Half-Life Dreamcast, Reviewed by doitall

[doitall]

This version of Half-Life 1 is a solid 9 out of 10. Though it does occasionally run out of RAM, leading to a crash, it makes up for it with its magnitude and ambition. Considering Half-Life 1 can't run on a stock 64mb Xbox original without removing all of the textures, I'd say the Dreamcast is a heck of a contender! You can see my live playthrough on stock Dreamcast hardware (model 1) at the link below. Be sure to subscribe while you're there, I have a wealth of Dreamcast content to come!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXIgqaUr3NU

[albert90]

Woah... that's such a far cry from the usual kind of games I see on the DC. Super interesting to see!

[mkandersson1082]

It's a brilliant port!!! It's a shame that they didn't iron out the memory issues and release it officially. Still, it's in a fully playable state, so one can't complain

[Londinium]

it raped my vmu

[Anthony817]

it raped my vmu

Don't save towards the end of levels, only save at the beginning. It grows in size as you progress the levels. It was never ironed out before the game was truly finished. I would say the version we have now you could say is 98% complete. The full game is there, and completable. But there are some frame rate and memory issues. Although I never had issues on the official game on Dreamcast, total conversion mods like Paranoia that push the system to the absolute limit do have memory issues often. I was literally playing it last night and got an exception error message when it crashed. But mods that replaced the assets completely with lower quality assets than the official Dreamcast release work much better. Case in point are the early mods like They Hunger which were released literally at the turn of the century in like 99-2000 or so. A person built a version of Half-Life for DC that was modded for the original lower quality PC assets and it ran much better. Likewise a PS2 asset modded version was made which performed a little worse but looked cool.

With that 32mb memory mod, and somebody like YZB trying to look into patching the game it could run much better. But the memory is the reason it is having performance issues. But Katana SDK made games have had the executable patched to utilize the extra memory, but Windows CE games have not been figured out yet unfortunately. But in the future hopefully it will be just like it is in the OG Xbox community and more games can be patched like that.

[azel]

A person built a version of Half-Life for DC that was modded for the original lower quality PC assets and it ran much better.

Do you happen to have this version?

[Londinium]

it raped my vmu

Don't save towards the end of levels, only save at the beginning. It grows in size as you progress the levels. It was never ironed out before the game was truly finished. I would say the version we have now you could say is 98% complete. The full game is there, and completable. But there are some frame rate and memory issues. Although I never had issues on the official game on Dreamcast, total conversion mods like Paranoia that push the system to the absolute limit do have memory issues often. I was literally playing it last night and got an exception error message when it crashed. But mods that replaced the assets completely with lower quality assets than the official Dreamcast release work much better. Case in point are the early mods like They Hunger which were released literally at the turn of the century in like 99-2000 or so. A person built a version of Half-Life for DC that was modded for the original lower quality PC assets and it ran much better. Likewise a PS2 asset modded version was made which performed a little worse but looked cool.

With that 32mb memory mod, and somebody like YZB trying to look into patching the game it could run much better. But the memory is the reason it is having performance issues. But Katana SDK made games have had the executable patched to utilize the extra memory, but Windows CE games have not been figured out yet unfortunately. But in the future hopefully it will be just like it is in the OG Xbox community and more games can be patched like that.

I meant it in a joking manner...

[Anthony817]

A person built a version of Half-Life for DC that was modded for the original lower quality PC assets and it ran much better.

Do you happen to have this version?

Unfortunately this version was lost to the internet and not backed up anywhere. It was before I started archiving Dreamcast homebrew and other releases. Somebody contacted me on reddit last week asking about it and said he contacted a person who told him they do have it. But when he explained how rare it was and wanting to know if he could back it up online and share the person ghosted him and never responded.

[azel]

Unfortunately this version was lost to the internet and not backed up anywhere. It was before I started archiving Dreamcast homebrew and other releases. Somebody contacted me on reddit last week asking about it and said he contacted a person who told him they do have it. But when he explained how rare it was and wanting to know if he could back it up online and share the person ghosted him and never responded.

That’s really unfortunate, I almost want to try replacing the original models myself. I love Half Life DC but I’d happily swap in the original models for some extra performance.