Falco Girgis
@falco_girgis • 13,699 subscribers
Sega Dreamcast developer on a quest to correct the timeline of video gaming history. Working on the modern, open-source indie DC SDK and library OS, KallistiOS.
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Sooo... How's our port of Sonic Mania to the Sega Dreamcast coming along!? SHE'S ALMOST DONE! We're getting ready for release!!! As you can see from these direct hardware captures, the game looks and runs amazingly on the DC! Multiple beta testers have now cleared the game on both Mania and Encore modes! Jnmartin worked his butt off finishing up the remaining effects, Michael Fadely is working on the final bit of polish, such as making sure the menu button icons show Dreamcast controller graphics, and I just opened a PR to put the gameplay code on the latest SH4ZAM commit... STAND BY FOR THE BLUE BLUR'S EPIC RETURN TO THE SEGA DREAMCAST!
Falco Girgis144,750 views • 2 months ago
Actual hardware capture showing some of the latest progress on our "impossible" #GTA 3 port to the Sega #Dreamcast! No more clipping issues, solid 30fps framerate, most effects are present. Very playable at this early stage. Still have a lot of work to go, but she's shaping up quite nicely! Footage was recorded by Esppiral. For more epic DC footage and updates, please subscribe to his YT channel: #gamedev #retrocomputing
Falco Girgis941,517 views • 2 years ago
I think it's time we all get a reality check on Diddy Kong Racing 64 for the Sega Dreamcast, including myself... So here it is: original DKR for N64 vs our ported DKR for DC, direct comparison with FPS counters enabled. The truth is that I've been staring at the FPS meter all weekend, obsessing over every little dip, vectorizing, loop unrolling, and optimizing every little expensive-looking loop I can see in the codebase to win back 0.1FPS at a time... totally losing sight of what the basis for comparison even was from the original... So how long has it been since you've played the original on N64? I'm not talking about via emulation with higher FPS and fancy upscaling. I'm talking about directly, on an actual, physical Nintendo 64. Full disclosure... prolly been half a decade now, for me! Anyway, the devs behind the decomp were kind enough to share with me some of their performance and timing analysis captures... so I figured we'd take a step back and have a little fun! I had no idea it was running at only 20FPS tops, capped at 15FPS for the WizPig races!? I just remember pissing myself at having never seen a game look that good or realistic in my entire life back in 1997 when DKR came out for the N64... All I know is I want to do this game justice... but the truth is that even though we're still cooking, already the Dreamcast runs consistently at 10FPS higher and runs at 4x the screen resolution with progressive scan output... What do you guys think? How's our port comparing?🤔
Falco Girgis54,555 views • 1 month ago
Holy SHIT! It's finally happening, guys!!! The Nintendo 64's definitive kart racer, Diddy Kong Racing, is coming to the Sega Dreamcast!!! This is a direct hardware capture of my very first preview of the initial build, and it already runs this well, and looks this good! 🙇♂️ This one was one of my all-time childhood favorites, and I have intentionally not yet introduced the game to my children, in hopes that they could one day get to experience it on DC! This one is all BRUCE so far, the same dude who heard your pleas and did the initial work to bring the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to the DC. ...and yes, I'm already looking at math routines for SH4ZAM gainz!🤣
Falco Girgis63,983 views • 1 month ago
Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the iconic 2001 MMORPG experience, Runescape Classic... NOW ON THE SEGA DREAMCAST!!! The port has officially progressed from the obligatory "runs like crap, looks like crap, and needs a 32MB RAM expansion," phase, to the "omg this thing is actually playable on a stock DC now and looks great," phase! Developer, Lobotomy, was able to completely rewrite the rendering back-end to use our low-level PowerVR GPU driver in KallistiOS, boosting performance so far that he could even include per-vertex dynamic lighting as part of a real-time day/night system! Upon setting your UTC timezone offset, and having it get saved to your VMU, the game will automatically sync system time over NTP and will actually keep your DC's internal time updated properly, for all of us lazy mofos with dead CMOS batteries! The port supports taking user-input from the Dreamcast's mouse and keyboard peripherals in addition to standard controllers (even sporting additional support for dual-analog controllers connected via 3rd-party adapters). Finally, you can connect to the RSC servers for online play by using the Dreamcast's built-in modem (typically via DreamPi), the 100mbit ethernet broadband adapter, the elusive AF 10mbit ethernet LAN adapter, or even the brand new, W5500-based, DIY BBA alternative, which can plug in externally through your serial port or internally through the SCI port (with modification), and is sold typically for only about $5-$10 from various online vendors.
Falco Girgis73,135 views • 2 months ago
I've only had access to the codebase for Bruce's port of Diddy Kong Racing to the Sega Dreamcast for about 12 hours so far... and I've already managed to create an "incident" worthy of the scrapbook. I migrated the trigonometry away from using giant-ass, interpolated LUT approximations to our HW-accelerated dual sin/cos FSCA instruction, using my SH4ZAM math library. The gainz were so big that their necks got swole too!🤣
Falco Girgis49,869 views • 1 month ago
Watching Elias Daler master the "bloom" or real-time "glow" look on the Sega Dreamcast is giving me flashbacks to one of the most surreal moments of working on our Grand Theft Auto 3 DC port... There was a point in time when I was convinced that these effects in GTA3 were implemented via a post-processing Gaussian blur pass, as is done nowadays within shaders... because it looked so damn good. I remember being horrified over how we'd be able to pull it off on Dreamcast, being extremely CPU-bound, lacking shaders. We didn't have enough VRAM left for RTT, and even if we did, transparent fillrate is a blatant weakness of our PVR GPU... I remember thinking... OH GOD, WE'RE SCREWED! PS2 FANBOYS WILL HAVE A FIELD DAY!!! So imagine my shock when, upon us implementing a seemingly trivial 2D billboard path in our custom Renderware driver back-end... SUDDENLY BLOOM LIGHTING ON DREAMCAST APPEARS??? W T F??? That moment forever changed the way I looked at GTA3 and Vice City, as well as at achieving peak graphical fidelity and dynamic lighting effects on 6th gen platforms. Rain, smog, bloom, coronas, lens flares, ground reflections, and more... all just genius use of simple textures within these engines. Combine these texture-based effects with juuuuust enough real-time dynamic lighting and fog effects, and you can really sell the overall aesthetic without killing a console that doesn't even have shaders and does all of its TnL on its main CPU.
Falco Girgis31,150 views • 1 month ago
Sonic Mania Plus for the Sega Dreamcast finally has audio! Here's a 2 minute direct hardware capture of me playing the latest build of Michael Fadely's port on my actual DC to hype up the Blue Blur's epic comeback to a Sega console... where he has always belonged!
Falco Girgis168,686 views • 7 months ago
What is this BLASPHEMY??? Oh, just a scene from Kingdom Hearts running on a SEGA DREAMCAST! The dynamic duo of Mad Modder Esppiral and DC homebrew veteran, PH3NOM, has once again given us a juicy glimpse into a version of gaming history where the little white box of dreams wound up winning against Sony's PS2. If you're into righting historical gaming wrongs and seeing the impossible made possible on the Sega Dreamcast, be sure to follow Esppiral for more blasphemy!
Falco Girgis105,301 views • 5 months ago
Excuuuuse me!? Shit just got REAL for the Resident Evil 4 proof-of-concept tech demo that Esppiral and PH3NOM have been cooking up... This is running on a SEGA DREAMCAST!?! In the span of 2 days, we went from "Wow, that looks pretty good, kinda like the scaled back version of RE4 that got released for the iPhone 3GS back in 2009," to talking about the technical feasibility of gloss-mapping Leon's leather jacket to recreate the effect that was present in the Gamecube version but was cut from the Playstation 2 port. ...best prepare ourselves for the impending PS2 fanboy mass meltdown.🤣
Falco Girgis87,051 views • 4 months ago
Today, I present to you a direct hardware capture of Sonic Advance 2... RUNNING ON A SEGA DREAMCAST! Turns out developer, bezet, has been hard at work porting the Gameboy Advance classic to the little white box of dreams... where it belongs! It's still extremely early, and there are plenty of visual glitches, performance issues, as well as no audio implemented yet, but as you can see, progress at this early stage is still extremely promising, and much of the game is very playable! Stay tuned for more footage and news as developer bezet continues to progress!
Falco Girgis60,515 views • 3 months ago
Ever wondered what Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword would look like on a Sega Dreamcast? Well, look no further than this direct hardware from Esppiral! Not content with proving the DC could mess around with PS2 poly counts, he's testing the waters with Wii games, currently... and little bit of jank and pop-in aside, considering this has come with zero asset changes or engine optimizations specific to this title, I'm extremely impressed with how she's performing! Be sure to check out the full video and subscribe to Esppiral on YouTube, so you can encourage him to keep working to correct the timeline of gaming history:
Falco Girgis75,376 views • 4 months ago
The next Nintendo 64 classic has just hit the Sega Dreamcast, thanks, once again, to the efforts of jnmartin! Here's over a minute of Super Mario 64 gameplay, captured directly from my DC! As is usual with jnmartin's work, the port plays like a AAA native release, with everything SH4ZAMed up, running fullspeed, and looking as crisp and vibrant as ever with the Dreamcast's sharp 480p video output! To convert your N64 ROM into a bootable Dreamcast image, follow the link to the automated builder on the GitHub repository: Let us know what you think and remember to keep Dreaming!
Falco Girgis120,194 views • 7 months ago
Holy CRAP! jnmartin gave me access to his private Sonic R decompilation repo, which will serve as the basis for the Sega Dreamcast port. I was able to build Sonic R NATIVELY for my x86_64 desktop, running Ubuntu 24.04, and immediately begin playing after just typing "make" and then passing the binary the location of my ripped (yet legally purchased) PC assets. ...but while he's at it, jnmartin has decided to make the base decompilation codebase platform-independent, so this should theoretically work on any platform that supports SDL2 and very basic OpenGL--no shaders required--with very low system requirements. jnmartin already has it running fine on the latest MacOS version on Apple silicon, and now we can confirm it works fine on Debian Linux distros, no problem. Next up we'll test for Windows. Oh, and by the way, to everyone freaking out over the fact that the decomp is starting from the PC version and not the Saturn version, lamenting the less vibrant coloring... Your voices have been heard! CHECK IT OUT NOW!!! ...just imagine 4p netplay between Windows, Mac, Linux, and the Sega Dreamcast! 🤯
Falco Girgis71,617 views • 4 months ago
It's finally time for the massive update I know EVERYONE has been eagerly waiting for... Presenting to you over 6 straight minutes of spliced footage directly captured from my actual physical Sega Dreamcast... RUNNING THE LATEST BUILD OF OUR SONIC MANIA PORT!!! I can't even begin to describe to you how polished and fantastic it's starting to feel... as though it belonged on the Dreamcast all-along... Thanks to the hard work of jnmartin, sonicfreak94, and a few others, not only is the Dreamcast port nearing completion, but... wait for it... THE 3D STAGES THAT STRUGGLED ON EVERY UNOFFICIAL PORT ARE NOW ALL RUNNING FULLSPEED!!!! Trust me when I say that this took an absolutely ENORMOUS amount of effort from jnmartin and the crew to pull off, considering the low-end for this game was the original Nintendo Switch, and ports running on consoles with twice our processing power struggled to run these levels fullspeed. The first and most obvious thing is that the 3D software renderer was ditched and all rendering was done natively with our PowerVR GPU... which actually wasn't as simple as it sounds. The tilemaps for these levels have had to be tessellated into a bajillion PVR quads and transformed and rendered as individual polygons to look correct and run faster than a slideshow. Mr anonymous Ocarina of Time chad developer came up with a pretty slick LoD scheme for drawing tiles closest to the player at 1x1 pixel sizes with sizes increasing with distance up to 2x2 and 4x4 pixels, allowing them to reduce the overall number of tile vertices that have to be transformed by the SH4 CPU and submitted to the PVR GPU, by strategically keeping the majority of the polygon detail closest to the camera, with detail decreasing as the tiles get further away. Next, the 3D geometry was preprocessed and converted from being triangle-based to being triangle-strip based, drastically reducing the number of vertices per model that our 200Mhz SH4 CPU had to transform (with plain integer arithmetic and no FPU vectorization, since this is all slow-ass fixed-point integer math)! Finally, it was discovered that the lighting was a disproportionately significant contributor to the TnL load on the SH4 for processing vertices. Jnmartin came to the realization that 99% of the time only the Y axis direction is considered for lighting equation intensity with just a white color. So this simplified lighting model got baked into the renderer, which gave another round of gainz. So in the end, after all of this work came together, a draw distance of 75% the distance of the retail Sonic Mania versions was achieved for the decorations, plus the character models have their full geometry count and have not been simplified on a freaking Sega Dreamcast with a 200Mhz SH4 CPU and only 16MB of RAM! 🔥
Falco Girgis88,417 views • 5 months ago
OH, HELL NO!!! Some poor sap just reported that we have a game-breaking bug in our port of Super Mario 64 to the Sega Dreamcast! EVIDENTLY you are rewarded for collecting all 120 stars and defeating the final Bowser encounter with... a game-breaking glitch that causes Mario to die as he flies off to into the sunset??? 🤣 Here's an actual hardware capture of me loading it up on my DC to see if I could repro... and sure enough... not only that, but the circles caused by Bowser stomping the ground are flying up in the air??? WOW. We missed this on the first release! Lucky for you guys, the same chad who reported the issue, Gazu, is not only working diligently to fix these bugs, but he has also taken the liberty of implementing VMU extras into the game! Now the VMU plays a scrolling animation of Mario's face during cutscenes and shows the power gauge during normal gameplay or the breathe gauge while underwater, in real-time! I'll let you guys know when we're ready for an updated release!
Falco Girgis72,278 views • 5 months ago
Bruce and I are proud to invite enfilade (dc99.net) to our humble little band of dudes on a quest to port Diddy Kong Racing, in all of its glory, to the Sega Dreamcast. Enfilade is a master of the Visual Memory Unit's monochrome LCD screen, featuring a whopping 48x32 pixel resolution. We will be leveraging his skill to bring VMU-specific enhancements to the experience, exclusively for the DC. Next up, Bruce just merged my "GAINZ Round 2" PR, which has taken the port from "pretty much fullspeed, can drop a few frames here and there," to "100% solid 30FPS no matter what you do in-game except for fucking Wizpig randomly causing us to dip to 26FPS in a few places." Check the video to see how smoothly she's running! To commemorate the occasion, Bruce has opted to make the repo public, so that anyone savvy enough to have a KallistiOS environment setup can already start building, playing, testing, and opening tickets with us for the remaining issues! I also wanted to shout-out to the dudes, especially gentarkin and Fazana, who we owe everything to, as their tireless work on the decompilation is the only reason we had any code to port to the DC to begin with... Not only did they put in this initial work, but then they also acted as total chads, continuing to support our DC port and offer consultations as we encountered issues or needed advice. Congratulations to both of them as well for finally reaching 100% on the decomp!
Falco Girgis19,872 views • 1 month ago
SURPRIIIIIIISE!!! The beta release of our Grand Theft Auto Vice City port to the Sega Dreamcast is finally here! Here's an actual hardware capture of raising some hell in the beautiful streets of Miami taken straight from my DC to celebrate! We've now added graphics settings for 2xFSAA to give it a less jagged, more smooth look and have added a video mode for rendering to a 24bpp framebuffer, which adds extra depth and vividness to the colors! While we still have plenty of work to do regarding features, assets, and performance, I am extremely proud of our team after what we've accomplished within just a few short months with this port that, for the last two decades, was considered literally impossible for the console to handle. It has been an absolute honor and privilege to work beside you crazy and talented bastards! I also want to thank the Sega Dreamcast and Grand Theft Auto communities for rallying around this cause and coming together to help us test and debug this release along with the previous GTA3 release over the last several months. Your support and diligent work has been vital for ensuring that the games have been fully playable on the DC, and your constant support and feedback has been an inspiration to the team. We couldn't have done it without you! For instructions on how to convert your (LEGALLY EFFING PURCHASED) PC versions of GTAVC into a image which can be played on the DC, the instructions can be found here: PS: No, this is not an April Fool's joke, but we're going to love everyone thinking it is! Guess you're gonna have to try it to find out!🤣
Falco Girgis153,237 views • 1 year ago
SURPRISE SURPRISE! The alpha release of Grand Theft Auto 3 running on the Sega #Dreamcast (DCA3) is here! Here is an actual hardware capture I took from my DC while doing some physics engine optimization work. Over the last several months, a rag-tag team of indie DC developers and GTA fans assembled to take on what seemed to many to be an impossible feat: port GTA3 to the Sega Dreamcast. I will be posting about our journey regularly!
Falco Girgis174,649 views • 1 year ago