Falco Girgis
@falco_girgis • 13,633 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 Girgis140,424 views • 28 days 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 Girgis71,908 views • 20 days 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 Girgis940,644 views • 1 year 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 Girgis59,989 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 • 6 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 Girgis104,680 views • 3 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 • 3 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 Girgis71,356 views • 2 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 Girgis75,077 views • 3 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 Girgis87,939 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 Girgis119,994 views • 6 months ago
Time for a status update and direct hardware capture of another high-profile AAA title coming to the Sega Dreamcast... jnmartin's eagerly anticipated port of Sonic R! As you can see from the footage, the game looks and runs phenomenally on the DC, with all of the fancy lighting from the Sega Saturn version, plus the dynamic weather system from the PC release, along with the banger soundtrack present and accounted for on the little white box of Dreams, which is now able to run it at twice the resolution, with crisp progressive-scan video display output! One of the most exciting and interesting aspects of this project is that jnmartin has taken the port to the next level and has implemented online connectivity and even internet cross-play, so that you can race against players running the game on Windows, MacOS, and Linux on your Dreamcast!
Falco Girgis17,114 views • 21 days 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 • 4 months ago
"Wait, WTF is this," you ask? Oh, nothing much... Just "The Tomb of Raithwall" from Final Fantasy 12... RUNNING ON AN ACTUAL FREAKING SEGA DREAMCAST!!! Mad modder Esppiral has cooked us up another round of epic console blasphemy with this one, this time teaming up with DC homebrew scene veteran, PH3NOM, who was also one of my partners in crime on our Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City ports to the Sega Dreamcast. Anyway, Esppiral has managed to warez this iconic scene from the big bad PS2 for our little white box of dreams by leveraging PH3NOM's new engine, the aptly named "Dreamcast Engine." I've been watching those two cook up crazy new scenes and push the DC to new levels for most of the week in our Discord server, so be sure to tune in to the two of them for updates! Follow PH3NOM for more updates on the engine and his science experiments with new rendering techniques using the DC's PowerVR GPU here: Follow Esppiral for more blasphemous experiments with bringing iconic scenes from other platforms to the DC here:
Falco Girgis56,726 views • 4 months ago
jnmartin and I just spent the last 12 hours straight locked into an epic tag-team, binge-coding session. We've decided to return to perfect our port of Mario Kart 64 to the Sega Dreamcast, bringing with us all of the skills, knowledge, and tools at our disposal that we gained from every port we've been involved with since we originally released MK64 DC to the public. 1) jnmartin has just completely redone the audio synthesis and mixing code. It was originally emulating the Nintendo 64's RSP in software, on our CPU, and wound up being a total resource hog, despite us going to hell and back again, substantially boosting its performance by vectorizing it with our SH4 SIMD instructions. 2) Now that the audio is actually offloaded to the AICA, we can leverage its DSP to put back in effects such as reverb and echo that we simply didn't have the CPU budget to implement before... so the overall audio quality of the port will be SIGNIFICANTLY improved. 3) jnmartin has been working on many small bugfixes, such as the near-Z clipping edge-cases that would cause corrupted triangles to draw over the players' screens sometimes in 3 and 4 player modes. 4) jnmartin just kicked GLdc--our OpenGL 1.1 driver, built atop of KallistiOS--to the curb and has instead implemented a bare-metal renderer that raw-dogs KOS's lowest-level PVR GPU driver directly, giving us more control and better performance within the renderer. 4) I just implemented support for playing with the Sega Dreamcast keyboard peripheral as a controller, partially as a flex, and partially because jnmartin kept complaining that he only had 3 controllers for testing... 🤣 4) I have taken my entire accelerated math and linear algebra library, SH4ZAM--which was born just after this port was originally released--back with me this time and am optimizing every freaking thing I can get my hands on with it. Every matrix multiplication, vector transform, memcpy-call, and scalar or trig routine is getting swapped out for the corresponding hand-optimized, meticulously benchmarked, and rigorously unit-tested equivalent within SH4ZAM, which now ships as part of kos-ports. As you can see from this series of direct hardware captures, overlaid with the terminal window which was capturing the FPS logging reports from my actual Sega Dreamcast, the performance is now SIGNIFICANTLY better than it was previously, and it already ran on-par or slightly better than the N64 original under most circumstances! Sooo many GAINZ to be had! 💪
Falco Girgis12,874 views • 22 days ago
Some interesting Sega Dreamcast science I've been doing on the side recently... Here's a direct hardware capture of a tech demo of Bruce's aptly-named "Dreamcast Mesh Shit," featuring assets from... Uhhh... I don't even know where he jacked these from... 😂 ANYWAY, the main thing I've been working on is optimizing the skinning for the animations using my SH4ZAM fast math and linear algebra library, which can easily become one of the primary bottlenecks when running the late 6th generation games on the Dreamcast. My work has been mostly to allow the vast majority of the skinning math to occur in the SH4's XMTRX back-bank of floating-point registers, rather than having to round-trip to and from memory for every operation... Just shaved off a few hundred microseconds per mesh this way, with a lot more room to go. Once I have this stuff SOLID, I plan to bring it back to our DC port of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, where skinning was one of the major contributors to FPS dips.
Falco Girgis49,078 views • 3 months ago
Just encountered the STRANGEST freaking "bug" in our port of Sonic Mania to the Sega Dreamcast while I was beta testing with my son... Witness as the game, which runs like an absolute dream on the Dreamcast, smooth as butter, without the SH4 CPU or PVR GPU even trying, abruptly slows down to a crawl the minute the anti-gravity electromagnets come onscreen. The game remains in slideshow mode all the way through until the end of Act 1, after which it jumps to 60FPS the INSTANT the act ends and Act 2 begins? WTF?! Turns out the minute the electromagnets become activated, they are checking for objects to interact with OVER THE ENTIRE MAP until the level ends... This would've never even been a problem for a game whose low-end was a Nintendo Switch with a 4-core ARM running at over 1GHz... but the inefficiency suddenly becomes quite blatant when the same code runs on our 200Mhz single-core SH4 CPU. Until we fix this one, I will henceforth be referring to the "Flying Battery Zone" as the "Fucky Battery Zone." 🤣
Falco Girgis51,794 views • 4 months 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 Girgis174,577 views • 1 year 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 Girgis149,786 views • 1 year ago