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[Alexios]

Based on this video:

It was good at doing what it did at a high resolution but was unable to do any of the advanced rendering/lighting stuff PS2 could do.

That's a shit comparison by a shitty channel. MDK2 is visibly superior on DC with more advanced visuals like speculars, other details and dynamic shadows, as well as far less severe frame drops (yet still severe in spots) but he doesn't show most of it and pins much of it down to personal preference as he also keeps implying a crisper image in higher res is worse than a blurry image in lower res because somehow he can't see the aliasing as much. He seemingly doesn't even play the games but compares random videos of unknown quality, not even knowing if they're native hardware on crt vs anything else like emulation or a capture that doesn't do them justice. Another game surprisingly popular in such stupid comparisons, even though nobody should care to play it on any platform, is 4x4 Evo/lution, as if even B tier or worse Dreamcast games like Midway's 4 Wheel Thunder don't completely trash it effortlessly and in 60fps. The same channel did the even shittier Dreamcast vs PS2 video pitting Omikron of all games against GTAIII our coffinbirth here also uses to make his point. Dodgy ports of dodgy PC games expose DC's true lack of potential!

Games with advanced rendering on DC include Metropolis Street Racer, MDK2, Code: Veronica, Quake III, Le Mans, Ecco and more, some being later games (yet well within the threshold of what is called early when excusing PS2's own deficiences) before its untimely death that stopped many more from releasing. Other games also include hints of advanced visuals subtly wherever necessary, like some real nice water ripples Skies of Arcadia so casually drops like it's nothing, no big deal, in one early scene and (as far as I've played) never again as the story didn't demand it. Many less known games like Treyarch's Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm (Dragon's Blood in Europe) also did interesting things like its procedural physics based animation system and sprawling levels. It's a flawed curiosity, with better art and design (or just more time, money and a less troubled development) alongside its tech it could have been much more, but has a charm similar to games like Rune, Die by the Sword, Enclave, Severance: Blade of Darkness and others of their ilk. Not that games choosing to have some less advanced elements to focus on others as they all compete for resources should be considered inferior if the results are still great (like Daytona or F355 vs the racing games previously mentioned, in short, screw advanced features if games look as good or better without them).

The PS2 being the most advanced was as short lived as Dreamcast's run, systems like Xbox brought far more advanced stuff in a shorter time frame than it even got to show any of it off vs the Dreamcast but only the Dreamcast is excluded from that term because by PR prowess Sony dominated the generation and held it back, with the games being more advanced being much fewer Xbox exclusives that are now ignored to help make that point. No biases there, lol. What Sony peddles is the sweetspot, anything less like Dreamcast is not advanced, or good, anything more is useless, if it exists, otherwise it's also hailed as the best. Dreamcast held its own while it lasted and holds up ​

 

[Fat Frog]

nice effect using the previous frame like tomb raider(PSX) over the water i guess

it was common to use higher poly models in some parts of games, blue stinger also used very high polygons models, here and there, unfortunately some games like sport jam suffered of very low poly models and even made with discreet polygons for everything else

Yeah, many games like Shenmue, Yakuza, FFX used high poly and low poly depending of the scene(in engine intro in Shenmue 1 and FFX for instance) type of gameplay.

 

[Fat Frog]

It was good at doing what it did at a high resolution but was unable to do any of the advanced rendering/lighting stuff PS2 could do.

The DC was killed less than 2 years and half after launch. No console has ever shown its limits in such a short time frame. Especially when heavy hitters like Naughty Dog, Square Enix were only developing for Sony...

In terms of advanced effects, 2006 Under Defeat has shown a glimpse of what the console could do with modern tools.(G Rave isn't exactly a AAA size Studio, it's a tiny studio. Under Defeat crush litteraly 99% of 99-2001 DC games... Big publishers or not.

 

[polybius80]

but somehow PS2 is still called advanced because by dominating the generation it also held it back with the games being more advanced being somewhat fewer and now ignored to help make that point. No biases there.​

that is not true, PS2 keept improving in their games year after year, games like hitman blood money and path of neo use normal mapping along with shader effects, in fact hitman blood money use a "shader model" on ps2 those are advanced techniques, that is something that even the game cube with its environmental bump mapping didnt achieve in fact even on wii the counduit with the omega3 engine while impressive used a more refined version of it, there was a console that was held back in lot of games and that is the xbox, but implying the ps2 held back the generation is ridiculous in fact there is a huge amount of games that where only on xbox and ps2 and are regarded as very impressive like burnout3, black or true crime 2, some devs mentioned that is because GC has trouble with heavy vertex processing, people keep comparing ps2 games against dreamcast and conclude PS2 couldnt compete or was a weak console based on a bad or lack of understanding of the specs of each machine, they are simply ignoring the whole generation and the level of graphics and effects used in later games which is very dishonest of them

to put an example


try doing those effects on DC

DC was a great machine it deserves to be apreciated for their great games and capabilities for the time it was released but there is no point in bringing other later and more powerful systems to the conversation or even worst say BS about them

 

[CashPrizes]

Definitely a powerhouse at launch. Soul Calibur was the best looking game on a home TV screen, by leaps and bounds, easily the most impressive jump in graphics technology I had ever seen, and that was at launch.

Crazy Taxi, PowerStone, RE Veronica, The dreamcast was doing amazing things. The PS2 only slightly edged it out, and that wasn't even apparent at launch. The initial PS2 games did not look as good as the best Dreamcast games.

But within a year after the PS2 launch Sega console ambitions died and we don't have a fair comparison after that.

 

[Fat Frog]

Maybe Alexios was more thinking about simple textures on many multi due to PS2 ?

PS2 has great effects no debate for me.

 

[polybius80]

The DC was killed less than 2 years and half after launch. No console has ever shown its limits in such a short time frame. Especially when heavy hitters like Naughty Dog, Square Enix were only developing for Sony...

In terms of advanced effects, 2006 Under Defeat has shown a glimpse of what the console could do with modern tools.(G Rave isn't exactly a AAA size Studio, it's a tiny studio. Under Defeat crush litteraly 99% of 99-2001 DC games... Big publishers or not.

true but no every system has the same limits, so its good to keep expectations in check, if there is something in the hardware that has possibilities to be used in an interesting way or that it was underused then sure there is room to improve but keeping expectation in check , as good as those explosions and smoke effect in Under Defeat looks its uncertain how good can be used in other more complex games who knows maybe in a couple years a homebrew comes release a very interesting game

 

[Fat Frog]

true but no every system has the same limits, so its good to keep expectations in check, if there is something in the hardware that has possibilities to be used in an interesting way or that it was underused then sure there is room to improve but keeping expectation in check , as good as those explosions and smoke effect in Under Defeat looks its uncertain how good can be used in other more complex games who knows maybe in a couple years a homebrew comes release a very interesting game

Well, i don't expect Megadrive limits (it's now running Star Wing without chip) but probably an optimization a la PSX (Tekken 3 looked great but removed 3D backgrounds i guess). I expect far more beautiful Dreamcast 3D games (but not not necessarly with much more geometry, a little more but mixed with unused or barely used stuff like normal mapping, bumb mapping or anything that can enhance the final result)

 

[Alexios]

Try doing those effects on DC

DC was a great machine it deserves to be apreciated for their great games and capabilities for the time it was released but there is no point in bringing other later and more powerful systems to the conversation or even worst say BS about them

What are you even arguing against? Certainly not anything I posted even though you quote me as I said many times in this thread that PS2 was more powerful than DC yet your post reads as if protesting someone saying the opposite. I said DC held its own, not that it beat or even matched anything and stressed "while it lasted" so yes, games that - mostly but not only - came afterwards like that example of yours did do things Dreamcast didn't.

I named Xbox as more advanced, not DC or GC. Good luck doing the likes of Half-Life 2, Halo, Doom 3, Chaos Theory and Riddick on PS2 without becoming different games altogether (or even RE4 without downgrades, or Rogue Squadron 2 & 3 for games not tuned to other platforms' strengths and weaknesses due to their popularity). And yes, there are even things PS2 could do Xbox can't keep up with, that doesn't make it more advanced, just the games tuned to its particulars, as DC doing things PS2 couldn't didn't make that more advanced as discussed.

I wasn't the one bringing up other systems here, though the whole thread's premise is implying comparisons, I just chimed in as people already were, just like you. I was obviously replying to someone with that comment.

 

[Meicyn]

This is not true. Dreamcast has many games streaming assets from disc real time, like Crazy Taxi for exemple which streams the city. Even Saturn has, for exemple Road Rash.

Yep, Sega licensed CRI’s ADX format for compressed music in numerous games. If you can stream and decode audio in realtime, you can do it for other data.

 

[coffinbirth]

tomb raider iv used emboss bump mapping



it wasnt used that much, maybe it costs too much and has to be used with small textures

Was probably more of a case of them already having those assets around from the pc version. Does Chronicles use them as well?

This is not true. Dreamcast has many games streaming assets from disc real time, like Crazy Taxi for exemple which streams the city. Even Saturn has, for exemple Road Rash.

I certainly could've worded that better. There were a few games that chunked texture data in from disc, CT, Omikron and Shenmue are the ones I'm aware of., but even in those cases it was very minimal data. I was speaking about cd-rom, not gd-rom, but more pointedly about it's inability to stream data fast enough to stream assets in a way that GTA III did. Very specific. Dreamcast did very little data fetching during gameplay beyond reading the security sectors and paging files. Crazy Taxi, for example, had the entire map loaded into RAM and VRAM as the game data was 40MB TOTAL. It chunked in texture data. Dreamcast has an excellent texture compression system, better than PS2 even, but it is still hamstrung by the optical drive, and ROM bandwidth...that's why a game like Crazy Taxi works because the entire map is already there, whereas a game like Omikron proved the limitations of streaming in data on Dreamcast. Shenmue was wizardry. Again, always exceptions to the rule...
Just for the sake of comparison:
CD-ROM(Saturn)=300kb/s @2x
GD-ROM=1.8MB/s @12x
DVD-ROM(PS2)=5.2MB/s @4x
And keep in mind DC has about 1/2 the bandwidth of PS2

Also, Road Rash Saturn loads in sprites from disc, because they mishandled the SFX allocation, which is also why the Saturn version sounds muffled compared to 3DO. Need for Speed also did this on 3DO, but was corrected for Saturn. These were corrective measures, not intended design.

You really can count these types of instances they are so few. Had Dreamcast stuck around longer, I'm certain we would've seen more developers utilize data streaming as it was MUCH better than CD-ROM in that regard....but it didn't, and DVD-ROM ushered in real time data streaming...for a whopping whole console generation before HDD became the norm.

 

[coffinbirth]

Yep, Sega licensed CRI’s ADX format for compressed music in numerous games. If you can stream and decode audio in realtime, you can do it for other data.

All CD-audio is streamed and decoded in real time. You're still getting that audio stream, but now it's in a compressed format. ADX is an audio container. It was used to loop audio so you could load in...additional audio via it's sister format AHX, which is an MPEG-2 variant used for dialog. Has absolutely NOTHING to do with data streaming. If you're suggesting you could cull additional data from the disc whilst decoding the ADX -STREAM-, you cannot. In the way you describe it, you would have to load the audio into RAM in order to fetch data off the disc to load into VRAM which would completely negate any benefit from that entire method, even if they were packed together you can't pass binary data through the audio channel.

 

[Meicyn]

All CD-audio is streamed and decoded in real time. You're still getting that audio stream, but now it's in a compressed format. ADX is an audio container. It was used to loop audio so you could load in...additional audio via it's sister format AHX, which is an MPEG-2 variant used for dialog. Has absolutely NOTHING to do with data streaming. If you're suggesting you could cull additional data from the disc whilst decoding the ADX -STREAM-, you cannot. In the way you describe it, you would have to load the audio into RAM in order to fetch data off the disc to load into VRAM which would completely negate any benefit from that entire method, even if they were packed together you can't pass binary data through the audio channel.

Thanks for the thorough explanation!

 

[coffinbirth]

They were still doing, not 64 KB files, but 64 KB chunks of data (you would have wanted to use the most compressed geometry and texture representations you could do 64 KB of data was not too too bad, N64’s texture cache was 8 KB ) to keep the 2 MB of RAM full, seek time issues were partially ameliorated by duplicating data on the discs and reducing seeks as you are streaming the level back and forth. Far bigger problem was RAM not allowing to store enough seconds worth of level data in without lots of visibility tricks to cover seek times.

It was a game that came out less than 2 years after the console launch, of course it was doing innovative things compared to other devs just starting to push CD based consoles (vs PC’s that were not generally pushing HW at that low level), but it was not impossible and developers started figuring it out. Hacking the file system… hehe… that is the joy of console development back then and in general: you have access to the innards of the machines and are trusted to use it. Then it becomes a latency and transfer speed balancing act vs the way the program on CPU/GPU needs to consume it (producer vs consumer). 1 MB of VRAM (lots of it used by the display buffers), 2 MB of main RAM, 650+ MB of CD-ROM. At each level of that pyramid you have more data you want to work on than you can fit so you are streaming data in constantly and need to find ways to hide the streaming (including how fast you can move around the level, what is actually visible, etc…).

Seek times did not magically get better with DVD, the transfer speed grew but so did RAM (by 16x as we went to 32 MB or RAM from 2 MB, actually the time to fill RAM from Disc did not get smaller going from CD to DVD in PS2 but grew: https://kb.iu.edu/d/adme ), seek times were similar, and the space in ram used to hold “seconds of level data” instead of just working data for the current frame. The same problem remained with games installed on HDD’s whose bandwidth and seek times are much much much better than DVD’s (seek times alone are at least 10-100x better than optical disk, still nowhere near enough as RAM goes to 512 MB and then 8 GB and then more…)… see Cerny’s Road to PS5 talk (SSD section).

Yes, the PS2, GC, and to a lesser extent, Xbox the were the only consoles that leveraged the read speed of the DVD drive in that manner. HDD as standard in consoles picked up that load going forward. With Dreamcast, it was possible on a smaller scale than GTA III, ala Crazy Taxi, but the limitations were visible even with that. I'm sure if Dreamcast had stuck around longer you would've seen more tricks in this vein, but alas.

My point was that it wasn't until DVD-ROM, GTA III specifically, where you saw the storage medium effect a game beyond the audio to the point the developers say that the streaming method, at the time, was what made the game even possible to achieve. Even doubling down and saying GD-ROM didn't provide enough bandwidth.

 

[hussar16]

I remember it being the sort of "hipster" console at the time. Everyone would be like "oh yeah I'm getting a PS2" or "I'm getting a Gamecube" and then you'd have some emo kid with long hair, baggy pants and vans shoes like "you should try jet set radio mate".

Based on this video:


It was good at doing what it did at a high resolution but was unable to do any of the advanced rendering/lighting stuff PS2 could do.

What advanced lighting. If anything ps2 was missing lightning

 

[Paulxo87]

It held up favorably to PS2 titles until things like the mgs2 demo and zone of the enders dropped

 

[Drew1440]

The DC was killed less than 2 years and half after launch. No console has ever shown its limits in such a short time frame. Especially when heavy hitters like Naughty Dog, Square Enix were only developing for Sony...

In terms of advanced effects, 2006 Under Defeat has shown a glimpse of what the console could do with modern tools.(G Rave isn't exactly a AAA size Studio, it's a tiny studio. Under Defeat crush litteraly 99% of 99-2001 DC games... Big publishers or not.

Dreamcast did live on in a way, the Sega NAOMI was still getting games produced as late as 2005. Granted the NAOMI has twice the system and video RAM as a stock Dreamcast. I wonder if the DC could have been more competitive had Sega stuck with that RAM amount from the start rather than halving it. I'd say that was the real reason it didn't get games like GTA III since they are reliant on not just streaming data, but caching it into RAM of which the PS2 had 32MB of it to store. That and hearing that GD-ROM drive noise whilst driving around Liberty City would not be a good experience.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Yes, the PS2, GC, and to a lesser extent, Xbox the were the only consoles that leveraged the read speed of the DVD drive in that manner. HDD as standard in consoles picked up that load going forward. With Dreamcast, it was possible on a smaller scale than GTA III, ala Crazy Taxi, but the limitations were visible even with that. I'm sure if Dreamcast had stuck around longer you would've seen more tricks in this vein, but alas.

My point was that it wasn't until DVD-ROM, GTA III specifically, where you saw the storage medium effect a game beyond the audio to the point the developers say that the streaming method, at the time, was what made the game even possible to achieve. Even doubling down and saying GD-ROM didn't provide enough bandwidth.

https://www.racketboy.com/retro/games-that-pushed-the-limits-of-the-sony-playstation-ps1 and this list is not exhaustive, quite a few games had to optimise data loading from CD to side step memory limitations (2 MB of main RAM was just too little)… Soul Reaver also counts, it’s way of streaming sectors in and out is the same strategy you will find in games like Morrowind and Oblivion and the clever gameplay tricks to hide swapping data in and out are the same ones that were being used in Jak & Daxter series on PS2 and on PS3 and PS4 games… what makes the difference is how much RAM can you “waste” as streaming buffer to keep as much world data that “could” be seen by the players at anyone time.

That is why SSD’s and an I/O stack that makes it efficient to load a lot of small data on demand (XSX|S and PS5 both invested in the same direction here) really made the difference in terms of memory utilisation being more efficient.

Read speed vs Main Memory size you can see how the situation was just getting worse and worse: PS1 ration was 0.15, PS2 was 0.16, PS3 craters to about 0.016 and you see the HDD installation step becoming pretty mandatory. As drives went faster and faster the memory was growing faster still and the weight of the data needed to power the visuals games were attempting was also growing astronomically high.

IMHO what helped streaming solutions become more and more useful was not as much the increase of bandwidth was the years of 16x RAM growth generation over generation (with the disc media struggling to keep up, giving up on PS3): 2 MB —> 32 MB —> 512 MB —> 8 GB and with PS4 even the fastest HDD based stack they could put in was struggling to deliver the kind of solution needed by open world games of their times. So well they started playing more and more clever visibility tricks, duplicating data massively on the HDD to maximise throughout and reduce latency, and using more and more RAM to store even more parts of the world in memory that you might travel to or see in the distance possibly at some points. If you wanted to swing quickly around the world that forced you to stress the streaming system more and more.

 

[cireza]

had the entire map loaded into RAM and VRAM as the game data was 40MB TOTAL

And this does not fit into the RAM and VRAM of the console. 8 + 16 MB. It is possible that the polygonal data is entirely loaded (makes sense, after all it can't be that huge), and then streaming textures which take the most space. This looks like a very common example of proper data streaming on Dreamcast.

In any case, streaming data on these old consoles is bad. It will use the lens very fast. I always thought that wanting to stream from an optical drive was a bad practice.

 

[thismeinteil]

I don't know if I would say powerhouse, since all 3 of the consoles that came out shortly after easily beat it. It definitely was compared to last gen systems, but that should be obvious.

I've been recently going back and playing some emulated DC games. I was actually surprised how little the graphics were changed for some of those cross gen games that were on the DC. I'm sure they were rendering at a slightly higher resolution and smoother frame rate, but besides that a lot of the assets were unchanged from the PSX versions. That seemed to change for cross gen games once the PS2 came out.

 

[dcx4610]

Actually powerful AND innovative. It's ironic because I was fed up and done with Sega by that point. I had the Genesis, 32X, Sega CD and Saturn and outside of the Genesis, they all let me down. It felt like they were always a step behind or just never fully commited to their hardware. The Dreamcast came out and they FINALLY nailed it and it was just too late.

It didn't really like the launch titles but despite that, games like Soul Caliber were legitimately better than the arcade version which was a first in my lifetime. The VMU was an awesome idea alongside the modem and online play. It's a real shame that they ran out of money because I think they could have held their own.

 

[UnNamed]

Force Five on Atomiswawe push the system harder than Soul Calibur, IMHO.

 

[Fat Frog]

Force Five on Atomiswawe push the system harder than Soul Calibur, IMHO.

Soulcalibur is an aesthetic beauty but doesn't push anything:
- It was released 8 months after launch (early game then)
- It was ported in only 7 months.(!!!)
- It's still a beautiful game because the Dreamcast is a great machine and Namco was at its peak. (it's a 7 months miracle production)

DOA2 has twice more polygons, multi layers levels... This one is pushing a little the Dreamcast.

 

[coffinbirth]

And this does not fit into the RAM and VRAM of the console. 8 + 16 MB. It is possible that the polygonal data is entirely loaded (makes sense, after all it can't be that huge), and then streaming textures which take the most space. This looks like a very common example of proper data streaming on Dreamcast.

In any case, streaming data on these old consoles is bad. It will use the lens very fast. I always thought that wanting to stream from an optical drive was a bad practice.

The HSS for Crazy Taxi is 100MB. Game data is 40MB. The map is < 20MB. The other 20MB are compressed textures. The other 60MB in HSS are the audio files.

https://www.racketboy.com/retro/games-that-pushed-the-limits-of-the-sony-playstation-ps1 and this list is not exhaustive, quite a few games had to optimise data loading from CD to side step memory limitations (2 MB of main RAM was just too little)… Soul Reaver also counts, it’s way of streaming sectors in and out is the same strategy you will find in games like Morrowind and Oblivion and the clever gameplay tricks to hide swapping data in and out are the same ones that were being used in Jak & Daxter series on PS2 and on PS3 and PS4 games… what makes the difference is how much RAM can you “waste” as streaming buffer to keep as much world data that “could” be seen by the players at anyone time.

That is why SSD’s and an I/O stack that makes it efficient to load a lot of small data on demand (XSX|S and PS5 both invested in the same direction here) really made the difference in terms of memory utilisation being more efficient.

Read speed vs Main Memory size you can see how the situation was just getting worse and worse: PS1 ration was 0.15, PS2 was 0.16, PS3 craters to about 0.016 and you see the HDD installation step becoming pretty mandatory. As drives went faster and faster the memory was growing faster still and the weight of the data needed to power the visuals games were attempting was also growing astronomically high.

IMHO what helped streaming solutions become more and more useful was not as much the increase of bandwidth was the years of 16x RAM growth generation over generation (with the disc media struggling to keep up, giving up on PS3): 2 MB —> 32 MB —> 512 MB —> 8 GB and with PS4 even the fastest HDD based stack they could put in was struggling to deliver the kind of solution needed by open world games of their times. So well they started playing more and more clever visibility tricks, duplicating data massively on the HDD to maximise throughout and reduce latency, and using more and more RAM to store even more parts of the world in memory that you might travel to or see in the distance possibly at some points. If you wanted to swing quickly around the world that forced you to stress the streaming system more and more.

Two of those games mention streaming from disc. That is half correct. The game that utilized it on PS1 was Crash, as was discussed in this thread. Soul Reaver does NOT do this, despite what that and many other articles claim. Soul Reaver does exactly what the Ridge Racer games do, which is not completely dump the RAM before a loading sequence. In Soul Reaver this occurs during corridors. Those corridors are a loading screen where you retain control because all of those values, tess. data etc. are still in RAM. It's a trick that somehow still manages to fool people. In Ridge Racer it's so you can play Pac-Man while the game loads.

Don't believe me?

https://tcrf.net/Proto:Legacy_of_Kain:_Soul_Reaver_(PlayStation)/January_23,_1999

"tunnels used to mask loading are not present, and finally duplicate files are not present to reduce search times for loading"

This from the Soul Reaver prototype before they added the corridors.

I've been in this game a long, long time, and as I've been saying, you can count these instances on one hand prior to DVD/PS2.

 

[Alexios]

It's not in the proto because they only managed to get the streaming fully working a couple months prior to launch. Idk what you think that proves and in the end you are just saying it streams the data in anyway, just only while in the corridors, yet are calling that a loading screen even though gameplay and everything remains fully funtional and you may of course always go back any time.

Behind the Classics: Amy Hennig Talks Soul Reaver Secrets

Ah, Soul Reaver. I remember it well! This gruesome little gem made quite the splash when it landed on PSone in 1999. As the wounded, ostracized vampire Raziel, your goal was to avenge yourself against the corrupt vampire lord Kain and restore balance to the decaying world of Nosgoth. I...

blog.playstation.com

Amy Hennig: Our biggest challenge, hands-down, was getting the data-streaming working, to allow us to have a seamless, interconnected world with no load events. I think we were one of the first developers to tackle this problem (along with Naughty Dog, on Crash Bandicoot). It proved to be way more difficult than we had initially anticipated – if I recall, we were still struggling to get the textures to dynamically pack correctly, just a couple months before release. We ultimately got it working by the skin of our teeth, but I wonder if we would’ve embarked on such an ambitious plan if we’d known how difficult it was going to be!

Difficult? Please, a simple don't-dump-all-ram trick, Amy!

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver - the genesis of today's open world tech?

In today's video games, the open world is now commonplace - a single, continuous gameplay area that offers a vast canva…

www.eurogamer.net

The work poured into this powerful engine would continue to serve the developer well after the release of Soul Reaver, and also impacted other areas of the game. For example, the PlayStation's CD drive was often deployed to play so-called Redbook audio - effectively audio CD-spec. With the drive entirely tied up with level streaming, this wouldn't be possible for Soul Reaver, so SNES-style sequenced audio was used instead. Crystal Dynamics took advantage of the set-up in order to dynamically alter the music during playback - context driven based entirely on what was happening during gameplay at the time. The sound quality is superb, but the storage and memory footprint was tiny - musician Kurt Harland's soundtrack from the game remains a highlight.

Everybody was lying to get you in 2023! A perfect crime!


You've quietly backpedaled from claiming it's 100% impossible to stream anything but audio (hello many CD games streaming video, you don't exist in his headcanon) on anything prior to DVD - as if the disc is more important than the actual system specs like drive speed - and treating anyone saying otherwise as an idiot, to then admitting it was indeed used to stream other types of data even on systems with the slowest possible CD drive/read speeds, never mind better non DVD systems like Dreamcast or GC or theoretical systems that could have used even faster CD or other drives, but then you try to call all that exceptions to your rule and claim you only ever meant streaming exactly as seen in GTAIII, which nobody claimed was made for those systems (duh) and it's obvious that every game/engine is different.

You basically make false statements, try to ridicule those opposing them with memes, make up arguments never claimed to respond to while backpedaling from your initial statements without admitting being wrong to make them or call others out for what you admit were in fact, facts! You do not know better than the developers and other quoted people even longer and even more "in this game" (that's your second appeal to the, your, authority, a logical fallacy for lack of arguments you keep going back to as if you think you're Carmack or somebody) which you wanna call liars or ignorant while now wanting everyone to take a random person's comments or notes - which may as well have been you or any other nobody for all we know - when describing an early build's differences to the final game as some kind of technical manual gospel worded exactly right. Kay

Edit: here's Crazy Taxi, normally a locked 60fps game, on a real Dreamcast with a replacement device slower in streaming than its drive, note the audio is perfectly fine, how about that? It's kind of a shame it waits rather than play without the loaded assets to see how that would look.


It almost resembles GTAIII performance on PS2 more than Crazy Taxi proper on Dreamcast

 

[cireza]

The HSS for Crazy Taxi is 100MB. Game data is 40MB. The map is < 20MB. The other 20MB are compressed textures. The other 60MB in HSS are the audio files.

Real time streaming is happening in this game for the visuals. And this is true for other games on the console. I don't care if it "counts" or not for for whatever reason, as your initial statement was that it did not exist before PS2, which is proven wrong.

 

[coffinbirth]

It's not in the beta because they only managed to get the streaming fully working a couple months prior to launch. Idk what you think that proves and in the end you are just saying it streams the data in, just only while in the corridors anyway, and calling that a loading screen even though gameplay and everything remains fully funtional throughout.
https://blog.playstation.com/2012/10/12/behind-the-classics-amy-hennig-talks-soul-reaver-secrets/

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfo...f-kain-the-genesis-of-todays-open-world-epics
You've already backepdaled from "it's impossible and you are an idiot if you say otherwise" to "it was rarely used" which nobody disputed and something like "I only neant streaming exactly as in GTAIII" which nobody claimed was made for any cd system. You don't know better than its developers and other people even longer and even more "in the game" which you wanna call liars while now wanting everyone else to take some random's comments describing an early build's differences as gospel worded exactly right. Kay.

I'm sorry, but you are clueless. Can't even reply directly, lol.
Also, learn what quotation marks are and how to use them when you brush up on that reading comprehension you so desperately need.

 

[DenchDeckard]

Still have my dream cast....absolute beast and I wasn't a huge Sega fan. Power stone....Street fighter....Tony hawks.....virtua tennis....house of the dead...

Console was great. Really enjoyed it.

 

[Alexios]

I also have to say that Windows CE is a bit underrated for Dreamcast. Sure it seems responsible for some duds, though the dev should be blamed for trying to do stuff they shouldn't with it and there are probably more duds that didn't use it anyway, but it also helped bring Dreamcast a good amount of solid games like Armada, Resident Evil 2 and Bust A Move 4 that didn't need "to the metal" optimizations and even some technically exciting stuff like freaking StarLancer which everyone should honestly play (on DC or PC).

Windows CE - Sega Retro

segaretro.org

The controls aren't as complicated as they seem at first, you'll do all your combat with just the basic layout, holding down X and using the d-pad to additionally scroll through targets more in-depth than just the next enemy (like when you wanna get to launched torpedoes first). Other controls that first need you to hold another button include orders to wingmen, strafing and rolling thrusters (the stick does pitch and yaw as there's no real up, down or gravity in effect) and while strafing would have been nice to have on hand in combat it's fine like this too with dogfights being more Star Wars or air combat style with other maneuvers only used out of combat when you need some extra precision (if they ever are necessary at all considering docking and such are automatic once you get close to the ship/station). It doesn't have inertia-type functions so you can strafe a large ship at full speed firing its broadside or something, it's not that kind of game even on PC. So yeah, it's a shame we didn't get more in that vein and quality like that era's Battlezone (which had a spin off on freaking N64 instead), a MechWarrior, IL-2 Sturmovik, Tachyon: The Fringe, just any cool PC ports...

 

[Alexios]

Deep Fighter (not Windows CE) is also cool though not quite impressive (if only it had visuals more like Ecco). Very nice mix of Toy Commander style object missions, Tomb Raider puzzles (yes in a vehicle) and 6 DOF combat. Kind of like a far more simy Treasures of the Deep. It also has real actor cut scenes (hence it's 2 discs) a la Wing Commander and other such games. There's quite a bit of variety to the gameplay though the controls could be better (the setup is a lot like MDK2 but in 6DOF rather than more like StarLancer's sticky throttle levels etc.). I can't find any good footage of the Dreamcast version that shows the more exciting stuff sadly, it seems most people give up early. There's some longer PC footage out there and it seems quite close with similarly low draw distance etc., possibly a better port than StarLancer even, with less slow down overall. The game's pretty ridiculous in its setting (Idk if the subs are meant to be tiny or the fish and everything gigantic + able to chew through metal, lol) and often slow but if people had fun moving eggs in Toy Commander I dunno why moving radioactive materials, ore, wrecked submarines etc. was too much...

 

[Esppiral]

Was probably more of a case of them already having those assets around from the pc version. Does Chronicles use them as well?

I certainly could've worded that better. There were a few games that chunked texture data in from disc, CT, Omikron and Shenmue are the ones I'm aware of., but even in those cases it was very minimal data. I was speaking about cd-rom, not gd-rom, but more pointedly about it's inability to stream data fast enough to stream assets in a way that GTA III did. Very specific. Dreamcast did very little data fetching during gameplay beyond reading the security sectors and paging files. Crazy Taxi, for example, had the entire map loaded into RAM and VRAM as the game data was 40MB TOTAL. It chunked in texture data. Dreamcast has an excellent texture compression system, better than PS2 even, but it is still hamstrung by the optical drive, and ROM bandwidth...that's why a game like Crazy Taxi works because the entire map is already there, whereas a game like Omikron proved the limitations of streaming in data on Dreamcast. Shenmue was wizardry. Again, always exceptions to the rule...
Just for the sake of comparison:
CD-ROM(Saturn)=300kb/s @2x
GD-ROM=1.8MB/s @12x
DVD-ROM(PS2)=5.2MB/s @4x
And keep in mind DC has about 1/2 the bandwidth of PS2

Also, Road Rash Saturn loads in sprites from disc, because they mishandled the SFX allocation, which is also why the Saturn version sounds muffled compared to 3DO. Need for Speed also did this on 3DO, but was corrected for Saturn. These were corrective measures, not intended design.

You really can count these types of instances they are so few. Had Dreamcast stuck around longer, I'm certain we would've seen more developers utilize data streaming as it was MUCH better than CD-ROM in that regard....but it didn't, and DVD-ROM ushered in real time data streaming...for a whopping whole console generation before HDD became the norm.

The bump mapping textures were exclusive to Dreamcast, to this day is the best version of the game.

 

[Esppiral]

Soulcalibur is an aesthetic beauty but doesn't push anything:
- It was released 8 months after launch (early game then)
- It was ported in only 7 months.(!!!)
- It's still a beautiful game because the Dreamcast is a great machine and Namco was at its peak. (it's a 7 months miracle production)

DOA2 has twice more polygons, multi layers levels... This one is pushing a little the Dreamcast.

Speaking of Soul Calibur I've necer seen it mentioned but Soul Calibur has soft body physics simulation for muscles (arms/legs chests) and no one ever mentions it, it may be the first game ever to actually feature soft body physics simulation, I am not talking about butts and boobs physics witch it also has.

 

[Fafalada]

Good luck doing the likes of Half-Life 2, Halo, Doom 3, Chaos Theory and Riddick on PS2 without becoming different games altogether (or even RE4 without downgrades

I'll be controversial here and say D3/Riddick were both very doable on PS2 (as in, competent versions that replicate the intended look&feel - not compromised). But for all its success - PS2 dev got cut-off before we'd see a commercial release that did something like it. GC probably had a fair shot here too - though limitations would be different for both of them.
Probably Halo - but for that we'd need to mandate a HDD install (in fact, all the ports would greatly benefit from requiring the HDD first - although HL2 is likely the most 'impossible' of the whole list due the specific visual make-up).
But of course we're talking engine-rebuilds to achieve any of this, not simple ports - you can't 'undo' entire pipelines that were built for PC GPUs (and consequently XBox) architecture.

Though this also goes to another point - PS2 gen was the first major step into "raw resources matter more than any sort of 'advanced features'", XB simply outclassed the competition in nearly every performance metrics that mattered(in some it was literally a generation ahead - like the built in HDD). If it was scaled down to PS2 (or worse, GC) level of memory/bandwidth/clock speeds, the differences would look much less exciting than all the 'features' would have you believe on paper.
And then by 360/PS3 launch we'd be all the way into that phase and in 2010s hw became indistinguishable from one another in terms of 'features'.

 

[Slayer-33]

I think it was, that's why I bought one. I played Ferrari 355 Challenge in HMV and just knew......I HAD to have one.

F yeah F355 Challenge is one of the GOAT's

 

[coffinbirth]

I'll be controversial here and say D3/Riddick were both very doable on PS2 (as in, competent versions that replicate the intended look&feel - not compromised). But for all its success - PS2 dev got cut-off before we'd see a commercial release that did something like it. GC probably had a fair shot here too - though limitations would be different for both of them.
Probably Halo - but for that we'd need to mandate a HDD install (in fact, all the ports would greatly benefit from requiring the HDD first - although HL2 is likely the most 'impossible' of the whole list due the specific visual make-up).
But of course we're talking engine-rebuilds to achieve any of this, not simple ports - you can't 'undo' entire pipelines that were built for PC GPUs (and consequently XBox) architecture.

Though this also goes to another point - PS2 gen was the first major step into "raw resources matter more than any sort of 'advanced features'", XB simply outclassed the competition in nearly every performance metrics that mattered(in some it was literally a generation ahead - like the built in HDD). If it was scaled down to PS2 (or worse, GC) level of memory/bandwidth/clock speeds, the differences would look much less exciting than all the 'features' would have you believe on paper.
And then by 360/PS3 launch we'd be all the way into that phase and in 2010s hw became indistinguishable from one another in terms of 'features'.

I was under the impression that they canned the PS2 port of Riddick because they couldn't get it to run properly. One only needs to look as far as their PC port of Riddick to see that they weren't up to the task of porting the game. That's not to say it wasn't doable, but I'd hazard a guess that MAJOR sacrifices would've had to have been made, regardless, had they gotten their optimization in check. That being said, they had a year to do it, and couldn't/didn't.

The fact that Riddick was considered a technical achievement on Xbox didn't help it's chances for running well on PS2 from the jump.

 

[Fafalada]

As I said above - the biggest wall with a lot of these was memory/HDD requirement, so for a standard commercial port, you'd be forced to downgrade before looking at a single performance bottleneck, because very few publishers could afford to 'mandate' the HDD on PS2.
Looking past that - both D3 and Riddick would require a deferred render-pipeline on PS2 to get good results - which was a pretty radical departure in how to utilize the PS2 hardware - and as mentioned, never made it into a commercial release. But who knows, maybe it will see light-of day in homebrew sometime, not unlike the 'impossible' stuff we see on older hw these days (Mode 7 on Spectrum, Unreal 1 on Saturn, etc).

 

[Daniel Thomas MacInnes]

Like everybody else in the year 1999, I was amazed and bowled over by Sega Dreamcast. Games like Soul Calibur, NFL & NBA 2K, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing, Power Stone and Sonic Adventure were really amazing and demonstrated the next leap forward in videogames. However, within a couple years, it was very clear that PS2, GameCube and Xbox were on a higher plane of existence.

I've had the opinion for some time that Sega never really intended for Dreamcast to "compete" against their rivals. At the time, the videogame market was simply not large enough to support four major players, and when two of those include Sony (worth $56 billion in 1999) and Microsoft (worth more money than God), there was no way in hell that Sega was ever going to survive. Even Nintendo found themselves in seemingly terminal decline on the console sphere, and heaven only knows where they would have ended if not for Pokemon and the Gameboy/Advance handhelds keeping things afloat.

No, I think the goal for Dreamcast was to regain Sega's financial footing after the severe beating they took during the Saturn era (not Saturn's fault, aside from the fact it cost $300 to build, which absolutely killed them), and seek a partner for either a merger or buyout. I still say Microsoft should have bought Sega back in 1997 or 1998 and sold the original Xbox as "Dreamcast" under the Sega brand in Japan (under this scenario, the Dreamcast we all know and love would never exist).

 

[Alexios]

Nah, that's nonsense, later (and perhaps more importantly more expensive) systems obviously can have better tech, Xbox (which may not have happened back then if Dreamcast had been successful and Sega saw no need to collaborate with Microsoft) came sooner after PS2 than PS2 did after Dreamcast and blew it out of the water, even if PS2 dominating the gen via PR meant most games had that as the baseline. It would have been neat to see games aim for Dreamcast as the baseline then just adjust with more effects, polygons, frames, textures for GC and whatever works for PS2.

A recent Flycast (RA core) update added a "Full framebuffer emulation" setting, using it limits you to native resolution and it may be more demanding but it enables things like 18 Wheeler's lens flares and makes effects like Code: Veronica's water/heat distortion stutter-free without turning the RTT buffer off. It's the same for Antonio's starting battle roar in Skies of Arcadia (it doesn't fix everything or is unrelated to effects like the dof or blur in Fina's dream before she wakes up on the pirate ship, it looks wrong but is momentary, though the game may have other such effects later). Many, if not most, games work correctly without this of course so you may still enable high resolutions, C:V even seemed fine with RTT off but Skies did have issues so there may be other games like it and 18 Wheeler that require this new setting. Still waiting for a Sega Rally 2 fix, though forcing texture filtering works as a work around for it not functioning by default, it still looks wrong in stages like Muddy where you see the big square textures tree leaves are painted on. These exceptions and bad performance in Armada and Under Defeat are about all the issues I've had in this emu (so I have no need for Redream which has its own issues, not to mention lacks support for Windows CE games, Atomiswave, Naomi or Naomi 2) with minor issues in a couple games' attract modes like crashes or stupid behaviour in Le Mans and Faster than Speed and some Aero Dancing iirc (gameplay has no issues).

 

[Fat Frog]

Alexios
As you said weeks ago, Dreamcast was clearly competitive and not leagues behind in terms of graphics.

People said the graphics were too archaic, too ugly to remain competitive ?
Well, gamers at Resetera just spoke...

I don't care if it's prettier than the PS2 or not (that's not my point) but it's a proof a lot of gamers loved Dreamcast's great IQ, colors, textures even if it had often blocky 3D. (more than 30% of the votes for the Dreamcast: it was clearly competitive)

 

[hussar16]

Alexios
As you said weeks ago, Dreamcast was clearly competitive and not leagues behind in terms of graphics.

People said the graphics were too archaic, too ugly to remain competitive ?
Well, gamers at Resetera just spoke...

I don't care if it's prettier than the PS2 or not (that's not my point) but it's a proof a lot of gamers loved Dreamcast's great IQ, colors, textures even if it had often blocky 3D. (more than 30% of the votes for the Dreamcast: it was clearly competitive)

I think the reason is dreamcast got 2000-2001 games while ps2 games look good because they are made later .if ps2 had worse running dreamcast games then I think dreamcast could run the ps2 games easy and with higher resolution. Some games on ps2 look so good in hd.issue was ps2 could never run it in high resolution so ps2 games looked ugly many times

 

[Mahnmut]

When the DC got released nothing came close (I remember that I skipped school to go get one on release day). When PS2 launched, the DC traded nice blows with it and even got the upper hand on some ports. But as the gen moved forward it was clear that PS2 was way above : games like MGS2 and 3, GTA, ICO… were just unthinkable on DC. But boy do I love that little white box.

 

[Fat Frog]

11,3% of youtube gamers

 

[Alexios]

Hard to find good footage of these games while they remain in Japanese only, but they look pretty sweet. I timestamped the 3D engine bits here. Kinda nuts how they could get away with just 2D/CG bits + 3D battles only but made all these in engine models/environments/scenes with ace effects.
​

 

[Yoboman]

It had good hardware but it was only 2 years after N64 but there was a substantial leap.

You could really see big leaps in only a year in graphics hardware back then

 

[Tell’em Keb]

Firing up Soul Caliber at launch was world changing for my friends and I. I couldn’t take my eyes of the screen and was blown away at the idea of playing games that looked better than the arcade. I was hooked.

 

[Mahnmut]

Firing up Soul Caliber at launch was world changing for my friends and I. I couldn’t take my eyes of the screen and was blown away at the idea of playing games that looked better than the arcade. I was hooked.

I remember when my brother came back with that game. Mind blowing. One of my biggest wow moment was also in Shenmue when you first leave the dojo and start wandering in the streets : the people living their lives, the activity, the feeling that you are in a tangible world with things happening around you, the music… It was just incredible.

 

[Alexios]

Giant Gram 2000: Zen Nihon Pro Wres 3 Eikou no Yuushatachi also looks great, not at a glance maybe compared to the likes of DOA 2 but considering that you have up to 5 characters on screen at a time with the tag matches and the referee. Those are some pretty cool ribbon effects too.


But yeah, delving into Sakura Wars footage, those are probably the best overall on Dreamcast outside fighting/racing and other in a sense limited scope games. Such attention to detail in the scenes, the skyboxes, particles, lens and lighting effects, animations, CG overlays for specials, so good.


Would have loved to see a Skies of Arcadia 2 style game on their level. Well, SoA already looks great (Grandia II too) but these have very mature (and expensive) development in a way that beats the likes of Persona, Tales and even Path of Radiance if not higher caliber stuff on PS2/GameCube.​

 

[sankt-Antonio]

It was a beast. very good style (love the logo) and sexy design. Games? Instant classics. If only they made it financially.

 

[Fat Frog]

 

[Surfheart]

PS1 -> Dreamcast jump felt bigger than PS3 -> PS5 jump