PC games of the year 1998/1999 could be ported to dreamcast?

[Leyenda03]

I would like to know if there is any group interested in that since in those years good games came out for PC

[Sax20]

I dream with a port of Unreal (no tournament)

[CORE316]

Im surprised this has not been done or atleast not that I know off someone has been or is working on this , there is an opensource GIT?

https://github.com/RedPandaProjects/UnrealEngine

[Ryo_Hazuki]

Im surprised this has not been done or atleast not that I know off someone has been or is working on this , there is an opensource GIT?

https://github.com/RedPandaProjects/UnrealEngine

I believe that, due to the low ram memory, it is not possible.

[la-li-lu-le-lo]

Im surprised this has not been done or atleast not that I know off someone has been or is working on this , there is an opensource GIT?

https://github.com/RedPandaProjects/UnrealEngine

I believe that, due to the low ram memory, it is not possible.

I doubt that, considering Unreal Tournament most likely used more memory, and it had an official port.

[Jenkins]

The problem with this is - afaik - that you have to alter the original files to get it running on Dreamcast. Maps, textures, models, audio... it must be downsizes, downsampled, cut, converted... even if you get your hands on the source material it's still under someones copyright. The developer team behind the UT port (Secret Level) was officially tasked with the port of UT - directly from Epic (or the rightsholder at that time). They had access, support, the offical SDK, the man power and the money to make the best possible port of the game.

As long as no specific engine, framework or stuff like "directX" was used in the code it _should_ only takes one or two talented coder and a *gooood* amount of time to port a game to Dreamcast. The next step would be to get the original game running stable on the console. When you run out of memory you have to cut levels in half and/or reduce the amount of polygons, downsample textures etc. furthermore delete/replace some performance heavy effects from their code like post processing stuff, nice looking water reflections, extansive use of bump mapping textures... It can take ages to get a alpha build of a game running. Always in mind that the entire work was all for nothing due to a overeager lawyer or an too ambitious project for one person.

The old shooter like Doom, Quake, Hexen and so on can be "streamed" directly from the disc without any alteration. It "only" needs a coder to get the engine itself running and the rest is already done. The entire shareware of doom even fits into the memory of the Dreamcast, hehe. Load the WAD file from the disc, extract it and everything is at hand. It wouldn't make any sense I guess but... it would possible at least.

[Ian Micheal]

The size of any file does not mean it's the size on Dreamcast you have foot print of all the api's you need to port the layer for hardware.. etc.. Please dont think you have 16mb of system ram got more like 12 to 14 max after an engine loads.. Please dont think that means you can load something that big ether..

Nothing is free every single thing needed to handle anything is baked into the bin before you run anything.. Example of this when i ported mame.. The mame emulator takes almost all system ram when loading drivers leaving 2mb of ram for games.. Doom you say.. The music alone uses 5mb to emulate and load patches for lol.. Doom wince port i worked on max was 12mb left after doom engined loaded then minus 5mb for midi patches.. compression buffers even less loading samples from the cache even less..

A file size does not mean how much memory it takes to run those files..

Example for you 500kb png uses more then 2mb of ram there is decoding and zlib and both api's what seems like a small 500kb png = over 2mb in ram wasted..

[MastaG]

The size of any file does not mean it's the size on Dreamcast you have foot print of all the api's you need to port the layer for hardware.. etc.. Please dont think you have 16mb of system ram got more like 12 to 14 max after an engine loads.. Please dont think that means you can load something that big ether..

Nothing is free every single thing needed to handle anything is baked into the bin before you run anything.. Example of this when i ported mame.. The mame emulator takes almost all system ram when loading drivers leaving 2mb of ram for games.. Doom you say.. The music alone uses 5mb to emulate and load patches for lol.. Doom wince port i worked on max was 12mb left after doom engined loaded then minus 5mb for midi patches.. compression buffers even less loading samples from the cache even less..

A file size does not mean how much memory it takes to run those files..

Example for you 500kb png uses more then 2mb of ram there is decoding and zlib and both api's what seems like a small 500kb png = over 2mb in ram wasted..

That always makes me wonder, how the developers for games like Sonic Adventure 2 and Shenmue pulled it off.
Perhaps the Katana SDK made it a lot easier to stay within memory limits when talking to the hardware compared to Kos.
Hell perhaps those devs acquired custom Katana SDK builds from Sega or even the source code for it, to get the most out of it.
Would be nice to see a source code leak for some of these games that pushed the hardware back in the days.