Those of you who know me well know my videogame-related secret: Before I was a die-hard, bona-fide Xbox fanboy, I was, in fact, a SEGA fanboy.After my Super NES (the last Nintendo console I owned), instead of jumping on the bandwagon and buying a Sony PlayStation (I've always hated Sony), I chose to wait and buy the SEGA DreamCast. With SEGA's partnership with Microsoft, the seeds were sown for the Xbox console. I've always said the Xbox 360 was the spiritual successor to the DreamCast.

The Xbox 360 is good enough for me, especially considering that SEGA is one of the many publishers developing Xbox Live titles (in other words, it should not be long before I can play Sonic the Hedgehog on Xbox Live Arcade). But, what of portable gaming? The Nintendo DS has recieved a facelift, and not instead of looking like a cheap piece of plastic, it looks like an iPod knock-off. The Sony PSP is D.O.A., and, well, made by Sony.

Well, I came across this article from some French gaming site, which claims that SEGA is preparing a portable console to be displayed at the usual gaming trade-shows next year.

It looks a lot like a DreamCast controller with a Nintendo DS lid, and a Sony PSP screen to me. In other words, the best the portable console market has to offer, in one device. The scoop explains that the spot in the center is an integrated laptop-style mousepad.

Furthermore:

It has an integrated USB port, Compact Flash reader, and SD Card reader, which means SEGA must be planning a lot of media-reading functionality (Off the top if my head, I can imagine sticking your digital camera's SD or CF card into the device to use it to view pictures, or sticking a bunch of MP3s on a shiny new 2GB SD card and turning the device into an MP3 player).

The hardware sounds promising: A 566 MHz Samsung CPU (compare that with Sony's dual-core CPU capped at 222 MHz), a 128-bit NVidia graphics card, and 128 MB RAM. That means it will be mroe than capable to meet SEGA's goals of allowing Master System, Saturn, and DreamCast games to be played.

As for media capabilities, SEGA is apparently considering the posibility of DivX format support (how about loading your 2GB SD card or USB flashdrive with 4 DVD movie rips instead of wasting your money on Sony's nearly dead UMD format?)
If you haven't been scared off by all the technical mumbo jumbo by now, then you're probably as excited as I am.

technorati tags: aprilfools, rumor, sega

Filed under: gaming on April 13th, 2006