The Dreamcast as set-top box

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by Atomic Dawg

(IDG) -- Pace Micro Technology, the largest supplier of digital set-top boxes in Europe and the fourth largest in the world, is teaming up with Sega to deliver Dreamcast games into your homes through digital personal video recorder (PVR) set-top boxes.

Pace introduced PVR set-top boxes with integrated hard disks last year. Such PVRs enable you to receive television programs from cable, satellite, or other digital sources and "record" them by saving the signals as a digital file onto a hard disk. In this way, PVRs enable you to record one or more programs as you watch another, or you can program it as you would a VCR to record programs at a certain time. Unlike a VCR, PVRs also enable you to conveniently pause a show during a broadcast and then return to it without missing a second.

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Sega and Pace have been working on the Dreamcast/PVR project for over a year. At a joint press briefing last week, representatives from both companies demonstrated a unit which contained a PVR system and, basically, the guts of a Dreamcast minus the proprietary GD-ROM disc drive operating side-by-side. Sonic Adventure 2, Shenmue, Crazy Taxi, and NFL 2K1 were all playable as demos. Sega representative made it clear, however, that the initial strategy for games delivered via set-top boxes would not be geared toward hard core gamers but toward casual gamers, who might not necessarily purchase a games console.

Depending on how a local network operator might set up its services, users could be able to download a set of Dreamcast games via cable, satellite, DSL, or some other digital TV signal onto a specially partitioned portion of the PVRās hard disk. The games could be played at any time and even saved to a VMU just like current Dreamcast software. An operator could periodically update the list with new games.

Pace and Sega see the U.S. as the main market for set-top gaming. Although the two companies are looking for distribution partners for the hardware, representatives said they expect the first Dreamcast PVRs to appear by mid-2002.

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