It certainly looks that way. The guys at Siliconera caught a set of patent trademarks for something called “Ringedge” and “Ringwide”, which are both listed as having something to so with arcade game boards. Interestingly enough the trademarks also mentions “prerecorded magnetic data carriers featuring arcade game programs” which could be a fancy way of saying a hard drive (although seriously ot those of you in the arcade hardware industry – why are we still using hard drives which will break down in a few years? I know that the new SSD drives are still expensive but flash memory isn’t that bad, I’m just saying!) or maybe it’s something else. Either way it looks like their powerful Europa hardware is not going to be getting much love and perhaps this Ringwide/edge will be what Sega is going to use to replace Lindbergh. We’ll have to wait and see.
Slight update: I’ve read online that some are thinking that this means that Sega will be getting back into the console business but it seems to me that such an idea is wishful thinking. This hardware rumor is pretty much the same thing we saw with Lindbergh and that did not lead Sega into creating new console hardware (because Lindbergh and their most recent arcade hardware Europa were modded PCs) and I have not seen or heard anything about this new hardware that indicates that it has something to do with consoles. It’s likely that the Dreamcast 2 will have to wait a bit longer.
[Via Kotaku that was via Siliconera] [Discuss on the Forum]
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Leynos
I think that the problem is that there isn’t really another inexpensive way to offer 80 GB of random access storage. SSDs (which are flash anyway) are a long way off from yielding 1GB/$US, whilst a 50GB blu-ray disc would slow things down too much. Loading the entire game into RAM would mean that the board would have to include a costly amount of on board memory.
Sadly, hard drives are still the best we have at the moment.