Dreamcast Beta Confirm / Debunk List

[pcwzrd13]

@galaxygod Yeah the Dreamcast Junkyard posted an article on it.

https://www.thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk/ ... es-of.html

[pcwzrd13]

Got some really interesting info today from a dev on a cancelled Harley-Davidson game that was being worked on by Melbourne House. Originally I thought it was L.A. Riders but he told me that he wasn't sure it was a port and was running on the Test Drive Le Mans engine. I'm now thinking that this might be the rumored Harley Davidson game and that reporters just mistakenly thought it was L.A. Riders back in the day? In any case, the game was up and running on a dev kit but in very early stages.

The title would have used the engine from Test Drive Le Mans and some bike physics from GP500 (PC title). It was running on devkits. I don't think we ever got to the point of testing on disc. It was only a few months in to development so it was missing most things really.

[pcwzrd13]

Got some really cool info recently from someone at Kalisto Entertainment. Their 1998 PC racing game, Ultim@te Race Pro, was used as a demo (on PC hardware) to pitch PoweVR to Sega as the GPU to use in the Dreamcast. It was eventually ported to actual Dreamcast hardware and used as the basis for 4 Wheel Thunder! Some really interesting info that I'm not sure has ever been public knowledge. I'm still trying to figure out if the Dreamcast port of Ultim@te Race still exists. I'll be sure to report back if I find out anything.

We actually did quite early on a PowerVR demo of Ultim@te Race for Imagination to present to Sega. This is a significant reason that got Sega to choose PowerVR for the Dreamcast. As for the game itself, the work we did eventually became 4 Wheel Thunder which was published by Midway.

we first did the port and then engage a collaboration with Midway to develop 4WT

[sheath]

Regarding Age of Empires II, the port was being done by Konami who also did the Combat Flight Simulator port. Both games suffered the same issues with running out of RAM. This was likely partly due to them using Windows CE which had an overhead. They were unfortunately required to use Windows CE as part of their cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft (which was also rumored to include MechWarrior 3 as well but I have yet to confirm this).

I'm not sure what the performance issues were aside from WinCE and RAM not being optimized for. But Age of Empires II runs with no slowdown on the (arguably inferior) Neon 250 PowerVR 2 AGP card in Win98SE. So do Mechwarrior 3 and Combat Flight Simulator for that matter.

I'll try to get videos up of these three this week. But here's Ultimate Race Pro on Neon 250:
[youtubenew]https://youtu.be/5vC44eSC9ow?si=c3wjPcpH6H1rLRUI[/youtubenew]

For some reason SGL 2 didn't have the dynamic shadows that PowerVR 1 cards had with the original Ultimate Race, but Pro ran just fine.

[Leyenda]

Legend of the Blademasters is there anything new with the game? And what happened to the videos of the Indiana Jones game, they couldn't send them to you?

[pcwzrd13]

Got a lot more info on the Infogrames Harley Davidson game from another dev:

From memory shortly after Lemans we had toyed with the very early stages of making a Harley Davidson game, but I think it barely made it into development and the license was lost. I think you could ride an early bike around an even earlier environment.

Then the studio pretty much had no choice but to follow the push towards Playstation 2 and all Dreamcast development very sadly stopped and we all moved over to PS.

When asked if it was related to Sega's "L.A. Riders" game:

It was a completely different game, though Sega's Model 3 arcade Harley game was totally in view and an inspiration! Model 3 was my inspiration and target for all the Dreamcast work we did. Originally Lemans was 60 FPS with Scud Race as my target. However with a lot of cars on track, all the effects and physics / race simulation, we just couldn't consistently sustain it so I made the choice to go 30fps but also ramped up the visual quality with anisotropic filtering and other expense things at the time.

Our Dreamcast engine and the assets were designed only for and to take advantage of it. It was all pure SH4 assembly code on the rendering side. Hence the ports were not as good as DC. Everything was totally optimised without compromise only for it:

The game and engine has a hardwired limit of 50,000 polygons per frame, and distributes them to always hit that limit somewhat like the image generator in model 3. Fixed performance.

That was the maximum number of sustained calculations with all else going on to ensure consistent performance. For Harley it would have been similar and is also roughly the sustained Model 3 polygon performance.

Without so many cars and their AI and physics simulation we could push about 150k polygons per frame. Unfortunately all the polygon calculations happen on the same (awesome!) CPU as game code and simulation!

This is roughly the same in the Harley game given everything.

A lot of cool info, especially for those of you that like hearing about the technical side of things.

Legend of the Blademasters is there anything new with the game? And what happened to the videos of the Indiana Jones game, they couldn't send them to you?

No update on either one unfortunately.

[pcwzrd13]

Got some info on the rumored port of the PC game "Nocturne" by Terminal Reality. Unfortunately it looks like it didn't get beyond a one-level performance test. And yes, I did ask if this still existed and was told it was scrapped long ago.

While we did 4x4 evolution, we actually never started on a Nocturne port. We tested and found the performance too low graphically and the controls were hard given the third person perspective on rails.

We took part of one level and got it running. Frame rate was really low and hard to control and even then there were rumors of the demise of Dreamcast (that we all loved - I still have mine) so we made the business decision the investment of time and engine rework wouldn’t be profitable

[dark]

Got some really cool info recently from someone at Kalisto Entertainment. Their 1998 PC racing game, Ultim@te Race Pro, was used as a demo (on PC hardware) to pitch PoweVR to Sega as the GPU to use in the Dreamcast. It was eventually ported to actual Dreamcast hardware and used as the basis for 4 Wheel Thunder! Some really interesting info that I'm not sure has ever been public knowledge. I'm still trying to figure out if the Dreamcast port of Ultim@te Race still exists. I'll be sure to report back if I find out anything.

We actually did quite early on a PowerVR demo of Ultim@te Race for Imagination to present to Sega. This is a significant reason that got Sega to choose PowerVR for the Dreamcast. As for the game itself, the work we did eventually became 4 Wheel Thunder which was published by Midway.

we first did the port and then engage a collaboration with Midway to develop 4WT

Oh that is a great game. Ultimate Race Pro is much more fun and interesting than 4 Wheel Thunder imo.