Dreamcast-Talk.com

First of all, should clarify (although redundant given where I'm making this statement) I adore the SEGA Dreamcast.
I have since 2000 when I first got one, and have always had one in my collection since.
Unfortunately that 2000 PAL model kind of died.
But, she did have a donor card and went on to keep other consoles alive in her wake.

Currently I'm rockin' an early NTSC-J VA0 model, the one with the extra heatsink where the fan is.
And I've obtained a Terraonion M.O.D.E. which is currently shared between this Dreamcast, my Saturn and PlayStation; until I can justify buying another two more to permanently install in each console.

Anyway...

As the title asks:

I was curious if there was some way I could modify some of the games for the Dreamcast to disable the 'blurry' texture filtering.

As the Dreamcast is 'kind-of' running like a PC; I assume that the graphics settings are likely stored and accessed by the console in a similar manner.
As in; via a plain-text file.
Although, I am okay with being wrong in that assumption.

But, if I am right; could said text file be extracted from the games disc image file... edited to disable the 'blurry' filtering (or force point/nearest neighbour)... reinjected back into the image... and finally then played on the Dreamcast; with sharpened non-blurred textures.

Two (actually 3) titles come to mind with this idea:

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver
On PlayStation this game uses the consoles signature 'sharp' textures, with big clear pixels.
But, on Dreamcast every texture is blurred, and just looks nasty; as any and all clear detail is lost through the filter.

Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation/Chronicles
The same as above; PSX = clean sharp pixely graphics.
DC = muddy undefined filtered mess.

I'm sure there are several other games that could benefit from the procedure I proposed as well.

I get that the Dreamcast (and it's liberal application of filtering) is a product of it's time; but even then I didn't like games that used 'bluring' filters.
Especially when using supposedly superior graphic settings, such as OpenGL over Software rendering.
I played games like Quake and Unreal in Software rendering because the graphics were horrible to look at using the default GL filters, especially at higher resolutions.
However, later in life I discovered how to edit the text files dictating the graphics for both of these games, and that's what inspired me to ask the question of if something similar could be done with Dreamcast software.

I get that not all games are going to get a massive improvement (if any) if this is possible.
But, I don't mind spending an afternoon experimenting... I just need guidance to the right tools and files to edit.

If not, I've only wasted a few minutes asking a question; although not really wasted if I get an answer in either direction.

If there's already a project like this in motion; I'd be grateful for the directions to it.


thanks.

I wouldn't count on it being that easy. The only games close to "kind of running like a PC" are the WinCE games and that's a very small percentage of the library as a whole. The closest you might get is here: https://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/vi ... =2&t=14698
But that's not disabling bilinear/trilinear texture filtering like you're asking for.

Thank you for the reply.

I suspected that I may have been erroneous in my assumptions.
However; as the whole WinCE thing was aggressively pushed in marketing (in my perspective anyway) I though t that the majority of multi-platform DC games were quick ports of the PC versions.
I do have a little experience with "Deflicker" in my XBox modding projects. And it does clean the image up, but doesn't affect the textures, only the definition of the screen resolution pixels.

Thank you anyway.

Maybe someone win the near future may find some way of processing some games as I described.
Maybe a hex-edit or patch.
Unfortunately those kinds of things are so far out of my skillset I don't even know where one would begin to researching the possibility of creating a patch or finding the exact part of the code to edit.

I think this is not easy to do in practice. You need to be a very good programmer to understand the server part of such a web project. Therefore, I advise you to seek help from a professional web agency. You can read the details here and use the services of experienced programmers to solve this problem. I have worked with this team several times already and was pleasantly surprised by the result of the work.

Sisee wrote:First of all, should clarify (although redundant given where I'm making this statement) I adore the SEGA Dreamcast.
I have since 2000 when I first got one, and have always had one in my collection since.
Unfortunately that 2000 PAL model kind of died.
But, she did have a donor card and went on to keep other consoles alive in her wake.

Currently I'm rockin' an early NTSC-J VA0 model, the one with the extra heatsink where the fan is.
And I've obtained a Terraonion M.O.D.E. which is currently shared between this Dreamcast, my Saturn and PlayStation; until I can justify buying another two more to permanently install in each console.

Anyway...

As the title asks:

I was curious if there was some way I could modify some of the games for the Dreamcast to disable the 'blurry' texture filtering.

As the Dreamcast is 'kind-of' running like a PC; I assume that the graphics settings are likely stored and accessed by the console in a similar manner.
As in; via a plain-text file.
Although, I am okay with being wrong in that assumption.

But, if I am right; could said text file be extracted from the games disc image file... edited to disable the 'blurry' filtering (or force point/nearest neighbour)... reinjected back into the image... and finally then played on the Dreamcast; with sharpened non-blurred textures.

Two (actually 3) titles come to mind with this idea:

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver
On PlayStation this game uses the consoles signature 'sharp' textures, with big clear pixels.
But, on Dreamcast every texture is blurred, and just looks nasty; as any and all clear detail is lost through the filter.

Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation/Chronicles
The same as above; PSX = clean sharp pixely graphics.
DC = muddy undefined filtered mess.

I'm sure there are several other games that could benefit from the procedure I proposed as well.

I get that the Dreamcast (and it's liberal application of filtering) is a product of it's time; but even then I didn't like games that used 'bluring' filters.
Especially when using supposedly superior graphic settings, such as OpenGL over Software rendering.
I played games like Quake and Unreal in Software rendering because the graphics were horrible to look at using the default GL filters, especially at higher resolutions.
However, later in life I discovered how to edit the text files dictating the graphics for both of these games, and that's what inspired me to ask the question of if something similar could be done with Dreamcast software.

I get that not all games are going to get a massive improvement (if any) if this is possible.
But, I don't mind spending an afternoon experimenting... I just need guidance to the right tools and files to edit.

If not, I've only wasted a few minutes asking a question; although not really wasted if I get an answer in either direction.

If there's already a project like this in motion; I'd be grateful for the directions to it.


thanks.

Not sure what your talking about ? are you using VGA that's super sharp not blurred at all best picture output of a generation!! Ps1 is wobbly mess low framerate on those games with short draw distance almost unplay-able Clean sharp ps1 Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver ? you having a laugh ? Dc version is far sharper better draw distance better framerate not even compare-able and on vga super sharp..Major upgrade is use a VGA cable.. If your using the leads that came with it on lcd or modern screen yes it look like shit so does the n64 and ps1 and any console from that gen.

Sadly this cant be done as if were a pc setting, the filtering for every model is stored in the model itself trough a material/polygon configuration, this tell the console what kind of filtering to use for every model in screen, to remove/modify this filtering you have to edit every model in the game individually trough a hex editor to change the kind of filtering they will use, this filtering is given to the material/poligon at the time of creation and can be found either in the material properties bytes or the poligon properties bytes of the model since the model formats used for DC offered such flexibility.
Trilinear filtering reduce DC rendering capabilities to about the half, thats why no any existent game uses it, all of games used bilinear at most and some dont use any filtering (point sampling) showing directly the pixels as they are just as old consoles.
(Point filtering show the pixels as they are when textures are closer and uses mipmaps when far away, this can give a blurry effect but increases game efficence pretty much and the average visuals is mantained across the scene specially whit high res textures)

The games you mention are ports and use most of the original textures wich lead to bad quality image since DC uses higher screen resolutions, it needs higher images resolutions too, other way the image quality will be downgraded heavily, by example mipmap a 16x16 pixels texture will give 8x8 4x4 and 2x2 pixel textures when are far away, this traduces to very low resolution blurry textures.