The dreamcast couldn't get over it's hardware limitations, but this still doesn't mean games wouldn't look any better than before. The dreamcast died pretty young and didn't get to experience many games that pushed it. Shenmue 2 was completed near the end of it's life cylcle with old tools( from the psx era) and it looks pretty amazing. I can understand how the games graphically wouldn't look that much different, but I still think art and aesthetic design can surpass hardware. In my first post I should have rephrased my question to mention more about aesthetic design; I meant say how much better dreamcast games would look if they incorporated modern aesthetic design.
Could Dreamcast et al handle this/that game/effect? *DC tech retrospective *spawn
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The dreamcast couldn't get over it's hardware limitations, but this still doesn't mean games wouldn't look any better than before. The dreamcast died pretty young and didn't get to experience many games that pushed it. Shenmue 2 was completed near the end of it's life cylcle with old tools( from the psx era) and it looks pretty amazing. I can understand how the games graphically wouldn't look that much different, but I still think art and aesthetic design can surpass hardware. In my first post I should have rephrased my question to mention more about aesthetic design; I meant say how much better dreamcast games would look if they incorporated modern aesthetic design.
Demosceners just squeezed 1024 colors out of a 4-color CGA. You never know what could be possible on fixed hardware with decades of research.
The Dreamcast's main CPU is a two-way 360 MIPSsuperscalar Hitachi SH-432-bitRISC[136] clocked at 200 MHz with an 8 Kbyteinstruction cache and 16 Kbyte data cache and a 128-bit graphics-oriented floating-point unit delivering 1.4 GFLOPS.[36] Its 100 MHz NEC PowerVR2 rendering engine, integrated with the system's ASIC, is capable of drawing more than 3 million polygons per second[40] and of deferred shading.[36] Graphics hardware effects includetrilinear filtering, gouraud shading, z-buffering, spatial anti-aliasing, per-pixel translucency sortingand bump mapping.[36][40] The system can output approximately 16.77 million colorssimultaneously and displays interlaced or progressive scan video at 640 × 480 video resolution.[40]Its 67 MHz Yamaha AICA[137] sound processor, with a 32-bit ARM7 RISC CPU core, can generate 64 voices with PCM or ADPCM, providing ten times the performance of the Saturn's sound system.[36] The Dreamcast has 16 MB main RAM, along with an additional 8 MB of RAM for graphic textures and 2 MB of RAM for sound.[36][40] The system reads media using a 12x speed Yamaha GD-ROM Drive.[40] In addition to Windows CE, the Dreamcast supports several Sega andmiddlewareapplication programming interfaces
I miss the days of colours counting.
Goodness me, no. The DC GPU was hugely more powerful and vastly more feature-rich than PCX2.
I rather meant do you have any docs or sdk's ect lying around
ps: wrapper thread
http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=41495
ps: wrapper thread
http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=41495
Hmm... interesting.
SGL (not SGL-Direct), was a display-graph API so you defined models, lights and camera(s), tweaked the matrices in the display graph, and then hit the render command.
I guess the difficulty would depend on what functions they wanted to support in SGL. Handling the triangle mesh functions should be relatively straightforward but supporting the convex polytopes (aka infinite planes) + shadows would be, err, more challenging.
I seem to recall that most of the games were using the triangle interface but a number, like Ultimate Race and IIRC Mechwarrior, used the infinite plane functions.
SGL (not SGL-Direct), was a display-graph API so you defined models, lights and camera(s), tweaked the matrices in the display graph, and then hit the render command.
I guess the difficulty would depend on what functions they wanted to support in SGL. Handling the triangle mesh functions should be relatively straightforward but supporting the convex polytopes (aka infinite planes) + shadows would be, err, more challenging.
I seem to recall that most of the games were using the triangle interface but a number, like Ultimate Race and IIRC Mechwarrior, used the infinite plane functions.
Megadrive1988
Veteran
[correct if needed]
PowerVR Series 1
-PCX1
-PCX2 (higher clockspeed, added bilinear filtering)
PowerVR Series 2
-PowerVR2DC / CLX2 (Dreamcast, NAOMI)
-PowerVR PMX1 (used in the Neon 250 card and not as powerful as the Dreamcast version)
PowerVR Series 1
-PCX1
-PCX2 (higher clockspeed, added bilinear filtering)
PowerVR Series 2
-PowerVR2DC / CLX2 (Dreamcast, NAOMI)
-PowerVR PMX1 (used in the Neon 250 card and not as powerful as the Dreamcast version)
PowerVR Series 1, PC card/chips: (not necessarily complete, e.g NEC and Matrox boards?)
- Internal/demo only, Midas 1 & 2
- Midas 3 (in some Compaq machines)
- PCX1 (AKA midas 4)
- PCX2 (AKA midas 5) (higher clockspeed, added bilinear filtering + slightly lower driver overhead)
- ARC1 (Used as early DC dev system and possibly(?) in an arcade system?)
I really, really want to see PVR back in a console (and not just because I'm still a Dreamcast fanboy). Perhaps a GPU with ray tracing acceleration? Hey, reflections and shadows are still distinctly "last-gen" and definitely need a kick up the arse...
How would the fastest MIPS cores fare compared to Jaguar and recent high end ARM cores?
How would the fastest MIPS cores fare compared to Jaguar and recent high end ARM cores?
EsppiraK
Newcomer
I have a technical question about the matter.
Could the Dreamcast use the same tricks as most games on Ps2 did? I am refering on rendering the games at some low resolutions in other to gain more juice from the hardware and display better graphics.
I am talking about things like this.
Sega Rally 2 on Dreamcast (despite it being a shoddy port) ran at 640x480p
Meanwhile Sega Rally 2006 run at 512x240i on Ps2.
Obviously rendering at lower resolution allows to free resources and so making it possible to display complex graphics.
In this particular case the Dreamcast is pushing 640x480=307200 pixels
and the ps2 512x240=122880
More than twice the pixels.(now that pixel counts is a hot topic xD)
Does anyone have knowledge if this is actually possible?
Could the Dreamcast use the same tricks as most games on Ps2 did? I am refering on rendering the games at some low resolutions in other to gain more juice from the hardware and display better graphics.
I am talking about things like this.
Sega Rally 2 on Dreamcast (despite it being a shoddy port) ran at 640x480p
Meanwhile Sega Rally 2006 run at 512x240i on Ps2.
Obviously rendering at lower resolution allows to free resources and so making it possible to display complex graphics.
In this particular case the Dreamcast is pushing 640x480=307200 pixels
and the ps2 512x240=122880
More than twice the pixels.(now that pixel counts is a hot topic xD)
Does anyone have knowledge if this is actually possible?