Audio and Input

Audio

Although the novice gamer will place emphasis on visual quality and performance, the hardcore gamer knows that audio is just as important part of the gaming experience. That's why most of the FS staff uses headphones when playing Quake 3.

The audio chip used in the Dreamcast is a custom-made Yamaha "Super Intelligent Sound ASIC." Although Yamaha's PC audio chips are geared toward low-end performance, the Dreamcast's sound chip is as capable as the best PC sound chips you can get today. Up to 64 concurrent streams are supported putting on par with the best of today's PCI sound cards. MIDI quality is top notch with full Yamaha-XG support and 2MB of RAM for samples. In addition to performance, audio quality is also important. Positional 3D audio is delivered by QSound and although it works fairly well it's still no match for Aureal A3D 2.0 with occlusion and reflection.

The Dreamcast uses a Burr-Brown DAC, although I have not been able to confirm which model. Although Burr-Brown does make a wide-range of DACs including budget and reference-quality designs, I found the Dreamcast's DAC pretty good and balanced and is as elegant as a good DAC on a PC soundcard. Unless you're an audio nut like myself and you are using a Burr-Brown PCM1704 DAC with your PC, the Dreamcast's audio performance and quality is just as good as what is offered on the PC.

Input

The "standard" inputs for the PC are the keyboard and mouse whereas the Dreamcast has its control pad with separate digital and analog directional controls, 4 buttons, and two analog triggers. The dichotomy between the PC and the Dreamcast's default controls is an example of where each product sees itself. The mouse and keyboard is obviously well adapted to first-person shooters as well as real-time strategy games whereas the Dreamcast's gamepad is designed to be more well-rounded and adapted to platform games.

Although you can easily buy after-market controllers such as a light gun, or a steering wheel for both the PC and Dreamcast, the default controller available is a significant feature to discuss. Although it is always best to play a PC racing game with a steering wheel, the fact that a steering wheel is not standard makes it important that the game support the keyboard. While this is trivial now, the divide will manifest when it comes to genre specific software comparisons.