, software creators, hardware components etc. what was achieved by DC Swat is fantastic but it would be great to see it go to the next level.
You can find more information here: http://www.gamespot.com/news/2681885.html In the pictures you can see Sonic Adventure 2 running from the box . Also I remember having read that they also tested Crazy Taxi and Sonic Adventure.
Yeah just found the gamespot article very interesting. If the games you mentioned worked from a HDD thats very cool indeed I want a small-ish handheld DC and if the drive can be done away with its totally possible. :thumbsup: Thanks wombat Having re-read the article its sounds as though they really were almost ready to go with this thing until it went belly up and thats a shame. What really made me laugh though was this: Pace claims...that each game will take approximately three minutes to download wow super fast connection especially for 2001 This prototype needs to be found however and I want it!
These estimates are probably true, because it uses the satelite dish for data transfer (which is pretty fast!).
Satellite data transfers can be really, really fast. Problem is that most consumer dishes don't support full-duplex communications over the satellite signal itself and require a modem for dial-up to request the data in the first place. Now I think you can use broadband equivalents of course. I recall vividly ODCM here in the states going on about how we would soon be playing out DC games off set top boxes via a DC on a chip type setup. At the time it was mostly speculation and planning done by Sega with no prototype being shown before the magazine was finally disbanded. Really excited to see the technology actually went somewhere!
Really?! wow I just think of satelite signals being badly interfered with when it rains and thats it! If its 1GB per disc (okay most games don't have to take up the whole 1GB) thats over 300 meg a minute crazy fast! Hope someone gets their hands on this at somepoint in the future
I think I once saw a post about someone buying one of these in an acution... Any idea who it might have been? It was years ago though...
Consumer satellite internet download speeds aren't that impressive. 1Mbit or thereabouts, from what I remember. At that rate (6MB/min) it'd take more like three hours to download a 1GB file, not three minutes... although obviously most DC games aren't 1GB in size anyway. What's the max speed that can be expected of a satellite connection, anyone know?
Depends on if you want to talk consumer or military grade. I'm sure the military has satellites capable of far more bandwidth than consumer satellites. I'd also imagine you wouldn't be streaming down an entire game to store in 1gb+ of ram? More likely just the necessities as they get in demand. Only problem would be the latency satellites have which would make load times interesting.
It's a PVR so a HDD is essential anyway. There's no way they'd bother with portioned streaming, that'd require extensive reprogramming of the games themselves.
Wonder why the deal fell through in the end I guess there are all kinds market reasons but taking a peek at the Pace website it reads: Pace At-a-Glance Founded in 1982 FTSE 250: PIC FY2009 Revenue: £1,133,442,000 FY2009 Employee Count: 1200 (approx.) Thats serious revenue! obviously doesn't say their profits but must be making some beans! we all know about SEGA's lack of cash at that time so maybe Pace thought twice about getting into bed with them.
This reminds me of the internet cafe things that also had Dreamcast innards. http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23702 Didn't some guys with LinuxDC get an IDE HDD interface working? I could have sworn they did.
