[cenal]

As a retro gaming enthusiast myself, I think the issue of the system not having a DVD drive is only potentially surpassed by the ease of which piracy was possible on the system.

What seems craziest to me of that era is that Microsoft didn't just buy Sega to enter the market and instead made a huge bet on Halo. Seamus Blackley should be better known for what they pulled off in Redmond.

[jimbob45]

Halo wasn’t a “huge bet”. Bungie had made three criminally underrated games in the Marathon series prior to Halo. In fact, Halo is largely supposed to take place in the same universe, although the final product was only vaguely linked.

[brendank310]

MS was knee deep in anti-trust negotiations with the DoJ around that time so I imagine acquisitions of that size and scope were off the table. Sega probably was small potatoes financially for MS at the time, but buying one of the three companies in that market wouldn't have helped their anti-competitive reputation.

[trelane]

Maybe. It's not like they didn't turn around shortly thereafter and launch their own console, likely incorporating lessons learned from their Dreamcast work.

[trelane]

Indeed, from the Wikipedia, article, MSFT had a fork of the OS to run DirectX games on it "Microsoft developed a custom Dreamcast version of Windows CE with DirectX API and dynamic-link libraries, making it easy to port PC games to the platform,[31] although programmers would ultimately favor Sega's development tools over those from Microsoft.[28]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast

[twoodfin]

My understanding at the time was that Xbox was not so much a bet on gaming as a bet on the PC architecture—and the Microsoft software platforms that dominated it.

[trelane]

That may have been in the cards eventually, had the Dreamcast worked out better. Microsoft made the OS for the Dreamcast after all.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast

[ac2u]

Sort of. Despite the logo on the console, the BIOS/OS on the Dreamcast was in-house by SEGA. The Windows CE thing was an SDK developed my MS that was essentially a port of DirectX to the Dreamcast to give developers an option to utilize existing skillsets in DirectX in making games, or to make certain PC ports to Dreamcast easier. Sega still had their own SDK though that most games used.

However, rather than an on-system OS, the Windows CE had to be bundled on disk for each game that used it.