Video games - History of video game consoles

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	Video games - History of video game consoles

The sixth-generation era (sometimes inaccurately referred to as the 128-bit era; see section below) refers to the computer and video games, video game consoles, and video game handhelds available at the turn of the 21st century. Platforms of the sixth generation are the Sega Dreamcast, Nintendo GameCube, Sony PlayStation 2, and Microsoft Xbox.

Video game consoles

PlayStation 2 dominated sales, with 100 million units shipped to retailers. Xbox was a distant second, with 25 million units, and Nintendo was third with 18.5 million GameCubes sold during the same period. The Sega Dreamcast sold roughly 10 million consoles despite its shorter lifetime.

Number of bits

Bit ratings for consoles largely fell by the wayside after the 32-bit era. The number of “bits” cited in console names referred to the CPU word size, but there was little to be gained from increasing the word size much beyond 32-bits; performance depended on other factors, such as processor speed, graphics processor speed, bandwidth and memory size.

The Sega Dreamcast, the first of the “128-bit” consoles, has a dual-issue 32-bit CPU core, 64-bit GPU, and 64-bit data bus although the geometry sub-processor GPU can perform internal math on 128-bit words. One of the PlayStation 2's many processors is known as the “128-bit Emotion Engine” but has a dual-issue 64-bit core; the graphics synthesizer has a 2560-bit DRAM bus. But the Nintendo GameCube is more powerful than the PS2, with only a single 64-bit CPU core. The Microsoft Xbox, the most powerful of the sixth-generation era consoles, uses a 32-bit CPU and 256-bit GPU, a configuration that is becoming standard in many desktop computers. The importance of “bitness” in the modern console gaming market has thus decreased due to the use of components that process data in varying word sizes. It is also important to note that most game companies sell on “n-bit talk” to over-emphasize the hardware capabilities of their system. The Sega Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2 were the last systems to use the term “128-bit” in their marketing to describe their capability.

Video game handhelds

During the sixth generation era, the handheld game console market exploded, with the introduction of new devices from many different manufacturers. Nintendo maintained their large market share of the handheld market with the release in 2001 of the highly upgraded Game Boy called the Game Boy Advance. Two redesigns of this system followed. The first, the Game Boy Advance SP in 2003 and the second, the Game Boy Micro in 2005. Also introduced was the Neo Geo Pocket Color in 1998 and Bandai's WonderSwan Color launched in Japan in 1999. Notably, Korean company GamePark introduced their GP32 handheld in 2001, and with it came the dawn of open-source handheld consoles.

A major new addition to the market was the trend for corporations to include a large number of "non-gaming" features into their handhelds. Everything from cell phones, MP3 players, portable movie players, to Palm Pilot-like features began to pop up on a regular basis during this generation. The first of these was Nokia's N-Gage, which was released in 2003 and doubled primarily as a mobile phone. It subsequently went through a redesign in 2004 and was renamed the N-Gage QD. A second handheld, the Zodiac from Tapwave was released in 2004 and was based on the PalmOS; it added numerous features typically found in PDAs.

With more and more PDAs arriving during the previous generation, the difference between consumer electronics and traditional computing began to blur- and cheap console technology grew from that blur. It was said of PDAs that they are "the computers of handheld gaming" because of their multi-purpose capabilities and the increasingly powerful computer hardware that resided within them- the capability existed to move gaming beyond the last generations 16-bit limitations. However, PDAs were still geared towards the typical buisnessman, and lacked new, affordable software franchises to compete with dedicated handheld gaming consoles.

With more and more handhelds arriving towards the end of this generation, it gets harder to locate exactly where the sixth generation ends and where the new seventh generation begins. It is believed that the seventh generation began in late 2004 with the introduction of Nintendo's Nintendo DS and Sony's PlayStation Portable.

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