Could Dreamcast et al handle this/that game/effect? *DC tech retrospective *spawn

Wow are those demos available anywhere?
No, not at the moment. Some are a bit old, and it might take some work to get working again with the changes I've made to my code/model format since then. When I have time to do DC dev, I'm busy working on HarleQuest, so I couldn't upload any right now.

Crazy Taxi has a piss poor draw distance (much lower than GTA3's) and flat environments so hardly a case to prove GTA3 is possible on DC from a streaming point of view, if anything it proves the opposite.

The draw distance in Crazy Taxi is so bad and the environments wouldn't look out of place on PSOne, games colorful looks flatter it to be honest.
Crazy Taxi is not a good example of streaming on the DC. Crazy Taxi was designed first as an arcade game for the Naomi, with double video and main RAM, where the entire map could be loaded into memory at once. I think I there was an interview somewhere that Sega wasn't sure if they could port it to the DC because of that. The streaming system was added on for the home port, so it's just enough to work. The attract mode for both home and arcade are different, with the arcade version teleporting around the map between each cut (since it doesn't need to load,) while the home version always cuts to nearby areas, slowly making a circuit around the map (so it has time to load.)

The rendering library for Crazy Taxi is the same as the one used for games like Dead or Alive 2, Virtua Tennis, House of the Dead 2, and Outtrigger, so it's really not intened for anything open world in the first place. And Crazy Taxi is an arcade game. The map was designed gameplay first, and had to fit in the Naomi main RAM. Arcade games are designed with very short schedules, so there's no time to create a large detailed world, and with the game's time limit you probably aren't going to be stopping to take the time to look at things closely, so there's no reason to bother adding tons of detail anyways.

The DC version of Crazy Taxi doesn't stream textures, just geometry. Almost all arcade textures were reduced to quarter resolution to fit in the DC's video RAM. You could probably still fit most the arcade textures on the DC, if you compressed the uncompressed textures and improved the compression ratio on the ones that were compressed. Crazy Taxi 2 has higher resolution textures because they started with the DC's limits in mind, and cut back on the variety to make them fit.

With a more space efficient model format, you could actually load the entire Crazy Taxi map into memory on the DC. The map is about 325K vertices and 200K tris, so if you had 16 byte vertices (6 byte position, 2 byte spherical coord normal, 4 byte color, 4 byte UV) and estimate an 8 byte average overhead per tri for indices/materials/culling info/etc, the whole map mesh could fit in less than 7MB. With the model format actually used, its 12.8MB. Nothing on the disc is compressed, besides audio and textures, so it wastes bandwidth and time loading.

There really isn't anything on the DC that attempts to push the DC's streaming capabilities. Sega was too focused on arcade style games where it's uncommon, and Shenmue's streaming is likely limited because of it's Saturn roots. I guess JGR or Omicron might be the best examples? Of course, they're nothing like GTA.

PSP has 32MB (Latter models have 64MB) of system ram compared to DC's 16MB which is a huge advantage over DC.
For the PSP, apparently 8MB of RAM is reserved for the OS. On the DC, only 64KB of RAM is reserved for some syscalls (mainly for disc access). So the developer has access to 24+2MB of RAM on the original PSP, versus 16+8+2 MB of RAM for the DC. The DC's compressed textures are smaller than the PSP's, but the PVR also has to store scene data in video RAM, so it balances out a bit. They're pretty close to the same. The unified RAM in the PSP is nicer since you have the freedom to do stuff like trade sound effects for textures, where as with non-unified you're stuck with what the hardware demands. If you wanted to, I guess you could also say that the PSP has an additional memory advantage because it's limited to a lower resolution. It's frame buffer is smaller and it can get by with lower resolution textures, so it effectively has more RAM.

PSP has nothing to do with this thread.
Talking about a DC game and comparing it to its ports has nothing to do with this thread, about how the DC can handle ports from other systems?

You seem to be overly focused on the question of, "Can the DC do an exact replica of a complex PS2 game?" That's not an interesting question to ask, in the same way it's not interesting to ask, "Can an Atari 2600 do an exact replica of a complex XBSX game." The answer is obvious, so it's pointless to discuss. No one cares about it. It's more interesting to ask, "How well would the DC handle running a complex PS2 game?" That's what everyone else is interested in.

Maybe someone could make another thread where we could discuss philosophy on what it means for one system to be able to run a game from another. How accurate does the conversion have to be to count as the same game? Is it the same game if there's 2% more slow down on one system, but otherwise identical? What if it drops a single frame in one cutscene, but is identical everywhere else? What about less slowdown, or the same amount but in different places? Does converting non-interactive in-engine cutscenes to lossless FMV count being a different game? Would changing the texture compression format mean that the games aren't the same, since the compression artifacts would be different? Could you say that the XBSX can't run Smash Ultimate, because Nintendo would never agree to it? Those questions are more interesting to discuss than how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or if the DC can run the PS2 version of GTA3 exactly.
 
No, not at the moment. Some are a bit old, and it might take some work to get working again with the changes I've made to my code/model format since then. When I have time to do DC dev, I'm busy working on HarleQuest, so I couldn't upload any right now.


Crazy Taxi is not a good example of streaming on the DC. Crazy Taxi was designed first as an arcade game for the Naomi, with double video and main RAM, where the entire map could be loaded into memory at once. I think I there was an interview somewhere that Sega wasn't sure if they could port it to the DC because of that. The streaming system was added on for the home port, so it's just enough to work. The attract mode for both home and arcade are different, with the arcade version teleporting around the map between each cut (since it doesn't need to load,) while the home version always cuts to nearby areas, slowly making a circuit around the map (so it has time to load.)

The rendering library for Crazy Taxi is the same as the one used for games like Dead or Alive 2, Virtua Tennis, House of the Dead 2, and Outtrigger, so it's really not intened for anything open world in the first place. And Crazy Taxi is an arcade game. The map was designed gameplay first, and had to fit in the Naomi main RAM. Arcade games are designed with very short schedules, so there's no time to create a large detailed world, and with the game's time limit you probably aren't going to be stopping to take the time to look at things closely, so there's no reason to bother adding tons of detail anyways.

The DC version of Crazy Taxi doesn't stream textures, just geometry. Almost all arcade textures were reduced to quarter resolution to fit in the DC's video RAM. You could probably still fit most the arcade textures on the DC, if you compressed the uncompressed textures and improved the compression ratio on the ones that were compressed. Crazy Taxi 2 has higher resolution textures because they started with the DC's limits in mind, and cut back on the variety to make them fit.

With a more space efficient model format, you could actually load the entire Crazy Taxi map into memory on the DC. The map is about 325K vertices and 200K tris, so if you had 16 byte vertices (6 byte position, 2 byte spherical coord normal, 4 byte color, 4 byte UV) and estimate an 8 byte average overhead per tri for indices/materials/culling info/etc, the whole map mesh could fit in less than 7MB. With the model format actually used, its 12.8MB. Nothing on the disc is compressed, besides audio and textures, so it wastes bandwidth and time loading.

There really isn't anything on the DC that attempts to push the DC's streaming capabilities. Sega was too focused on arcade style games where it's uncommon, and Shenmue's streaming is likely limited because of it's Saturn roots. I guess JGR or Omicron might be the best examples? Of course, they're nothing like GTA.


For the PSP, apparently 8MB of RAM is reserved for the OS. On the DC, only 64KB of RAM is reserved for some syscalls (mainly for disc access). So the developer has access to 24+2MB of RAM on the original PSP, versus 16+8+2 MB of RAM for the DC. The DC's compressed textures are smaller than the PSP's, but the PVR also has to store scene data in video RAM, so it balances out a bit. They're pretty close to the same. The unified RAM in the PSP is nicer since you have the freedom to do stuff like trade sound effects for textures, where as with non-unified you're stuck with what the hardware demands. If you wanted to, I guess you could also say that the PSP has an additional memory advantage because it's limited to a lower resolution. It's frame buffer is smaller and it can get by with lower resolution textures, so it effectively has more RAM.


Talking about a DC game and comparing it to its ports has nothing to do with this thread, about how the DC can handle ports from other systems?

You seem to be overly focused on the question of, "Can the DC do an exact replica of a complex PS2 game?" That's not an interesting question to ask, in the same way it's not interesting to ask, "Can an Atari 2600 do an exact replica of a complex XBSX game." The answer is obvious, so it's pointless to discuss. No one cares about it. It's more interesting to ask, "How well would the DC handle running a complex PS2 game?" That's what everyone else is interested in.

Maybe someone could make another thread where we could discuss philosophy on what it means for one system to be able to run a game from another. How accurate does the conversion have to be to count as the same game? Is it the same game if there's 2% more slow down on one system, but otherwise identical? What if it drops a single frame in one cutscene, but is identical everywhere else? What about less slowdown, or the same amount but in different places? Does converting non-interactive in-engine cutscenes to lossless FMV count being a different game? Would changing the texture compression format mean that the games aren't the same, since the compression artifacts would be different? Could you say that the XBSX can't run Smash Ultimate, because Nintendo would never agree to it? Those questions are more interesting to discuss than how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or if the DC can run the PS2 version of GTA3 exactly.
God damn son. I've read your post twice. It inspires me.
 
No, not at the moment. Some are a bit old, and it might take some work to get working again with the changes I've made to my code/model format since then. When I have time to do DC dev, I'm busy working on HarleQuest, so I couldn't upload any right now.


Crazy Taxi is not a good example of streaming on the DC. Crazy Taxi was designed first as an arcade game for the Naomi, with double video and main RAM, where the entire map could be loaded into memory at once. I think I there was an interview somewhere that Sega wasn't sure if they could port it to the DC because of that. The streaming system was added on for the home port, so it's just enough to work. The attract mode for both home and arcade are different, with the arcade version teleporting around the map between each cut (since it doesn't need to load,) while the home version always cuts to nearby areas, slowly making a circuit around the map (so it has time to load.)

The rendering library for Crazy Taxi is the same as the one used for games like Dead or Alive 2, Virtua Tennis, House of the Dead 2, and Outtrigger, so it's really not intened for anything open world in the first place. And Crazy Taxi is an arcade game. The map was designed gameplay first, and had to fit in the Naomi main RAM. Arcade games are designed with very short schedules, so there's no time to create a large detailed world, and with the game's time limit you probably aren't going to be stopping to take the time to look at things closely, so there's no reason to bother adding tons of detail anyways.

The DC version of Crazy Taxi doesn't stream textures, just geometry. Almost all arcade textures were reduced to quarter resolution to fit in the DC's video RAM. You could probably still fit most the arcade textures on the DC, if you compressed the uncompressed textures and improved the compression ratio on the ones that were compressed. Crazy Taxi 2 has higher resolution textures because they started with the DC's limits in mind, and cut back on the variety to make them fit.

With a more space efficient model format, you could actually load the entire Crazy Taxi map into memory on the DC. The map is about 325K vertices and 200K tris, so if you had 16 byte vertices (6 byte position, 2 byte spherical coord normal, 4 byte color, 4 byte UV) and estimate an 8 byte average overhead per tri for indices/materials/culling info/etc, the whole map mesh could fit in less than 7MB. With the model format actually used, its 12.8MB. Nothing on the disc is compressed, besides audio and textures, so it wastes bandwidth and time loading.

There really isn't anything on the DC that attempts to push the DC's streaming capabilities. Sega was too focused on arcade style games where it's uncommon, and Shenmue's streaming is likely limited because of it's Saturn roots. I guess JGR or Omicron might be the best examples? Of course, they're nothing like GTA.


For the PSP, apparently 8MB of RAM is reserved for the OS. On the DC, only 64KB of RAM is reserved for some syscalls (mainly for disc access). So the developer has access to 24+2MB of RAM on the original PSP, versus 16+8+2 MB of RAM for the DC. The DC's compressed textures are smaller than the PSP's, but the PVR also has to store scene data in video RAM, so it balances out a bit. They're pretty close to the same. The unified RAM in the PSP is nicer since you have the freedom to do stuff like trade sound effects for textures, where as with non-unified you're stuck with what the hardware demands. If you wanted to, I guess you could also say that the PSP has an additional memory advantage because it's limited to a lower resolution. It's frame buffer is smaller and it can get by with lower resolution textures, so it effectively has more RAM.


Talking about a DC game and comparing it to its ports has nothing to do with this thread, about how the DC can handle ports from other systems?

You seem to be overly focused on the question of, "Can the DC do an exact replica of a complex PS2 game?" That's not an interesting question to ask, in the same way it's not interesting to ask, "Can an Atari 2600 do an exact replica of a complex XBSX game." The answer is obvious, so it's pointless to discuss. No one cares about it. It's more interesting to ask, "How well would the DC handle running a complex PS2 game?" That's what everyone else is interested in.

Maybe someone could make another thread where we could discuss philosophy on what it means for one system to be able to run a game from another. How accurate does the conversion have to be to count as the same game? Is it the same game if there's 2% more slow down on one system, but otherwise identical? What if it drops a single frame in one cutscene, but is identical everywhere else? What about less slowdown, or the same amount but in different places? Does converting non-interactive in-engine cutscenes to lossless FMV count being a different game? Would changing the texture compression format mean that the games aren't the same, since the compression artifacts would be different? Could you say that the XBSX can't run Smash Ultimate, because Nintendo would never agree to it? Those questions are more interesting to discuss than how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or if the DC can run the PS2 version of GTA3 exactly.
Thank you for saying this!
 
No, not at the moment. Some are a bit old, and it might take some work to get working again with the changes I've made to my code/model format since then. When I have time to do DC dev, I'm busy working on HarleQuest, so I couldn't upload any right now.


Crazy Taxi is not a good example of streaming on the DC. Crazy Taxi was designed first as an arcade game for the Naomi, with double video and main RAM, where the entire map could be loaded into memory at once. I think I there was an interview somewhere that Sega wasn't sure if they could port it to the DC because of that. The streaming system was added on for the home port, so it's just enough to work. The attract mode for both home and arcade are different, with the arcade version teleporting around the map between each cut (since it doesn't need to load,) while the home version always cuts to nearby areas, slowly making a circuit around the map (so it has time to load.)

The rendering library for Crazy Taxi is the same as the one used for games like Dead or Alive 2, Virtua Tennis, House of the Dead 2, and Outtrigger, so it's really not intened for anything open world in the first place. And Crazy Taxi is an arcade game. The map was designed gameplay first, and had to fit in the Naomi main RAM. Arcade games are designed with very short schedules, so there's no time to create a large detailed world, and with the game's time limit you probably aren't going to be stopping to take the time to look at things closely, so there's no reason to bother adding tons of detail anyways.

The DC version of Crazy Taxi doesn't stream textures, just geometry. Almost all arcade textures were reduced to quarter resolution to fit in the DC's video RAM. You could probably still fit most the arcade textures on the DC, if you compressed the uncompressed textures and improved the compression ratio on the ones that were compressed. Crazy Taxi 2 has higher resolution textures because they started with the DC's limits in mind, and cut back on the variety to make them fit.

With a more space efficient model format, you could actually load the entire Crazy Taxi map into memory on the DC. The map is about 325K vertices and 200K tris, so if you had 16 byte vertices (6 byte position, 2 byte spherical coord normal, 4 byte color, 4 byte UV) and estimate an 8 byte average overhead per tri for indices/materials/culling info/etc, the whole map mesh could fit in less than 7MB. With the model format actually used, its 12.8MB. Nothing on the disc is compressed, besides audio and textures, so it wastes bandwidth and time loading.

There really isn't anything on the DC that attempts to push the DC's streaming capabilities. Sega was too focused on arcade style games where it's uncommon, and Shenmue's streaming is likely limited because of it's Saturn roots. I guess JGR or Omicron might be the best examples? Of course, they're nothing like GTA.


For the PSP, apparently 8MB of RAM is reserved for the OS. On the DC, only 64KB of RAM is reserved for some syscalls (mainly for disc access). So the developer has access to 24+2MB of RAM on the original PSP, versus 16+8+2 MB of RAM for the DC. The DC's compressed textures are smaller than the PSP's, but the PVR also has to store scene data in video RAM, so it balances out a bit. They're pretty close to the same. The unified RAM in the PSP is nicer since you have the freedom to do stuff like trade sound effects for textures, where as with non-unified you're stuck with what the hardware demands. If you wanted to, I guess you could also say that the PSP has an additional memory advantage because it's limited to a lower resolution. It's frame buffer is smaller and it can get by with lower resolution textures, so it effectively has more RAM.


Talking about a DC game and comparing it to its ports has nothing to do with this thread, about how the DC can handle ports from other systems?

You seem to be overly focused on the question of, "Can the DC do an exact replica of a complex PS2 game?" That's not an interesting question to ask, in the same way it's not interesting to ask, "Can an Atari 2600 do an exact replica of a complex XBSX game." The answer is obvious, so it's pointless to discuss. No one cares about it. It's more interesting to ask, "How well would the DC handle running a complex PS2 game?" That's what everyone else is interested in.

Maybe someone could make another thread where we could discuss philosophy on what it means for one system to be able to run a game from another. How accurate does the conversion have to be to count as the same game? Is it the same game if there's 2% more slow down on one system, but otherwise identical? What if it drops a single frame in one cutscene, but is identical everywhere else? What about less slowdown, or the same amount but in different places? Does converting non-interactive in-engine cutscenes to lossless FMV count being a different game? Would changing the texture compression format mean that the games aren't the same, since the compression artifacts would be different? Could you say that the XBSX can't run Smash Ultimate, because Nintendo would never agree to it? Those questions are more interesting to discuss than how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or if the DC can run the PS2 version of GTA3 exactly.
Coudnt be more agree!!
 
You seem to be overly focused on the question of, "Can the DC do an exact replica of a complex PS2 game?" That's not an interesting question to ask

That's the thread title (which I have suggested needs to be changed to something more suitable) : Could Dreamcast et al handle this/that game/effect?

It's more interesting to ask, "How well would the DC handle running a complex PS2 game?" That's what everyone else is interested in.

Which I've also spoke about.

Maybe someone could make another thread where we could discuss philosophy on what it means for one system to be able to run a game from another.

I've already made a similar suggestion in this thread, stating we need clarity of what it means by 'handle' that game or effect.

How accurate does the conversion have to be to count as the same game? Is it the same game if there's 2% more slow down on one system, but otherwise identical? What if it drops a single frame in one cutscene, but is identical everywhere else? What about less slowdown, or the same amount but in different places? Does converting non-interactive in-engine cutscenes to lossless FMV count being a different game? Would changing the texture compression format mean that the games aren't the same, since the compression artifacts would be different? Could you say that the XBSX can't run Smash Ultimate, because Nintendo would never agree to it?

Once again, I've already suggested in this thread that that level of clarity is needed.

Those questions are more interesting to discuss than how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or if the DC can run the PS2 version of GTA3 exactly.

That's a boring question as it's easy, the answer is no it can't. But it's been dragged on for pages as some people can't come to that simple conclusion.

I've also suggested it would be good to discuses what systems may have to removed from the PS2 version to get it running on DC at an 'acceptable' level, which would be a cool topic.

So it's nice to see someone else finally suggest things I did several pages back.
 
Now curious. I wonder if there is a possibility of porting a PC version to the DC and having it run through an SD card with all gameplay systems intact. Optimizing the data on Disk for proper steaming would be a big hussle. So an SD mod would be a nice solution
 
Now curious. I wonder if there is a possibility of porting a PC version to the DC and having it run through an SD card with all gameplay systems intact. Optimizing the data on Disk for proper steaming would be a big hussle. So an SD mod would be a nice solution
Are you psychic or something. According to Ian Michaels in Dreamcast talk someone is in the initial stages of porting the PC version to Dreamcast of gta3. Apparently menu runs and makes it in game ( what ever that means). Talk about coincidental. It's gonna be super tough with the homebrew libraries for performance but I guess we will see how far it goes. Aren't the pc assets basically the enhanced Xbox assets?

image-1.png
 
No, not at the moment. Some are a bit old, and it might take some work to get working again with the changes I've made to my code/model format since then. When I have time to do DC dev, I'm busy working on HarleQuest, so I couldn't upload any right now.


Crazy Taxi is not a good example of streaming on the DC. Crazy Taxi was designed first as an arcade game for the Naomi, with double video and main RAM, where the entire map could be loaded into memory at once. I think I there was an interview somewhere that Sega wasn't sure if they could port it to the DC because of that. The streaming system was added on for the home port, so it's just enough to work. The attract mode for both home and arcade are different, with the arcade version teleporting around the map between each cut (since it doesn't need to load,) while the home version always cuts to nearby areas, slowly making a circuit around the map (so it has time to load.)

The rendering library for Crazy Taxi is the same as the one used for games like Dead or Alive 2, Virtua Tennis, House of the Dead 2, and Outtrigger, so it's really not intened for anything open world in the first place. And Crazy Taxi is an arcade game. The map was designed gameplay first, and had to fit in the Naomi main RAM. Arcade games are designed with very short schedules, so there's no time to create a large detailed world, and with the game's time limit you probably aren't going to be stopping to take the time to look at things closely, so there's no reason to bother adding tons of detail anyways.

The DC version of Crazy Taxi doesn't stream textures, just geometry. Almost all arcade textures were reduced to quarter resolution to fit in the DC's video RAM. You could probably still fit most the arcade textures on the DC, if you compressed the uncompressed textures and improved the compression ratio on the ones that were compressed. Crazy Taxi 2 has higher resolution textures because they started with the DC's limits in mind, and cut back on the variety to make them fit.

With a more space efficient model format, you could actually load the entire Crazy Taxi map into memory on the DC. The map is about 325K vertices and 200K tris, so if you had 16 byte vertices (6 byte position, 2 byte spherical coord normal, 4 byte color, 4 byte UV) and estimate an 8 byte average overhead per tri for indices/materials/culling info/etc, the whole map mesh could fit in less than 7MB. With the model format actually used, its 12.8MB. Nothing on the disc is compressed, besides audio and textures, so it wastes bandwidth and time loading.

There really isn't anything on the DC that attempts to push the DC's streaming capabilities. Sega was too focused on arcade style games where it's uncommon, and Shenmue's streaming is likely limited because of it's Saturn roots. I guess JGR or Omicron might be the best examples? Of course, they're nothing like GTA.


For the PSP, apparently 8MB of RAM is reserved for the OS. On the DC, only 64KB of RAM is reserved for some syscalls (mainly for disc access). So the developer has access to 24+2MB of RAM on the original PSP, versus 16+8+2 MB of RAM for the DC. The DC's compressed textures are smaller than the PSP's, but the PVR also has to store scene data in video RAM, so it balances out a bit. They're pretty close to the same. The unified RAM in the PSP is nicer since you have the freedom to do stuff like trade sound effects for textures, where as with non-unified you're stuck with what the hardware demands. If you wanted to, I guess you could also say that the PSP has an additional memory advantage because it's limited to a lower resolution. It's frame buffer is smaller and it can get by with lower resolution textures, so it effectively has more RAM.


Talking about a DC game and comparing it to its ports has nothing to do with this thread, about how the DC can handle ports from other systems?

You seem to be overly focused on the question of, "Can the DC do an exact replica of a complex PS2 game?" That's not an interesting question to ask, in the same way it's not interesting to ask, "Can an Atari 2600 do an exact replica of a complex XBSX game." The answer is obvious, so it's pointless to discuss. No one cares about it. It's more interesting to ask, "How well would the DC handle running a complex PS2 game?" That's what everyone else is interested in.

Maybe someone could make another thread where we could discuss philosophy on what it means for one system to be able to run a game from another. How accurate does the conversion have to be to count as the same game? Is it the same game if there's 2% more slow down on one system, but otherwise identical? What if it drops a single frame in one cutscene, but is identical everywhere else? What about less slowdown, or the same amount but in different places? Does converting non-interactive in-engine cutscenes to lossless FMV count being a different game? Would changing the texture compression format mean that the games aren't the same, since the compression artifacts would be different? Could you say that the XBSX can't run Smash Ultimate, because Nintendo would never agree to it? Those questions are more interesting to discuss than how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or if the DC can run the PS2 version of GTA3 exactly.
Wow excellent . Nicely put.

Hmm what do you think about naomi2 ports to DC. Basically the same hardware with tons of memory and a really unique tnl unit.

The closest to dc spec type port Naomi 2 initial d ported to PSP @ 30 fps instead of 60. The java psp emulator allows you to dump scenes models into obj and textures as PNG. Textures are tiny on the port compared to huge Naomi 2 ( had some 1024x1024 and 512x512von naomi2). Scene wise it was like 35k triangles tops( usually cruises at 20k something,so it's heavily cut down there too ) on PSP scene dump. I guess what I am asking because of the similarities of hardware would dc fare better on a port like that.
 
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Crazy Taxi is not a good example of streaming on the DC. Crazy Taxi was designed first as an arcade game for the Naomi, with double video and main RAM, where the entire map could be loaded into memory at once. I think I there was an interview somewhere that Sega wasn't sure if they could port it to the DC because of that. The streaming system was added on for the home port, so it's just enough to work. The attract mode for both home and arcade are different, with the arcade version teleporting around the map between each cut (since it doesn't need to load,) while the home version always cuts to nearby areas, slowly making a circuit around the map (so it has time to load.)

That's really interesting. Considering the game was meant to run from ram, and the DC port was a pretty quick affair it's pretty impressive that they got it to work so amazingly from disk.

That'd never occurred to me about the attract mode!

The rendering library for Crazy Taxi is the same as the one used for games like Dead or Alive 2, Virtua Tennis, House of the Dead 2, and Outtrigger, so it's really not intened for anything open world in the first place. And Crazy Taxi is an arcade game. The map was designed gameplay first, and had to fit in the Naomi main RAM. Arcade games are designed with very short schedules, so there's no time to create a large detailed world, and with the game's time limit you probably aren't going to be stopping to take the time to look at things closely, so there's no reason to bother adding tons of detail anyways.

Do you know which rendering library Shenmue 1/2 and JSR used? I always assumed Shenmue was something custom from AM2, but OTOH they had been behind Saturn SGL library from Saturn that was designed to be shared and make Saturn more accessible for higher level development.

A lot of DC tools were in development concurrently with the Shenmue, as AMD were hard at work on the DC version of Shenmue before the hardware was finalised. I wonder what kind of overlap there was.

The DC version of Crazy Taxi doesn't stream textures, just geometry. Almost all arcade textures were reduced to quarter resolution to fit in the DC's video RAM. You could probably still fit most the arcade textures on the DC, if you compressed the uncompressed textures and improved the compression ratio on the ones that were compressed. Crazy Taxi 2 has higher resolution textures because they started with the DC's limits in mind, and cut back on the variety to make them fit.

So that's what the DC CT developers meant when they (via a translator) talked about DC textures being more highly compressed!


With a more space efficient model format, you could actually load the entire Crazy Taxi map into memory on the DC. The map is about 325K vertices and 200K tris, so if you had 16 byte vertices (6 byte position, 2 byte spherical coord normal, 4 byte color, 4 byte UV) and estimate an 8 byte average overhead per tri for indices/materials/culling info/etc, the whole map mesh could fit in less than 7MB. With the model format actually used, its 12.8MB. Nothing on the disc is compressed, besides audio and textures, so it wastes bandwidth and time loading.

So definitely not an ideal case for streaming of DC (and perhaps PSP too). I'm curious though, would there be any processing overhead to using the more space efficient format you're describing?


Is there much in it? PSP is also using texture compression, so you're talking S3TC versus VQ.

Dreamcast made lots of use of 2bpp VQ textures, where as the most directly comparable S3TC mode was a 24bit (no-alpha) texture compressed down to 4bpp. Both were lossy, with 2bpp VQ naturally being lossier.

Pretty sure DC also supported 4bpp VQ textures which were much higher quality than 2bpp. If you wanted to use transparencies on DC I think you needed to use 4 or 8 bit CLUT textures or RGB I think. Transparencies with S3TC were 8bpp, again IIRC.

As with most forms of image compression, ongoing work into improving compressors pays off. DC was dead before any S3TC equipped consoles arrived.
 
@TapamN you mentioned that you made Shenmue render in 24 bit colour, is there an universal flag or something to force more games to do so? I hate dithering with all my soul I've patched many games to disable the dithering but the banding produced by the 16bit image is quite noticeable.
 
That's really interesting. Considering the game was meant to run from ram, and the DC port was a pretty quick affair it's pretty impressive that they got it to work so amazingly from disk.

That'd never occurred to me about the attract mode!



Do you know which rendering library Shenmue 1/2 and JSR used? I always assumed Shenmue was something custom from AM2, but OTOH they had been behind Saturn SGL library from Saturn that was designed to be shared and make Saturn more accessible for higher level development.

A lot of DC tools were in development concurrently with the Shenmue, as AMD were hard at work on the DC version of Shenmue before the hardware was finalised. I wonder what kind of overlap there was.



So that's what the DC CT developers meant when they (via a translator) talked about DC textures being more highly compressed!




So definitely not an ideal case for streaming of DC (and perhaps PSP too). I'm curious though, would there be any processing overhead to using the more space efficient format you're describing?




Dreamcast made lots of use of 2bpp VQ textures, where as the most directly comparable S3TC mode was a 24bit (no-alpha) texture compressed down to 4bpp. Both were lossy, with 2bpp VQ naturally being lossier.

Pretty sure DC also supported 4bpp VQ textures which were much higher quality than 2bpp. If you wanted to use transparencies on DC I think you needed to use 4 or 8 bit CLUT textures or RGB I think. Transparencies with S3TC were 8bpp, again IIRC.

As with most forms of image compression, ongoing work into improving compressors pays off. DC was dead before any S3TC equipped consoles arrived.
I dont know about shenmue but jet grind radio uses ninja . Someone reversed the models a while back , slightly modified version. Its funny you mention saturn. The guy who did sc2 models on ninja2 dc told me that docs mentioned ninja was originally made for saturn. Went to look on the docs and while its only 1 mention it seems to be the case. I wonder how this came about.

1.1 Abolition of Basic Model

The Basic Model structure was designed with compatibility with Saturn in mind before the development of the Dreamcast hardware. The Basic Model will be abolished and will be fully utilized in favor of the Chunk Model, which was designed to support the Dreamcast's characteristics and envelopes. This will allow the library to be made more compact.If you were using the simple Basic Model with collision data, etc., please use the Chunk Volume provided in the Chunk Model format. It cannot be drawn, but it can output collision data for triangles, squares, and strips. In the case of triangular polygons, it can also be used as modifier volume data.
 
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Wow so it does make it in-game. Pretty amazing considering they are using PC side things( which require more ram than PS2 assets). I guess gta3 on the dc is not a question if it could but like we said the question was if they wanted to.

It was never questioned if they could.

It was questioned what it would be like.
 
It was never questioned if they could.

It was questioned what it would be like.
Yeah but this is even the worst case scenario ( worse than trying to run the PS2 version) it's using PC assets( it's gonna require to rework those textures for sure ) and who knows how wasteful the stuff is under the hood is. Yet here it is. It's pretty much the same thing. Art assets aside it's gonna be the same systems/logic.
 
Yeah but this is even the worst case scenario ( worse than trying to run the PS2 version) it's using PC assets( it's gonna require to rework those textures for sure ) and who knows how wasteful the stuff is under the hood is. Yet here it is. It's pretty much the same thing. Art assets aside it's gonna be the same systems/logic.

DC could run the PS2 version, with all systems in tact.

But at what cost to performance and frame rate? Would it be playable?

That's the question.
 
DC could run the PS2 version, with all systems in tact.

But at what cost to performance and frame rate? Would it be playable?

That's the question.
I mean the game on PS2 runs sub 20 FPS most of the time so it should be worse on the Dreamcast, not that it is butter smooth on PS2 either

This regta3 is way more resource hungry than the original game so let's see how far he can get with it.
 
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