Okawa Confirms DC Hard Drive, Camera

TOKYO - Isao Okawa, chairman of Sega Enterprises, ASCII, and CSK, spoke about his vision and future for the Dreamcast in his annual address. In it, he revealed Sega's plan to shape the Dreamcast into an easy-to-use computer, complete with a hard drive, to be released later this year, and a camera to allow for videophone-type options. Here's what he had to say:

"PCs have become more powerful and inexpensive in the last few years, with a network infrastructure being formed. But this is still expensive and difficult to learn. So, there are strong needs for an inexpensive, easy-to-use information terminal. We think that Dreamcast fits this need, and we want to prevail not only for home use but offices too.

"We shipped 500,000 units of Dreamcast by the end of last year. About 30 percent of Dreamcast users are already connecting to the Internet. We want to increase this number to a million people as soon as we can. We will provide many different kinds of services and information, including electronic commerce, to the people through this network.

"As I address before, we are preparing not only a hard drive to store e-mail but a camera and microphone for Dreamcast. This peripheral will allow users to have face-to-face communication in multiple channels - which doesn't limit it to two-person communication - and users will be able to enjoy online gaming while seeing each other's faces."