Sega System SP/Aurora: The Dreamcast-on-a-chip that is still manufactured

[M-S]

 Although Sega discontinued the Dreamcast in 2001, the hardware still persisted through the 2000s in the Naomi, Atomiswave and Hikaru arcade boards, these are very well known and considered to be upgrades to the original architecture, however, the two main components are still identical, an SH-4 CPU and a PowerVR2 GPU, in fact, when Sega made the Naomi 2 they decided to just double the hardware and add a few components, but at the time there were already PowerVR3 and 4 GPUs being sold, which brings the question of why they didn't use one of those. One of the theories that explain it is that Sega had so much of that hardware in stock that they needed to find a quick way to use it. But in 2004 Sammy had announced a partnership with the company Renesas, which happened to own licenses to both of those components, the result was the Sega System SP arcade board, which featured all of the Dreamcast's components in a single chip, the Renesas SH3707.

 Now, when you look at it, it doesn't look like a system-on-a-chip, but all of the other components are related to copy protection, loading games through Compact Flash, linking multiple systems and a lot more. This board was designed to be as versatile as possible, as it doesn't have a standard form factor, every single machine is different, but the games themselves are running in the SoC. What is more impressive is that it's in fact better than the other boards, only inferior to the Naomi 2, it has a PowerVR4 GPU and a slightly faster CPU(1.5x). There are only 4 games that don't involve gambling, ticket redemption or children atractions, 3 of them seem to be just like the minigames in the Like a Dragon series, the other one is Giant Tetris, which is exactly what the name implies.

 But coming back to the main point of the thread, this system was manufactured all the way into 2014, and Renesas seems to have liked this SH-4+PowerVR combination, they have used it in mobile devices, home appliances and car navigation systems, one of these features a dual SH-4 and a series 5 GPU, the same series that is on the PS Vita, so you could assume it even surpasses all of Sega's arcade boards from the 2000s.

Now, here's the point I wanted to make, Sega talked with multiple notable figures in the community about a Dreamcast Mini, they seemed to bring two options, a system with similar specs and price to the Genesis Mini running PC ports, which they consider that won't satisfy fans due to the multiple downgrades in these ports, or a more premium system, running the actual Dreamcast ports, what I think they could be referring to in the latter is this architecture, I don't know how much it is backwards compatible with the Dreamcast, but they could make a custom IC for that matter.

And that's it, sources are Wikipedia, Sega Retro, Sega 16 and some very old posts from inactive forums.

[Zoyous]

Thanks for that detailed overview! When asked a couple of years ago about a possible Dreamcast Mini, Yousuke Okinari said something to the effect that they weren't able to do it at that time because the projected cost would be in the same range with current-gen consoles. I wonder if that was considering the expense of this chip in particular, or some other hypothetical architecture.

[M-S]

 I find it very likely to be, back when this appeared in 2004 there were a lot of discussions in forums speculating that this would be used for Sega's seventh generation portable console, the arcade board also was described to be half the cost of a Naomi, which isn't cheap anyway. Buying just the SH-4 CPU from Mouser costs at least 30$, of course getting it from the original source in millions of units would make it way cheaper, they probably want it to have a similar price to the Mega Drive Mini, so unfortunately they will likely wait for a cheap Android IC capable of Dreamcast software emulation.

 Considering the recent popularity of modern consoles that use either real hardware or FPGA emulation being sold for around 200$ they might change their minds, specially if they had some way to expand the library to sell games or use original accessories, but we'll see about that.