Is it possible to port GTA 3 to the Dreamcast?

[gilvan666]

It would be magnificent to see GTA 3 running on Dreamcast but I think it's a mission almost impossible.

[MastaG]

That's why we should close this topic with:
"Is it possible to port GTA 3 to the Dreamcast?"

- no it is not -

[AtomicPunk]

The dev just said it certainly is possible

Im playing Headhunter for the first time and im comparing it to gta3 on my ps2 and headhunter looks better even. Definitely can port GTA3 or even vice city to Dreamcast.

[Anthony817]

It was only possible in first person mode they stated. Running in 3p mode ate up even more of the little 16mb memory it had. Visually GTA 3 has never been something to be considered revolutionary. Shenmue and Headhunter had better graphics on models in many cases and environments of GTA and characters looked like caricatures of real life ones. But the ram was always the main problem for the console. I have no doubt it could have ran with a 300 person team developing it on the official Katana devkit using every trick in the book. But I feel like the scene complexity would be way down such as pedestrian and vehicle density in any given area. Not to mention that the dev himself said it had to be locked to first person view. It is always fun to speculate though, but a homebrew port of GTA 3 I feel is nigh impossible due to so many factors.

[Bob Dobbs]

I agree, Anthony.

[MastaG]

Amen to that Anthony...

[AtomicPunk]

Oh i know what GTA devs stated but Headhunter and Shenmue, several other games prove them incorrect.

The Dreamcast had more VRAM to work with it easily couldve been done third person. They just didn’t have enough experience with Dreamcast which was the problem with 3rd party devs on Saturn too.

They often didn’t know enough on how to optimize Sega systems or will unwilling to spend on it or just not capable.

Can easily change distance, resolution if necessary to make up for anything the DC couldnt do but the extra VRAM makes up for a lot. GTA 3 pc required 16mb vram but managed to squeeze into PS2 4mb despite the shared memory its not true vram hence the lack of proper progressive scan in PS2 games (the ones that do look terrible) and looks worse when forced on games as well.

DC should actually be able to do some things better with that 8mb VRAM than the PS2 version like 480p. I mean you have to keep in mind im playing Headhunter, and Shenmue in 480p the PS2 cant even handle 480p that well. Any games ive tried progressive scan in dont even look good and there’s not many that do. Dreamcast handles 480p much better than PS2 and because of that games often look a lot better than my PS2 with component cables even forcing resolutions.

At best when swapping textures they get maybe 6mb vram equivalent on PS2, they managed to put a bunch of crappy textures in on PS2 to make GTA3 work. DC version would look better with higher quality textures and in 480p to boot

[AtomicPunk]

Im not sure someone is porting it to 3ds even so people have been porting GTA 3

Interesting notes on Dreamcast comparison

“ While the PS2's CPU–GPU transmission bus for transferring polygons and textures is 50% faster than the Dreamcast's CPU–GPU transmission bus, the DC has textures loaded directly to VRAM (freeing up the CPU–GPU transmission bus for polygons) and texture compression gives it higher effective texture bandwidth.”

“ Dreamcast games were effectively using 20–30 MB of texture data[1] (compressed to around 5–6 MB),[10] while PS2 games up until 2003 peaked at 5.5 MB of texture data (average 1.5 MB). PS2 games up until 2003 rendered up to 7.5 million polygons/sec (145,000 polygons per scene), with most rendering 2–5 million polygons/sec (average 52,000 polygons per scene);[11] in comparison, Dreamcast game engines rendered up to 5 million polygons/sec (160,000 polygons per scene),[4] with most games rendering 2–4 million polygons/sec (average 50,000 polygons per scene).”

Which is not a totally fair comparison as Dreamcast development ended 2001. How many per scene on PS2 games in the first 2 years? Either way including games 2 years after Dreamcast death still have essentially the same polygons per scene

I wonder if someone can contact the team porting to 3ds and figure out how they are doing it

[Ian Micheal]

More matter of some one doing it and it would need to be team like the old days. i dont get the locked to fps mode thing at all.. it would have less going on but 3rd person should really not be a problem .. major problem is who is going to do it ... why would they do it with the amount of work needed and time needed to do so.. Which also any one that can do it would bring heat to them if they work in the field

Think wii versions of games of xbox 360 games course it can be done i agree i dont see it happening any time soon..

It's also more the api's we have ported compared to other systems as well so to even start a port..

Any versions would need to be ported on pc to opengl 1.2 render or ported to psp to start the dreamcast version at all

[Motoracer5]

3ds is far more capable, no secret to uncover there