PS2 was the tail end of the bespoke hardware, and Sony gave their chips very marketing names, but I don’t remember the hardware being especially strange. The SDK being ass would be a different issue.

Well the two vector coprocessors (vu0, vu1) each talking to a different processor (cpu or "gpu") was quite weird, imho.

The PS2 was infamous to develop for. Most of the bottleneck came from the vector units. Most middleware eventually made working around the strange hardware much easier.

When asked if they were weary about developing on PS2, due to its reputation of it being tough to code for, Sega devs famously laughed and replied that they already mastered the Saturn - how much harder could it get?

I wonder how many games utilized Windows CE (which was a thing for it) on the Dreamcast.

Not a whole lot. If you wanted to extract the full power of the system then you needed the native SDK. Sega Rally 2 was ported using CE and it has frame rate issues it really shouldn't have an this is attributed to CE

I guess they had a porting job to do since the arcade hardware Sega Rally ran on wasn't Naomi(which was basically a souped up Dreamcast), and they figured if they used WindowsCE then they could use DirectX and get a PC port out of the same efforts.

But yeah, for a flagship title they should have went for a port with the official SDK.

Naomi games ported over to the Dreamcast just fine. It was essentially a Dreamcast with more memory if I'm not mistaken. Sega Rally 2 used the Model 2 board.

Sega Rally 1 used Model 2, Sega Rally 2 used Model 3.

The goal was to prove to third-party developers that it was trivial to port an existing Windows game to Dreamcast. It was sort of a tech demo for the industry.

The end result though was… demonstrating the Windows CE overhead.