Falco Girgis
@falco_girgis • 13,432 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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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 Girgis58,217 görüntüleme • 4 gün önce
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 Girgis940,443 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
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 Girgis70,918 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
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 Girgis86,908 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
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 Girgis74,680 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
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 Girgis104,464 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
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 Girgis168,016 görüntüleme • 4 ay önce
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 Girgis87,298 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
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 Girgis72,242 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
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 görüntüleme • 4 ay önce
"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 Girgis56,563 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
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 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
This is a direct hardware capture of our Grand Theft Auto 3 port running on the Sega Dreamcast... which I'm still constantly receiving questions about to this day... So what's the deal? Do we ever plan to revisit it, or have we called it a day and moved on? What about all of these gainz that I keep posting about, surely they could be applied to our GTA3 and VC ports? The truth is... No, I'm not done. I constantly think about the day when SH4ZAM is ready to be pulled back into the codebase for what will hopefully be another round of epic gainz. GTA3 and VC on DC were probably the most exhilarating, satisfying projects I've ever worked on as an engineer--academically, professionally, and personally. SH4ZAM literally started out as hand-optimized inline ASM routines I was whipping out of my ass to optimize the physics and TnL for these ports... but I decided to extract the routines and develop SH4ZAM in isolation for a couple reasons: 1) I saw a gaping hole in the DC homebrew community and KallistiOS ecosystem, which prevented indie developers from truly harnessing the power of the DC's SH4 CPU and its epic FPU, due to us having no good generic software solution to democratize the hardware... I felt like my work on GTA3 and VC could help fill that void. 2) The linear algebra math and low level SH4 ASM was starting to get complex enough that continuing to work within the main game codebase when implementing these optimizations became unrealistic. It became too easy to break the game in obscure ways that weren't immediately apparent without playing the game for hours, which was not a very ideal workflow... I needed an isolated environment where I could rigorously unit test and profile my routines. In addition to SH4ZAM, though, there's all kinds of other stuff I wanted for the game... We have yet to implement mouse + keyboard support for the PC control scheme, also enabling players enter cheat codes. We had some cool goodies planned for the VMU, and we didn't support any rumble or haptic feedback either, just to name a few. Finally, we have one more super secret weapon we've kept hidden for many months now... A certain 3D modeling wizard, who goes by Andrea Lotito, has been working on asset-side gainz, by reducing polygonal complexity of pedestrian models among others, while astonishingly still managing to get EVEN MORE DETAIL out of the models as well?!
Falco Girgis34,216 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
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 Girgis49,195 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
OKAY, FIIIINE! It's true! The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is now actively being ported to the Sega Dreamcast!!!! Here's a direct hardware capture I LITERALLY just barely took of me testing out a bunch of optimizations I'm making to the matrix routines using my SH4 accelerated SH4ZAM library. This port was started and is currently being led by a total chad who was always joking that he'd do the legwork to get the port started for jnmartin, who was never particularly interested in OoT, despite the desperate pleas from the fans... Mr. Chad knew that jnmartin wouldn't be able to resist jumping in and helping with the port once the initial work was done... aaaand he was 100% right! 🤣 While Mr. Chad, OoT leader prefers to remain anonymous (so people can't bitch at him over bugs or pressure him to hurry up), he and jnmartin have been working their asses off to get the port this far... to the point of the entire game being mostly playable with occasional graphical glitches or crashes here and there... Oh... and don't mind me... I'm late to the party, but I figured I'd jump in and do my thing, SH4ZAM-ing up and optimizing the vectors, matrices and math, especially for the more complex animations and skinning in this port!
Falco Girgis44,043 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
What would Super Mario 64 look like were it enhanced for the Sega Dreamcast? Well, modder Esppiral is setting out to answer exactly that question with his upcoming mod for our Mario 64 DC port, featuring enhanced geometry and textures, as well as Mario Galaxy's fresnel lighting! While this footage is still extremely early, and represents a work in progress, it is being brought to you by the same mad Dreamcast scientist who remastered Dead or Alive 2 and brought Xbox assets and effects to our port of Grand Theft Auto 3! Please be sure to support the original video and subscribe to Esppiral's channel for future updates and more mad Sega Dreamcast science:
Falco Girgis119,496 görüntüleme • 10 ay önce
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 Girgis174,453 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
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 Girgis145,261 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce
Today, PH3NOM brings us the historic gaming blasphemy to end all blasphemies... A little tech demo of a scene from Resident Evil 4 recreated within the PH3NOM engine... RUNNING ON THE SEGA DREAMCAST!!!! Here is a direct hardware capture of me playing on a stock DC, recorded with just a cheap-ass HDMI cable being fed into a cheap-ass USB capture card... admittedly after maybe 15 minutes of practicing to not embarrass myself. 🤣 I am so beyond impressed, though, at what I'm seeing from PH3NOM, after simply a week's worth of hacking RE4 models, assets, and behaviors into a totally different engine, which was written from the ground up to target the DC's unique hardware. If one (albeit extremely talented and accomplished) dude did this as a tech demo with a general-purpose DC engine in a week... Imagine what a well-funded team from Capcom could've done with support from Sega, had the Dreamcast stuck around and received an official port...
Falco Girgis25,517 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce