Super Mario 64 Port for Dreamcast is possible ?

[dcsteve]

Mrneo240, Can dreamcast handle the high resolution texture updates without a major impact to speed?

https://github.com/Fanfreluche/SUPERMAR ... xture-pack

[Anthony817]

Hell to the no boss. I asked about just normal non-texture mods, such as the no draw distance, or Sonic the Hedgehog mod. He said it barely had enough to run as it is with sound on. It only had 512kb free I BELIEVE after he enabled sound. Either way you slice it that ain't much to work with.

Also, 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. That isn't a whole lot to play around with enhancing textures. The most we could theoretically hope for are using the textures form the new SM64 release on the Switch. It only slightly upressed the textures. I think they just used the actual source texture images in all honesty.

[Ian Micheal]

Sound coding on the dreamcast taking to much cpu time it's also very slow example 10fps is wiped away on radquake and dreamneo cd with the sound code sometimes even more.. This port was too fast with out sound it shows you how much the sound code takes ..

If you do any sound mixing on the sh4 which most if not all homebrew does your going to get this problem.. forget using sdl_mixer or any other port that uses main cpu to mix.. Really not that great the way the ACIA works .. very very slow..

[dcsteve]

Hi Ian, would there be any speed up to use a different sound API? This i believe uses ALdc for sound.

[Ian Micheal]

Hi Ian, would there be any speed up to use a different sound API? This i believe uses ALdc for sound.

Problem is just how slow the acia really is any other mixer that is ported would be much slower..

Mrneo240 has the rendering blazing fast turn the sound off pretty much fullspeed or over it

[dcsteve]

This is what Rand Linden, Bleemcast creator, said about sound programming on Dreamcast-

"Using AICA for sound is definitely possible

... but it's a significant undertaking, and classifying it as "complicated" is a major understatement.

There are some MAJOR restrictions on what can be done with the hardware, and in addition, AICA runs on the G1 bus, so any amount of data transfer beyond minimal is pretty much out.

Also, there's no cache, and as such, all instructions run from memory -- which is SLOW.... as in SLOW SLOW SLOW.

Oh, and it's not an ARM7TDMI -- there's no Thumb and there's no Multiplier logic... there *may* be the Debug logic, but I'm not sure.

There is an embedded DSP to do all sorts of awesome stuff, but it's an order of magnitude more complicated than the rest of the AICA -- basically, it makes the ARM side of stuff look like a cakewalk.

As for the touted "compression" of 8Megs from 2Megs -- If you convert all your samples to 4bit, that means *at most* you can fit 4Meg samples in the 2Megs of RAM.

If your samples started out at 16bit, you're still only storing 4bits of the original 16bits -- sure, you're storing more samples, but at a major cost in quality. Yes, ADPCM filtering smooths out a lot of the noise, but it still isn't close to the same quality.

ADPCM is great for some things, but as a "generic" compression, no -- think "majorly low-resolution JPEG" and you'll have a good idea of what it's like.

All that being said, a sound system is definitely feasible -- it all depends on how much time you want to spend on it... If you're looking for a research project that'll suck huge amount of time and have little progress to show for it, this is the one.
"

[MastaG]

But then how did the katana devkit took care of it then?
Even the good-looking games such as Sonic Adventure 2 / Shenmue 2 feature background music streaming in adx format instead of cd-audio.

[Ian Micheal]

But then how did the katana devkit took care of it then?
Even the good-looking games such as Sonic Adventure 2 / Shenmue 2 feature background music streaming in adx format instead of cd-audio.

Exactly what Rand said

All that being said, a sound system is definitely feasible -- it all depends on how much time you want to spend on it... If you're looking for a research project that'll suck huge amount of time and have little progress to show for it, this is the one.

Katana dev kit has a stream driver no source

Rand did bleemcast clean room ground up ..

sonic adventures 2 is amazing on more levels but sound got remember they would had full sega docs and help first game only ran at 30fps they learned over time ..

This sort of effort was a full time paid job a career..

One place the dreamcast hardware to me is very weak and needs the most time to get anything out of is sound.. Also why a lot of games just used CDDA that takes no cpu time why games used it..

Your taking a port that was made for a pc of much higher spec .. for open formats that take lots of cpu time.. Not an embedded dreamcast with no HDD ..

The port as it stands is pushing the limits of what can be done .. Mrneo240 gets time or thinks of way it will get done..

In this case i dont think Rand could done any better..

[Nico0020]

I played this for the first time the other night. I was impressed, without sound it runs blazingly fast.
Hope to see more work done on this. It's a shame the sound is such a mess, but Dreamcast gonnna Dreamcast.

[Retro-45]

I need to try this, sucks there's no sound but hey its playable.