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Got something totally different, but exceptionally badass today to share! Here is a bunch of direct hardware captures of the (F)ixed (F)unction and (F)ast (F)ourier (T)ransform (T)esting audio visualization demos, running on my Sega Dreamcast! This incredible piece of science, engineering, art, and music started off as a crazy...

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Falco Girgis

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12,566 Aufrufe • vor 15 Tagen •via X (Twitter)

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FINALLY seeing my recent hard work on my accelerated linear algebra and math library, SH4ZAM, for the Sega Dreamcast pay off for our community infrastructure and libraries, holy shit. What you are seeing is two direct hardware captures of our Mario Kart 64 port running on actual DC hardware, playing the most taxing stage in 2-player coop mode. The top frame was the release build, which uses the standard GLdc OpenGL 1.2 driver implementation for all of its rendering. The bottom frame is a new build I just made using an experimental branch of GLdc which I have accelerated using SH4ZAM... Most of what I've done so far has been swapping to my optimized memcpy() and store-queue copying routines and backing the GL stack with my vectorized SH4 ASM implementations of the GL transform routines... I've introduced a few regressions into some of the GLdc test/example programs, but for the most part, everything is actually working, and I'm finally seeing some real-world gainz from accelerating our community infrastructure instead of just single applications!
1:03

FINALLY seeing my recent hard work on my accelerated linear algebra and math library, SH4ZAM, for the Sega Dreamcast pay off for our community infrastructure and libraries, holy shit. What you are seeing is two direct hardware captures of our Mario Kart 64 port running on actual DC hardware, playing the most taxing stage in 2-player coop mode. The top frame was the release build, which uses the standard GLdc OpenGL 1.2 driver implementation for all of its rendering. The bottom frame is a new build I just made using an experimental branch of GLdc which I have accelerated using SH4ZAM... Most of what I've done so far has been swapping to my optimized memcpy() and store-queue copying routines and backing the GL stack with my vectorized SH4 ASM implementations of the GL transform routines... I've introduced a few regressions into some of the GLdc test/example programs, but for the most part, everything is actually working, and I'm finally seeing some real-world gainz from accelerating our community infrastructure instead of just single applications!

Falco Girgis

29,743 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

Soooooo... What is going to be the next Nintendo 64 classic jnmartin ports to the Sega Dreamcast? He's decided that before he starts something new, he would like to go revisit our Super Mario 64 port and apply all of the infrastructure, gainz, and wisdom from the other ports... Once again, I have joined the party, armed with my SH4ZAM accelerated vector math library for the Dreamcast's SH4 CPU. ...and once again, I'm over here totally screwing up all of the math on the hunt for gainz. Here's a direct hardware capture of my latest matrix math mistake for the scrapbook!
0:30

Soooooo... What is going to be the next Nintendo 64 classic jnmartin ports to the Sega Dreamcast? He's decided that before he starts something new, he would like to go revisit our Super Mario 64 port and apply all of the infrastructure, gainz, and wisdom from the other ports... Once again, I have joined the party, armed with my SH4ZAM accelerated vector math library for the Dreamcast's SH4 CPU. ...and once again, I'm over here totally screwing up all of the math on the hunt for gainz. Here's a direct hardware capture of my latest matrix math mistake for the scrapbook!

Falco Girgis

50,251 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

I have something very special to share today! This is a hardware capture of maximqad's port of the Xash3D engine--which is compatible with the Half-Life engine--running on the Sega Dreamcast... ONLINE! Keep in mind this is EXTREMELY early in the days of the port, with no DC-specific graphics optimizations or hardware accelerated math routines yet, so performance still has a lot of room to drastically improve. Audio was literally just barely moved to the SPU for the first time just the other day too, so this is still all very incredibly new... ...but here it is! The engine that wouldn't even run without being on an emulator that also needed to emulate the extended 32MB RAM modification... now running on a stock Sega Dreamcast with online multiplayer connectivity and mouse and keyboard support! Fantastic work from maximqad! I really believe as this engine matures, it will be an incredibly powerful tool for Dreamcast developers and will potentially bring a lot of new software to the platform in the form of Half-Life engine mods!
1:43

I have something very special to share today! This is a hardware capture of maximqad's port of the Xash3D engine--which is compatible with the Half-Life engine--running on the Sega Dreamcast... ONLINE! Keep in mind this is EXTREMELY early in the days of the port, with no DC-specific graphics optimizations or hardware accelerated math routines yet, so performance still has a lot of room to drastically improve. Audio was literally just barely moved to the SPU for the first time just the other day too, so this is still all very incredibly new... ...but here it is! The engine that wouldn't even run without being on an emulator that also needed to emulate the extended 32MB RAM modification... now running on a stock Sega Dreamcast with online multiplayer connectivity and mouse and keyboard support! Fantastic work from maximqad! I really believe as this engine matures, it will be an incredibly powerful tool for Dreamcast developers and will potentially bring a lot of new software to the platform in the form of Half-Life engine mods!

Falco Girgis

17,012 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

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!
2:09

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 Girgis

139,498 Aufrufe • vor 15 Tagen

"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:
0:21

"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 Girgis

56,610 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

It's officially that time of year again! Presenting the second annual "DreamDisc" indie gamejam for the Sega Dreamcast! If you weren't around for last year, check out the video! We had 24 incredibly polished, epic submissions including a wide-range of genres, such as 3D space shooters and resource managers, 2D platformers and racing games, VMU minigames, custom hardware, and even a custom implementation of the Java VM for SH4! Just like last year, the top 10 submissions, as voted by a panel of judges, will be pressed to a commercially released, actual physical Sega Dreamcast disc, which will be available for purchase from Orc Face Games - Chew Chew Mimic out on Dreamcast!! Oh, and there are cash prizes for the top 3, of course! This year we have an even wider range of engines, frameworks, and prebuilt library solutions for developers are all experience levels, including: 1) Antiruins - Lua-based, very newbie friendly game engine for the Sega Dreamcast. 2) raylib - famous cross-platform C-based games framework which needs no introduction 3) SDL2/3 - our very own ports of the famous cross-platform SDL libraries, which target the Dreamcast. 4) Simulant - the same engine that powered Driving Strikers--the very first online homebrew commercial DC game--as well as last year's wining submission, written in C++. 5) KallistiOS - you can raw-dog the indie SDK and pseudo OS that started it all and powers everything in the community, rolling your own tech stack. 6) SH4ZAM - my collection of SH4 assembly optimized math and matrix routines, which originally powered our Grand Theft Auto ports. Contestants are encouraged to join the OrcFace and Simulant Discord servers where they can interact with other DC developers, share their progress, and ask for help with anything they may need. Official DreamDisc '25 website:
2:33

It's officially that time of year again! Presenting the second annual "DreamDisc" indie gamejam for the Sega Dreamcast! If you weren't around for last year, check out the video! We had 24 incredibly polished, epic submissions including a wide-range of genres, such as 3D space shooters and resource managers, 2D platformers and racing games, VMU minigames, custom hardware, and even a custom implementation of the Java VM for SH4! Just like last year, the top 10 submissions, as voted by a panel of judges, will be pressed to a commercially released, actual physical Sega Dreamcast disc, which will be available for purchase from Orc Face Games - Chew Chew Mimic out on Dreamcast!! Oh, and there are cash prizes for the top 3, of course! This year we have an even wider range of engines, frameworks, and prebuilt library solutions for developers are all experience levels, including: 1) Antiruins - Lua-based, very newbie friendly game engine for the Sega Dreamcast. 2) raylib - famous cross-platform C-based games framework which needs no introduction 3) SDL2/3 - our very own ports of the famous cross-platform SDL libraries, which target the Dreamcast. 4) Simulant - the same engine that powered Driving Strikers--the very first online homebrew commercial DC game--as well as last year's wining submission, written in C++. 5) KallistiOS - you can raw-dog the indie SDK and pseudo OS that started it all and powers everything in the community, rolling your own tech stack. 6) SH4ZAM - my collection of SH4 assembly optimized math and matrix routines, which originally powered our Grand Theft Auto ports. Contestants are encouraged to join the OrcFace and Simulant Discord servers where they can interact with other DC developers, share their progress, and ask for help with anything they may need. Official DreamDisc '25 website:

Falco Girgis

16,980 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

The time has finally come! Here's an actual hardware capture of me cruising through Corneria in jnmartin's port of Star Fox 64 running on the Sega Dreamcast! As you can see, the port has been progressing PHENOMENALLY over the last couple months. Everything plays super smoothly and is as responsive as lightning! The visuals also look clean and crisp rendered at 480p with the DC's PowerVR GPU. We're estimating that the port is about 95% completed, with the majority of the last few weeks being spent implementing the lighting and other special effects for certain areas (which you will soon be seeing as well). Finally, he's been working daily on JIT compiling the N64 display list code into SH4 assembly in real-time in addition to using my SH4ZAM library for what he hopes will be a final round of additional performance gainz! TL;DR: We have another AAA-quality Nintendo 64-to-Sega Dreamcast jnmartin port on our hands here! Stay tuned for the upcoming release!
3:12

The time has finally come! Here's an actual hardware capture of me cruising through Corneria in jnmartin's port of Star Fox 64 running on the Sega Dreamcast! As you can see, the port has been progressing PHENOMENALLY over the last couple months. Everything plays super smoothly and is as responsive as lightning! The visuals also look clean and crisp rendered at 480p with the DC's PowerVR GPU. We're estimating that the port is about 95% completed, with the majority of the last few weeks being spent implementing the lighting and other special effects for certain areas (which you will soon be seeing as well). Finally, he's been working daily on JIT compiling the N64 display list code into SH4 assembly in real-time in addition to using my SH4ZAM library for what he hopes will be a final round of additional performance gainz! TL;DR: We have another AAA-quality Nintendo 64-to-Sega Dreamcast jnmartin port on our hands here! Stay tuned for the upcoming release!

Falco Girgis

35,196 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

Today we have a direct hardware capture of an upcoming Sega Dreamcast homebrew title, tentatively known as "DemoTek," from developer, ac3t1ne, whose goal is to create a Crash Bandicoot-style platformer. The game uses our GLdc implementation of OpenGL 1.2 for rendering, libADX for music, and with my own SH4ZAM library for vector math, all of which are first-party ports provided within the KallistiOS indie DC SDK. The engine already features a renderer with some fairly aggressive batching and pre-submission culling, some clever LOD tricks and frame blending (notice the lava animates at twice the FPS when the player is close to it), as well as a particle system, which drives the smoke and bubbles. Something that I find quite interesting and exciting is that ac3t1ne has also managed to create a kind of update manager which can check for newer versions of the game (or any other Dreamcast binary), then download it via dial-up modem or broadband adapter, and install it onto an SD card! Be sure to check out ac3t1ne's YouTube channel for more updates:
1:35

Today we have a direct hardware capture of an upcoming Sega Dreamcast homebrew title, tentatively known as "DemoTek," from developer, ac3t1ne, whose goal is to create a Crash Bandicoot-style platformer. The game uses our GLdc implementation of OpenGL 1.2 for rendering, libADX for music, and with my own SH4ZAM library for vector math, all of which are first-party ports provided within the KallistiOS indie DC SDK. The engine already features a renderer with some fairly aggressive batching and pre-submission culling, some clever LOD tricks and frame blending (notice the lava animates at twice the FPS when the player is close to it), as well as a particle system, which drives the smoke and bubbles. Something that I find quite interesting and exciting is that ac3t1ne has also managed to create a kind of update manager which can check for newer versions of the game (or any other Dreamcast binary), then download it via dial-up modem or broadband adapter, and install it onto an SD card! Be sure to check out ac3t1ne's YouTube channel for more updates:

Falco Girgis

12,421 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

With all of the excitement from Mario Kart 64 coming to the Sega Dreamcast, I've been getting bombarded with questions about whether any more progress has been made on our Mario 64 port... so here's a direct hardware capture of the latest build running on DC! The answer: HELL YES! Last time most people saw or played this port, it was plagued with performance, audio, and graphical issues... but as you can see from this footage, almost all of them have been resolved, and she's playing like a dream on the DC now! Wtf happened? Well, first of all, in the 5 years since the port initially started, I, along with others, such as UnknownShadow, have made progress optimizing and improving upon our OpenGL 1.2 driver, "GLdc," which drastically improved the overall performance of the port by decreasing the amount of time the Dreamcast's SH4 CPU spent on T&L, processing polygons. Next, chad developer, Bruce (or Bruck or Brucilicious, depending on who you are), went through and applied a bunch of bugfix patches from the upstream repo to the game to fix the majority of the graphical glitches such as clipping issues and Mario's iconic biker mustache from the previous releases (despite me trying to convince him to keep that one, as it's become a Dreamcast trademark). Finally, the original developer behind both the Sega Dreamcast and Sony PSP ports, MrNeo, has returned from hiatus and has begun redoing the audio engine to fix the artifacting and stuttering! Stay tuned for further updates and the inevitable rerelease of this N64 classic on Sega's finest little white box that still refuses to die!
0:45

With all of the excitement from Mario Kart 64 coming to the Sega Dreamcast, I've been getting bombarded with questions about whether any more progress has been made on our Mario 64 port... so here's a direct hardware capture of the latest build running on DC! The answer: HELL YES! Last time most people saw or played this port, it was plagued with performance, audio, and graphical issues... but as you can see from this footage, almost all of them have been resolved, and she's playing like a dream on the DC now! Wtf happened? Well, first of all, in the 5 years since the port initially started, I, along with others, such as UnknownShadow, have made progress optimizing and improving upon our OpenGL 1.2 driver, "GLdc," which drastically improved the overall performance of the port by decreasing the amount of time the Dreamcast's SH4 CPU spent on T&L, processing polygons. Next, chad developer, Bruce (or Bruck or Brucilicious, depending on who you are), went through and applied a bunch of bugfix patches from the upstream repo to the game to fix the majority of the graphical glitches such as clipping issues and Mario's iconic biker mustache from the previous releases (despite me trying to convince him to keep that one, as it's become a Dreamcast trademark). Finally, the original developer behind both the Sega Dreamcast and Sony PSP ports, MrNeo, has returned from hiatus and has begun redoing the audio engine to fix the artifacting and stuttering! Stay tuned for further updates and the inevitable rerelease of this N64 classic on Sega's finest little white box that still refuses to die!

Falco Girgis

34,186 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Every day is a fantastic day to be playing Counterstrike... ON THE SEGA DREAMCAST! What you are seeing is a couple minutes of video featuring online play captured directly from the real hardware! This monumental feat of engineering is to be credited to developer, maximqad, who has successfully ported the Xash3D engine, which is Half-Life compatible, to the little white box, with its 200Mhz SH4 CPU and whopping 16MB of system memory. With the engine has come Half-Life, Counterstrike, and the possibility of many others on DC. Unlike the last time you saw these games, though, they're now glitch-free and are fully playable, with plenty of room for further optimizations left! Speaking of gainz, one of the most interesting battle stories from this project has got to be maximqad offloading some of the engine's allocations for its BSP from system memory onto video memory, which the Dreamcast tends to have an abundance of, at 8MB, with support for a fantastic VQ hardware compression format. For more footage from this play session, check out SWAT's full capture here:
2:39

Every day is a fantastic day to be playing Counterstrike... ON THE SEGA DREAMCAST! What you are seeing is a couple minutes of video featuring online play captured directly from the real hardware! This monumental feat of engineering is to be credited to developer, maximqad, who has successfully ported the Xash3D engine, which is Half-Life compatible, to the little white box, with its 200Mhz SH4 CPU and whopping 16MB of system memory. With the engine has come Half-Life, Counterstrike, and the possibility of many others on DC. Unlike the last time you saw these games, though, they're now glitch-free and are fully playable, with plenty of room for further optimizations left! Speaking of gainz, one of the most interesting battle stories from this project has got to be maximqad offloading some of the engine's allocations for its BSP from system memory onto video memory, which the Dreamcast tends to have an abundance of, at 8MB, with support for a fantastic VQ hardware compression format. For more footage from this play session, check out SWAT's full capture here:

Falco Girgis

36,750 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

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!
1:41

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 Girgis

16,729 Aufrufe • vor 8 Tagen

Time to right some more wrongs in the timeline of gaming history... Today we have an actual hardware capture of Esppiral doing his thing and rendering a scene from Final Fantasy X... ON A REAL SEGA DREAMCAST!
1:08

Time to right some more wrongs in the timeline of gaming history... Today we have an actual hardware capture of Esppiral doing his thing and rendering a scene from Final Fantasy X... ON A REAL SEGA DREAMCAST!

Falco Girgis

48,329 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

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.
0:34

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 Girgis

49,078 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

Been optimizing my ASS OFF now that jnmartin has pushed all of his progress on his Star Fox 64 Sega Dreamcast port to a private GitHub repo to collaborate with a bunch of us DC devs before release. MAN this thing is HIGHLY optimized already... We're essentially running a high-level emulator for the N64's RSP coprocessor, doing graphics transforms, matrix math, and display list conversions not only on the main SH4 CPU, but also sitting atop a high-level OpenGL driver, in real-time. Not only that, but once again, we're doing all audio synthesis and mixing also on the main SH4 CPU, so this thing is doing a literal asston on the main CPU with what might seem like a relatively straightforward port. 99% of the time, everything runs flawlessly, but when you drop a bomb on a shitfest of enemies in a densely populated area, as with the N64 original, the FPS can dip momentarily. Here's a direct hardware capture of me testing a new SH4 optimized routine out for gainz on my Sega Dreamcast... this mofo is meant be used for one-off 3D vector transforms by a single matrix which has not been preloaded into the XMTRX FP register matrix back-bank. Rather than doing a full 4x4 load on the matrix just to do a single 4D transform via the FTRV instruction, we're simply peforming 3 3D dot products against a single 3D vector, allowing us to pipeline the loads, dot products, and store operations better than doing a load all at once followed by a transform, and we aren't wasting a lane on the FPU for a 0.0f W component!
1:14

Been optimizing my ASS OFF now that jnmartin has pushed all of his progress on his Star Fox 64 Sega Dreamcast port to a private GitHub repo to collaborate with a bunch of us DC devs before release. MAN this thing is HIGHLY optimized already... We're essentially running a high-level emulator for the N64's RSP coprocessor, doing graphics transforms, matrix math, and display list conversions not only on the main SH4 CPU, but also sitting atop a high-level OpenGL driver, in real-time. Not only that, but once again, we're doing all audio synthesis and mixing also on the main SH4 CPU, so this thing is doing a literal asston on the main CPU with what might seem like a relatively straightforward port. 99% of the time, everything runs flawlessly, but when you drop a bomb on a shitfest of enemies in a densely populated area, as with the N64 original, the FPS can dip momentarily. Here's a direct hardware capture of me testing a new SH4 optimized routine out for gainz on my Sega Dreamcast... this mofo is meant be used for one-off 3D vector transforms by a single matrix which has not been preloaded into the XMTRX FP register matrix back-bank. Rather than doing a full 4x4 load on the matrix just to do a single 4D transform via the FTRV instruction, we're simply peforming 3 3D dot products against a single 3D vector, allowing us to pipeline the loads, dot products, and store operations better than doing a load all at once followed by a transform, and we aren't wasting a lane on the FPU for a 0.0f W component!

Falco Girgis

36,911 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

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! 🔥
6:32

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 Girgis

87,802 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

What you are seeing here is a totally revamped and improved version of a Dreamcast homebrew classic: the Caves tech demo, captured directly from a Sega Dreamcast. FreakDave's original demo already impressed the hell out of me when I first saw it several years ago, getting back into DC development after a several-year hiatus... but this new demo is absolutely INCREDIBLE stuff. It's powered by FreakDave's FDV engine, and now features vertex-based ambient occlusion, light baking, approximated global illumination, fog, and crazy water effects in addition to the dynamic lighting of the original all running at higher FPS! ...and now I can brag about the fact that he's using my SH4ZAM linear algebra library for the DC's SH4 CPU to accelerate all of the math behind the effects! Makes me proud AF! Great work, my dude! Check out the demo here:
1:02

What you are seeing here is a totally revamped and improved version of a Dreamcast homebrew classic: the Caves tech demo, captured directly from a Sega Dreamcast. FreakDave's original demo already impressed the hell out of me when I first saw it several years ago, getting back into DC development after a several-year hiatus... but this new demo is absolutely INCREDIBLE stuff. It's powered by FreakDave's FDV engine, and now features vertex-based ambient occlusion, light baking, approximated global illumination, fog, and crazy water effects in addition to the dynamic lighting of the original all running at higher FPS! ...and now I can brag about the fact that he's using my SH4ZAM linear algebra library for the DC's SH4 CPU to accelerate all of the math behind the effects! Makes me proud AF! Great work, my dude! Check out the demo here:

Falco Girgis

15,701 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

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!
1:52

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 Girgis

168,579 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten

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! 💪
1:08

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 Girgis

12,615 Aufrufe • vor 9 Tagen

The #GTA 3 port to the Sega #Dreamcast has been progressing at an incredible pace. It's been amazing to see the whole DC community come together to tag-team this "impossible" project... Here it is running on a stock DC, no longer requiring the 32MB RAM hardware modification, only a few weeks into development. Since I finally got the time to sit down, build the codebase, and look into some of what I think is the critical path for performance, let's talk about some technical shit, and some of the future steps I think can be taken to further improve performance. First of all, I want everyone to take note that this is NOT a port of the PS2 version. This is a port of the PC version, which has extra content, increased draw distance, improved textures, and other things that have actually increased the challenge here... Whether the DC version will ultimately have these additions or not will remain to be seen, but we're running into plenty of shit that the PS2 didn't have to worry about (like these big-ass PC replay saves won't fit onto a Visual Memory Unit!) Secondly, lets talk about what is and isn't currently optimized, because it's absolutely vital that the DC's hardware is fully utilized here for the sake of performance and achieving a competitive polygon count. Unlike with modern devices, where the whole graphics pipeline is handled by the GPU, both the PS2 and Dreamcast were responsible for transforming and doing lighting calculations for each vertex BEFORE they got submitted to the GPU. The PS2 had a vector coprocessor to do this, while the Dreamcast had a few extremely important SIMD and fast math assembly instructions on its CPU to do these computations. Up until literally just a few hours ago (not shown in this footage), the Dreamcast's SH4 was doing 100% of these operations in slow-ass plain C and C++ code, which is absolutely sub-optimal and is immediately bogging down its CPU with just transforming vertices, bottlenecking the entire graphics pipeline on the fist T&L stage, and also leaving less CPU time for handling other gameplay logic... this is going to absolutely have to be addressed (and already has begun to be). Another issue that is crippling performance here is the fact that the models are all using individual triangles rather than triangle strips, which the Dreamcast's PVR GPU was designed to handle better... Converting these models to use strips rather than individual triangles will result in MANY different gainz for the DC, as you're going from 3N to N+2 vertices per triangle. Converting the models to triangle strips will 1) reduce load times, since model assets will be smaller 2) reduce the amount of video memory required to hold these vertices on the GPU 3) reduce the amount of shit that must be transferred from the CPU to the GPU and 4) give us back a bunch of CPU time, since the SH4 will be less bogged down transforming redundant vertices! TL;DR: This is still EXTREMELY suboptimal in terms of fully utilizing the graphical potential of the Dreamcast. There is going to be a LOT that can be done still to both improve performance and polygon counts, so stay tuned! FINALLY: Mad respect and love to Stefanos Kornilios Mitsis Poiitidis, for doing an amazing job leading this project, and to Frogbull , Esppiral, and everyone else who is helping us stick it to the PS2 by making this happen! #gamedev #retrogaming #cplusplus
1:53

The #GTA 3 port to the Sega #Dreamcast has been progressing at an incredible pace. It's been amazing to see the whole DC community come together to tag-team this "impossible" project... Here it is running on a stock DC, no longer requiring the 32MB RAM hardware modification, only a few weeks into development. Since I finally got the time to sit down, build the codebase, and look into some of what I think is the critical path for performance, let's talk about some technical shit, and some of the future steps I think can be taken to further improve performance. First of all, I want everyone to take note that this is NOT a port of the PS2 version. This is a port of the PC version, which has extra content, increased draw distance, improved textures, and other things that have actually increased the challenge here... Whether the DC version will ultimately have these additions or not will remain to be seen, but we're running into plenty of shit that the PS2 didn't have to worry about (like these big-ass PC replay saves won't fit onto a Visual Memory Unit!) Secondly, lets talk about what is and isn't currently optimized, because it's absolutely vital that the DC's hardware is fully utilized here for the sake of performance and achieving a competitive polygon count. Unlike with modern devices, where the whole graphics pipeline is handled by the GPU, both the PS2 and Dreamcast were responsible for transforming and doing lighting calculations for each vertex BEFORE they got submitted to the GPU. The PS2 had a vector coprocessor to do this, while the Dreamcast had a few extremely important SIMD and fast math assembly instructions on its CPU to do these computations. Up until literally just a few hours ago (not shown in this footage), the Dreamcast's SH4 was doing 100% of these operations in slow-ass plain C and C++ code, which is absolutely sub-optimal and is immediately bogging down its CPU with just transforming vertices, bottlenecking the entire graphics pipeline on the fist T&L stage, and also leaving less CPU time for handling other gameplay logic... this is going to absolutely have to be addressed (and already has begun to be). Another issue that is crippling performance here is the fact that the models are all using individual triangles rather than triangle strips, which the Dreamcast's PVR GPU was designed to handle better... Converting these models to use strips rather than individual triangles will result in MANY different gainz for the DC, as you're going from 3N to N+2 vertices per triangle. Converting the models to triangle strips will 1) reduce load times, since model assets will be smaller 2) reduce the amount of video memory required to hold these vertices on the GPU 3) reduce the amount of shit that must be transferred from the CPU to the GPU and 4) give us back a bunch of CPU time, since the SH4 will be less bogged down transforming redundant vertices! TL;DR: This is still EXTREMELY suboptimal in terms of fully utilizing the graphical potential of the Dreamcast. There is going to be a LOT that can be done still to both improve performance and polygon counts, so stay tuned! FINALLY: Mad respect and love to Stefanos Kornilios Mitsis Poiitidis, for doing an amazing job leading this project, and to Frogbull , Esppiral, and everyone else who is helping us stick it to the PS2 by making this happen! #gamedev #retrogaming #cplusplus

Falco Girgis

88,224 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

We still had some audio issues going on, but this was one of my favorite points during the development of GTA3 for the Sega #Dreamcast... This was the first time when graphically we were able to say that we were not simply a downgrade of the PC and PS2 versions, and you could clearly see the dynamic lighting and specular environment mapping in full glory on the DC, thanks to the absolute SH4 wizardry of Stefanos Kornilios Mitsis Poiitidis, which we will be getting into shortly!
0:46

We still had some audio issues going on, but this was one of my favorite points during the development of GTA3 for the Sega #Dreamcast... This was the first time when graphically we were able to say that we were not simply a downgrade of the PC and PS2 versions, and you could clearly see the dynamic lighting and specular environment mapping in full glory on the DC, thanks to the absolute SH4 wizardry of Stefanos Kornilios Mitsis Poiitidis, which we will be getting into shortly!

Falco Girgis

47,062 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr