davis.anthony
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That $100 (and maybe more) was likely all down to the DVD drive and everything associated with being able to play DVD's.
Could Dreamcast et al handle this/that game/effect? *DC tech retrospective *spawn
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That $100 (and maybe more) was likely all down to the DVD drive and everything associated with being able to play DVD's.
By Christmas 2000 in Europe Sega were offering a Dreamcast plus entire standalone DVD player for the same price as a PS2.
By Christmas 2000 in the US entire standalone DVD players sold for profit were starting from $100.
You can look at the die area of PS2, the nodes used, and the number of discreet chips and tell that the processing guts of the PS2 were a lot more expensive at launch.
The PS2 was such an unconventional beast and such a pain to squeeze it's capabilities when it launched. But it didn't take long to mindblow us with TTT, RRV, SH2,GT3, DMC and MGS2.
Man these visuals were a whole new revelation. Even Namco didn't top TTT's graphics after that release. That game had visuals that no other game replicated in PS2's whole generation Materials looked like PBR when such thing didn't exist in real time game graphics
Man these visuals were a whole new revelation. Even Namco didn't top TTT's graphics after that release. That game had visuals that no other game replicated in PS2's whole generation Materials looked like PBR when such thing didn't exist in real time game graphics
davis.anthony
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Which was still a good 9 months after PS2 launched, and don't forget that during PS2s development cycle DVD players were $600-1000 and this high cost would have affected production of test and evaluation hardware and the cost of the consoles launch units.
davis.anthony
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Agreed, there was a lot of questions asked about PS2's capabilities compared to the Dreamcast as it just wasn't showing it's power at launch, which lead to people questioning if it was all hype.
Then 12 months in to it's life cycle, it got a release of games that simply would not look as good or work on Dreamcast.
Oh yeah, Sony took on a up front costs to bring DVD to PS2, but they are also a developer and license holder of DVD so there's a large and long tailed revenue stream that could easily amortise those costs over. DVD costs were only high for a tiny portion of the PS2's lifetime.
By US and EU launch DVD was costing Sony a lot less than $100 over a high end CD drive (which was basically what Dreamcast's GD ROMs were). So the PS2's DVD drive doesn't account for the US $100 difference in console launch prices. PS2 was quite a bit more expensive just in terms of the processing guts, and it also used more power (which maybe the Dreamcast could have benefitted from too, so long as it had the necessary cooling).
My first DVD drive was on PC in 1998, which also used a dedicated DVD decoder card that plugged into the GPU. It was very cool but very expensive.
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I had a Pentium 2 400 and software playback was always inferior to the criminally expensive hardware decoder card I had back in the short lived day.
Yeah, nothing more than the likes of ps2 to xbox/gamecube
The doa2 mods already show there was still overhead on Dreamcast, too. Also, you gotta remember that ps2 games had the manpower and budget over DC. If MGS2 was made on DC (if it were viable) it would definitely look similar. Mind you, yes, there will be changes to work around it's limitations, but it would look great in its own right. MGS1 Twin Snakes had less polys per character, etc, and still looked comparable.
It always surprises me how clean Dreamcast looked. And seeing doa2 in 60fps with higher polygon counts and detail kind of makes me sad that we never saw the true potential.
I recently went to a ‘retro’ arcade (with many late 90s early 2000s machines) and even without wearing my -1 diopter glasses, from a distance I could see the muddy ps2 based boards with their flickering field based rendering whereas crazy taxi held up and looked colorful.
I recently went to a ‘retro’ arcade (with many late 90s early 2000s machines) and even without wearing my -1 diopter glasses, from a distance I could see the muddy ps2 based boards with their flickering field based rendering whereas crazy taxi held up and looked colorful.
davis.anthony
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DC games have held up very well in terms of image output but not in terms of graphics.
PS2s composite output is dire, even by composite standards which made field rendering look even worse.
It actually looks really clean with a proper RGB or component output, with the latter allowing 480p progressive scan.
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GC was theoretically more powerful than the PS2. It wasn't just polygons on characters though. MGS2 featured a lot of post processing effects, lots of heavy physics and particle effects, dynamic shadows with variable opacity based on distance and angle of light source, all kinds of reflective surfaces etc. All at 60fps. Surely porting the textures and static polygons is one thing. Replicating all of it is another.
Surely a version of MGS2 could have been made. But I would expect a lot of heavy compromises to maintain 60fps
Especially during the first part of the game with the heavy weather effects and wind, I am very sure that the compromises would have been so big that it would have lost its impact completely. The heavy particle based wheather might have probably kneeled the DC. Even the XBOX struggled in the first section
That's also maybe because Sega image quality on TV (notably using RGB in Europe) was the best. It hasn't being matched by anyone else. From Master System to Dreamcast the IQ you could obtain from RGB cables on a CRT was incredibly high quality compared to the others. Compared to this NES / SNES / Gamecube RGB output was criminally bad (and here I am being nice) and Sony RBG output quality on PS2 was at amateur level.
Yeah, ofcourse gamecube and xbox are more powerful. I was just using twin snakes as an example cause things were reduced or changed. Also, i aready know mgs2 wouldn't be able to do all those fillrate effects at 60fps, but capping at 30fps, and certain small changes would be more than passable on Dreamcast.
davis.anthony
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Watched that a few days ago, it was an interesting beast architecturally.
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davis.anthony
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Compared to what?