Is it time for another console war, then, or what?

Free Huey!

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By now, you've probably all heard the rumours, from allegedly well-informed sources, that the Playstation 2 will be released early next year, far sooner than everyone thought.

And you've probably already read some idiots pontificating about what it'll mean for Sega's Dreamcast, and whether we're going to see yet another console war between two evenly-matched yet deadly opponents blah blah blah zzzzzz.

And like me, you've probably thought, "You're all totally missing the point."

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Because what everyone seems to have entirely failed to see is that the console wars are over. Sony won. Everyone else is making half-hearted noises about new hardware, but the game is over. The Playstation name is the only one in Console Town.

"But Stu, what about the Dreamcast?", you might be thinking, like some kind of fool. "Everyone says it's going to be great and all the developers are making games for it and everything. Surely you can't be saying it's just going to flop straight away?"

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And sure enough, I'm not saying that the Dreamcast is going to be Sega's seventh flop console in a row. The reason? It isn't a console at all.

Yes, you read that right. Dreamcast isn't a console. Huh? Listen: It's got a Windows operating system. It's going to be upgradeable, fully backwards-compatible. It's got a modem in it. And 3D accelerator hardware. There's going to be a keyboard add-on.

It walks like a duck. It quacks like a duck. Can you guess what it is yet?

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Dreamcast is nothing more, chums, than a PC that goes under your telly. You might have noticed that nearly all the games mentioned as coming out for it so far are PC titles, from PC developers. The portability of code between PCs and the Dreamcast is one of its biggest selling-points to publishers.

Sega aren't (completely) stupid. At last, they've realised that after the spectacular debacle that was the Saturn, they've lost the console market to Sony for ever. Their only hope of a future in hardware lies elsewhere.

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Or did you think it was a coincidence that they'd spent so much time quietly bringing all their games to the PC over the last few years, even though there seemed to be very little money to be made from them?

(None of the Sega PC titles were a significant hit, yet they kept on making them. Hmm.)

Did you think they just LIKED messing about with the nightmare from Hell that is the PC operating system? Or was there, perhaps, some other reason?

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Stealthily, Sega may just be about to try to sneak the biggest revolution in the history of gaming hardware past everyone. But it's not the other console makers who should be worried.