How did dreamcast compare to psx/n64?

[Deleted member 13524]

I hear about the "greatness" of Shenmue, but I never heard anything about people buying a DC for Shenmue like people bought an Xbox for Halo.

I did.


Going on topic, I think the DC would've been able to run multiplatform titles from the 6th generation, as long as it had downscaled assets.

I really liked that console when it came out. It had VGA output, out-of-the-box 56Kb modem, Ethernet adapter, the VMU was brilliant and there was mouse+keyboard from day one (at least when it arrived here in Europe).

It was definitely a console thought for online gaming and interaction. In that aspect, it was well ahead of its time.

Regarding its capabilities, we could always look at Rage SD to see what the console's pinnacle could look like (I heard the Sega Aurora with a MBX was supposed to be a low-cost replacement of the NAOMI 1 with the CLX2).

 

[Exophase]

dreamcast could have emulated both of them

Regardless of what Rand Linden claimed I don't have a lot of faith that Dreamcast can emulate N64 that well. Maybe around the level PSP does at best, but even PSP has a couple advantages here. You can see how poorly the Daedalus port runs in onQ's video, this isn't any kind of real accomplishment..

Dreamcast was a good example of "work smarter" vs PS2's "work harder." It hit a few key areas right which let it do more with less for games. But I agree that PS2 probably had more room to grow as developers figured out how to best utilize its many resources and DC games wouldn't have improved as much as PS2 ones did.

 

[Simon F]

Aren't you making the (flawed?) assumption that all the features of DC had been utilised?

 

[Exophase]

Aren't you making the (flawed?) assumption that all the features of DC had been utilised?

Can you be more specific? Are you talking about my comment about the N64 emulation video? If you are then I didn't mean to say that it's representative of the best you can do (how do you really prove such a thing anyway? But yes, there's probably a lot of room for improvement there, I don't think it even uses a recompiler), just wanted to refute that this is somehow evidence that it "can be done" for any reasonable expectations.

 

[ERP]

I always liked Dreamcast, there were very few really well written dreamcast titles though.
Interesting fact of the day there were at least 4 different OS' people developed with on DC.
Win CE, the Sega supplied one, one called Dark that exposed register level access to the PVR chip, and the one that was used internally by some Sega Studios.
Dark was something you had to ask for, I think we ended up getting it after I moaned about them removing what I considered the only useful triangle submission path from the Sega SDK, for whatever reason people largely used DMA to transfer tris to the GPU, but for triangles that didn't cover a lot of tiles it was actually faster to write to the TLA directly than it was to write to memory. Plus you had to then pay the read bandwidth for the tri list you'd stored in memory.

Much faster than PS1/N64, PS2 was certainly more powerful.

It also had by far the best optical disk emulation, and mastering tools of any shipped console devkit even to this day.

 

[swaaye]

Regardless of what Rand Linden claimed I don't have a lot of faith that Dreamcast can emulate N64 that well. Maybe around the level PSP does at best, but even PSP has a couple advantages here. You can see how poorly the Daedalus port runs in onQ's video, this isn't any kind of real accomplishment..

Yeah, even Xbox is iffy with a lot of N64 games.

 

[Simon F]

Can you be more specific? .

I meant this part of your comment:

But I agree that PS2 probably had more room to grow as developers figured out how to best utilize its many resources and DC games wouldn't have improved

<shrug>

 

[Exophase]

I meant this part of your comment:

<shrug>

You clipped that quote in a bad place

To your comment, no, I wasn't making the assumption that DC games realized the full capabilities of the machine. Just that PS2 had more of a learning curve so it stood to reason that it'd take longer to see games utilize it as well.

 

[function]

Aren't you making the (flawed?) assumption that all the features of DC had been utilised?

Other than the aniso filtering (used once), SSAA (used once), dot3 bump mapping (used once, on a coin, in a Shenmue 2 menu), what else was rarely utilised? I remember this post from a few years back:

Which is again, strange, because CLX2 could do shadows from two lights sources - one using the full featured** modifier volume and the second using a "cut down" one which only allowed the shading to be modified.


**Fully featured meant that each triangle could choose one of two totally independent texture/shading parameter sets on a pixel-by-pixel basis.

What do you mean by a "texture/shading parameter set"? Does it mean texture layers, blend modes, light source, fogging etc?

Could you have had an effect where, say, within a volume representing a pocket torch you could have turned on a spot light source, a bump map, a specular map and activated particles representing dust in the air?

 

[Lazy8s]

Among those more "premium" features which were underutilized, the CLX2 also had two, generally applicable internal (fast) color buffers that could've been exploited to far greater effect for creative multi texture effects.

I figure Dreamcast's CLX2 was further ahead of any comparable graphics part near its launch in 1998 than any other modern graphics launch, with the exception of maybe MBX versus its respective competition of 2004.

 

[swaaye]

More DC hardware discussion here:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=14660&highlight=dreamcast+neon

including SimonF on underutilized features.

 

[Simon F]

including SimonF on underutilized features.

Excellent. That saves me having to remember.

 

[fearsomepirate]

My friends' kids play some game where they fly RC planes and drive RC cars around a room to beat various challenges, and it's really pretty. I saw some kind of bump-mapping (EMBM?) in it, too.

 

[kagemaru]

My friends' kids play some game where they fly RC planes and drive RC cars around a room to beat various challenges, and it's really pretty. I saw some kind of bump-mapping (EMBM?) in it, too.

My guess is Toy Commander?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOz6lc5IUoA

Had a decent following IIRC, never got into it myself though.

 

[Simon F]

My guess is Toy Commander?

It was a great game - you are basically enacting a child's imagination battling the 'evil toy bear'. Weapon upgrades were amusing - misiles started out as pencils, then biros and finally, IIRC, highlighters.

Techwise, it also featured shadow volumes (very useful when doing bombing runs).

 

[Angelcurio]

I really think that a generational leap can't only be measured from a graphics point of view. The Dreamcast did a lot of things that would become common place later, like the inclusion of a modem for online play, being able to browse the web (i don't remember if a special CD was needed for this), a memory card with a screen (ofter underused, etc. And as others have said in the graphics department, there was even a program to emulate PSX games called Bleemcast, even though i don't remember if it actually saw the light of the day.

 

[kagemaru]

It was a great game - you are basically enacting a child's imagination battling the evil bear. Weapon upgrades were amusing - misiles started out as pencils, then biros and finally, IIRC, highlighters.

Techwise, it also featured shadow volumes (very useful when doing bombing runs).

Yeah I had a lot of fun with the demo, have no idea why I never picked the game up.

Maybe I'll track a copy down, I still have my DC since that's the only system I'll never trade it. :smile:

I really think that a generational leap can't only be measured from a graphics point of view. The Dreamcast did a lot of things that would become common place later, like the inclusion of a modem for online play, being able to browse the web (i don't remember if a special CD was needed for this), a memory card with a screen (ofter underused, etc. And as others have said in the graphics department, there was even a program to emulate PSX games called Bleemcast, even though i don't remember if it actually saw the light of the day.

Yeah you needed a browser disc to browse the net on the dreamcast, a couple browser upgrades were also included with the ODM demo discs. The browser for the Saturn worked the same way.

Also Bleemcast did release, though not as originally intended. They planned to release one package that supported ~200 PS1 games, but it got scaled down to only a handful of disc releases that each supported a single game. I had it for MGS and Tekken 3 (at least I believe it was Tekken 3).

 

[fearsomepirate]

Yep, that's the game. Looked to be in the same spirit as Chibi Robo, Katamari Damacy, and that sort of thing.

Comparing GT2 Bleemcast vs Sega GT really shows off how much better PD was at nailing the colors in their in-game assets. The Sega GT games looked really cartoony by comparison (heck, Burnout 3 looks more realistic than Sega GT 2001). The Forza team has finally caught up, though.

 

[Nano]

Technically it destroyed those platforms.

Had some headroom too, especially as programmers lean new techniques. Shame it was cancelled so early...