SEGA DREAMCAST DEVELOPMENT UNIT HKT-01 PHOTOS COURTESY OF http://www.smspower.org !!

   Sega was really smart when they designed the development unit for Dreamcast. They made use of inexpensive chassis design, off the shelf parts, and made the unit very user friendly. It's basically a mini tower that has all of the dreamcast debugging hardware, dev hardware, and software mastering tools in one. Bolt a handle on it, and you're a walking games studio. Inexpensive compared to PS2 dev, (PSTool costs some $20,000) it was affordable for developers , and in Japan, the home of the one man game company, very popular. SEGA gave some of these away for free as an incentive to get large developers to make games. But as we know, PS2 was where the real money was, and total rubbish like "BANG" and "Tomoe-chan's video diary" weren't exactly what was needed to drive sales. Dreamcast was a brilliant machine, but SEGA having thoroughly ruined it's reputation with 32X and Saturn, the Dreamcast was shunned by the mainstream market. On to the tech crap:

The GD-R tray has the entire write assembly in it. This is good way to minimize media movement. It's also a good way to get all sorts of gooey shit on the lens. The front has the front game ports, and yes, they can blow out just like on th ehome system. The switches are for selecting regions and system modes.            PAGE 2