Many people know of the R7 dreamcast, which is black and has the characters R7 printed on the dreamcast lid. I knew R7 corresponded to some sort of Japanese regulation or law related to pachinko parlors, but I read an interesting factoid today in some old press coverage of the release of this special edition:
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/sega- ... 0-2782515/Sega announced today that it will release the Dreamcast R7 in Japan on September 9 for 9,800 yen (about $80). This version of the console, which features a black color scheme with a golden "R7" logo, waspreviously used as a network console in pachinko parlors in Japan. Production of the Dreamcast was terminated earlier this year when the company announced its withdrawal from the game hardware business.
What does it mean that dreamcasts were used as network consoles in pachinko parlors? Were they somehow hooked up to pachinko machines, perhaps with custom software that has not been discovered or dumped yet? Or maybe they served as little internet kiosks inside pachinko parlors for customers to pay some money to do basic webbrowsing using the typical dreamcast internet browsers when not gambling at the pachinko machines? Anyone know?
