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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...

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Falco Girgis

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49,078 views • 5 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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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 views • 8 months ago

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

29,770 views • 6 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!
0:35

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 Girgis

174,649 views • 1 year ago

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!
1:51

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 Girgis

47,178 views • 5 months ago

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

17,371 views • 1 year 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:
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

56,726 views • 5 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!🤣
0:22

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 Girgis

49,869 views • 1 month ago

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

36,801 views • 1 year 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!🤣
0:24

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 Girgis

63,810 views • 1 month ago

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 views • 5 months ago

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

36,939 views • 9 months ago

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 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!🤣
2:27

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 Girgis

153,237 views • 1 year ago

I wanted to show you guys how hard we've been working to get the Diddy Kong Racing decompilation to run this well on the Sega Dreamcast... So I took the liberty of splicing together some high-action moneyshots directly captured from the console for a look at how the game currently performs. Just a few days ago, it was dipping to below 20FPS with audio cutting in and out as the main thread couldn't keep up with the audio decoding while simultaneously handling rendering and game logic. I know, I know, how could a Dreamcast struggle with an N64 game? It's because these decompilations are written to essentially emulate the N64's unique hardware as accurately as possible. In this case, that means the Dreamcast's main SH4 CPU is emulating all audio decoding, mixing, and synthesis in software, including DSP effects. This was originally handled separately by the RSP coprocessor in the N64... Not wanting to have to rewrite the entire audio back-end to use the DC's AICA sound processor, I've vectorized the absolute living HELL out of the ADPCM decoder with my SH4ZAM library... Which gave us enough performance out of the SH4 to continue emulating all of the sound processing in software. You will notice in the footage that the only time the FPS isn't at solid 30 is when there is a lot of overlapping SFX from nearby racers chattering or items getting used. That's the SH4 having to work even harder to mix multiple audio channels together and possibly even apply DSP effects to them as well!
0:58

I wanted to show you guys how hard we've been working to get the Diddy Kong Racing decompilation to run this well on the Sega Dreamcast... So I took the liberty of splicing together some high-action moneyshots directly captured from the console for a look at how the game currently performs. Just a few days ago, it was dipping to below 20FPS with audio cutting in and out as the main thread couldn't keep up with the audio decoding while simultaneously handling rendering and game logic. I know, I know, how could a Dreamcast struggle with an N64 game? It's because these decompilations are written to essentially emulate the N64's unique hardware as accurately as possible. In this case, that means the Dreamcast's main SH4 CPU is emulating all audio decoding, mixing, and synthesis in software, including DSP effects. This was originally handled separately by the RSP coprocessor in the N64... Not wanting to have to rewrite the entire audio back-end to use the DC's AICA sound processor, I've vectorized the absolute living HELL out of the ADPCM decoder with my SH4ZAM library... Which gave us enough performance out of the SH4 to continue emulating all of the sound processing in software. You will notice in the footage that the only time the FPS isn't at solid 30 is when there is a lot of overlapping SFX from nearby racers chattering or items getting used. That's the SH4 having to work even harder to mix multiple audio channels together and possibly even apply DSP effects to them as well!

Falco Girgis

17,239 views • 1 month ago

I've been mostly working on the internal systems lately for my #Dreamcast engine. The PC port gave me the debugging tools I needed to improve complex systems like the memory manager. • Audio is now working on the Dreamcast version • The renderer runs 20% faster on the Dreamcast • Heap allocation is 300% faster on average and 200% faster on worst case. While this had minimal impact on performance for the #Gamecube and PC versions, it was a significant bottleneck on the Dreamcast. • Increased real-time heap defragmentation throughput by using a new multi-regional heap structure, which also sets the foundation for DRAM bank-aware memory allocation. There's still plenty of room for more optimizations in Meese Engine. In fact, some optimizations found in Minecraft have yet to be implemented in this engine! #retrogamedev #indiegamedev
2:27

I've been mostly working on the internal systems lately for my #Dreamcast engine. The PC port gave me the debugging tools I needed to improve complex systems like the memory manager. • Audio is now working on the Dreamcast version • The renderer runs 20% faster on the Dreamcast • Heap allocation is 300% faster on average and 200% faster on worst case. While this had minimal impact on performance for the #Gamecube and PC versions, it was a significant bottleneck on the Dreamcast. • Increased real-time heap defragmentation throughput by using a new multi-regional heap structure, which also sets the foundation for DRAM bank-aware memory allocation. There's still plenty of room for more optimizations in Meese Engine. In fact, some optimizations found in Minecraft have yet to be implemented in this engine! #retrogamedev #indiegamedev

A Flock of Meese

294,839 views • 1 year ago

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

144,057 views • 2 months ago

This is an actual hardware capture of our WIP #GTA 3 port to the Sega #Dreamcast. SUBSTANTIAL framerate gainz have come from converting the model geometry from triangle lists to triangle strips as well as from utilizing KallistiOS's "Direct Rendering" PVR API for fast polygon submission via the SH4 CPU's "Store Queues." Oh... plus we enabled LTO, and it seriously jumped like another 3-5fps. Funnily enough, there's still PLENTY of room for optimization... Every vertex you see was being transformed by the PS2's vector unit coprocessor, while these transforms are being done in plain C++ on the DC's SH4 CPU... These are being accelerated via the SH4's SIMD and fast-math instructions at this very moment. Yes, we got clipping bugs, but we've been too excited trying to push polygons and frames-per-second to bother fixing that shit just yet. Oh, and yes, this is now running on a 16MB stock Dreamcast. #gamedev #retrogaming #indiegamedev
1:58

This is an actual hardware capture of our WIP #GTA 3 port to the Sega #Dreamcast. SUBSTANTIAL framerate gainz have come from converting the model geometry from triangle lists to triangle strips as well as from utilizing KallistiOS's "Direct Rendering" PVR API for fast polygon submission via the SH4 CPU's "Store Queues." Oh... plus we enabled LTO, and it seriously jumped like another 3-5fps. Funnily enough, there's still PLENTY of room for optimization... Every vertex you see was being transformed by the PS2's vector unit coprocessor, while these transforms are being done in plain C++ on the DC's SH4 CPU... These are being accelerated via the SH4's SIMD and fast-math instructions at this very moment. Yes, we got clipping bugs, but we've been too excited trying to push polygons and frames-per-second to bother fixing that shit just yet. Oh, and yes, this is now running on a 16MB stock Dreamcast. #gamedev #retrogaming #indiegamedev

Falco Girgis

69,571 views • 2 years 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!
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

17,766 views • 1 month ago

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 idea to port a bunch of GPU-based, Shadertoy audiovisual demos to the Sega Dreamcast, to play with combined digital signal processing and rendering on legacy fixed-function hardware. As you can see from the video, the FFFFTT repo includes a wide array of different demos, each providing different kinds of visualizations, each featuring different types of signal transformations and analyses, with many of them also being interactive, all done in real-time! Not only that, but you ALSO can freaking pause the playback and analyze the signals in real-time... crazy! The final resulting FFFFTT demos are an epic full-stack conglomeration of Ray's raylib, providing the backing infrastructure and graphics framework, which sits atop our GLdc driver for rendering, using David Reid's miniaudio library for sound playback, with its FFT and vector algebra accelerated for the SH4 CPU using my SH4ZAM math library... all ontop of KallistiOS, running on the Sega Dreamcast! Congratulations to meisei4 for the fantastic accomplishments, and a heart-felt thanks from me for bringing everything together to make this happen! You just laid the framework for some epic audio-based gameplay mechanics and other crazy science experiments in the future for whole community!
0:59

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 idea to port a bunch of GPU-based, Shadertoy audiovisual demos to the Sega Dreamcast, to play with combined digital signal processing and rendering on legacy fixed-function hardware. As you can see from the video, the FFFFTT repo includes a wide array of different demos, each providing different kinds of visualizations, each featuring different types of signal transformations and analyses, with many of them also being interactive, all done in real-time! Not only that, but you ALSO can freaking pause the playback and analyze the signals in real-time... crazy! The final resulting FFFFTT demos are an epic full-stack conglomeration of Ray's raylib, providing the backing infrastructure and graphics framework, which sits atop our GLdc driver for rendering, using David Reid's miniaudio library for sound playback, with its FFT and vector algebra accelerated for the SH4 CPU using my SH4ZAM math library... all ontop of KallistiOS, running on the Sega Dreamcast! Congratulations to meisei4 for the fantastic accomplishments, and a heart-felt thanks from me for bringing everything together to make this happen! You just laid the framework for some epic audio-based gameplay mechanics and other crazy science experiments in the future for whole community!

Falco Girgis

13,167 views • 2 months ago

FINALLY finishing up a MASSIVE PR from hell for the Sega Dreamcast port of Grand Theft Auto 3! This is an actual hardware capture now of the DC version under a high load, which would've previously been a slideshow, between the dynamic lighting from the sirens, the amount of rigid bodies in the physics simulation from the cars, and the high-speed chase placing high-demands on asset streaming... I went through all of the low-level common math infrastructure in both the engine and at the RenderWare driver layer and made numerous optimizations, before slowly working my way up to optimizing individual algorithms at the application layer using the new math routines. Firstly, the common low-level floating-point math routines for everything from trig and inverse square root operations to floor(), ceiling(), and clamp(), were replaced with what was meticulously found (in Compiler Explorer) to be the optimal patterns for GCC 14.2.0, targeting our SH architecture (sometimes favoring C builtins, sometimes inline SH4 ASM). Next, in the layer above, with inline SH4 assembly, the common matrix math and linear algebra routines were accelerated using the Dreamcast's vector instructions. Some cleverness went down here, such as cramming matrix metadata into unused insignificant bits of an element, combining loading two matrices with multiplying them, fast transposes, fast quaternion multiplication using 4 dot products, etc. Once the foundation was laid, some of the Renderware code such as the calculations for the lighting, updating bounding volumes, and deriving UV coordinates for specular environment maps on the cars was made faster automatically. The main gainz were actually made rewriting a decent amount of the collision intersection and contact resolution code, though, from using C++-style overloaded operators for multiplying single 4D vectors by a 4x4 matrix to doing batches of 4D vectors by the same matrix. This SUBSTANTIALLY reduced the number of times the backing 4x4 matrix bank had to be reloaded and allowed me to keep it resident within registers while it was being used by the intersection algorithms!
1:05

FINALLY finishing up a MASSIVE PR from hell for the Sega Dreamcast port of Grand Theft Auto 3! This is an actual hardware capture now of the DC version under a high load, which would've previously been a slideshow, between the dynamic lighting from the sirens, the amount of rigid bodies in the physics simulation from the cars, and the high-speed chase placing high-demands on asset streaming... I went through all of the low-level common math infrastructure in both the engine and at the RenderWare driver layer and made numerous optimizations, before slowly working my way up to optimizing individual algorithms at the application layer using the new math routines. Firstly, the common low-level floating-point math routines for everything from trig and inverse square root operations to floor(), ceiling(), and clamp(), were replaced with what was meticulously found (in Compiler Explorer) to be the optimal patterns for GCC 14.2.0, targeting our SH architecture (sometimes favoring C builtins, sometimes inline SH4 ASM). Next, in the layer above, with inline SH4 assembly, the common matrix math and linear algebra routines were accelerated using the Dreamcast's vector instructions. Some cleverness went down here, such as cramming matrix metadata into unused insignificant bits of an element, combining loading two matrices with multiplying them, fast transposes, fast quaternion multiplication using 4 dot products, etc. Once the foundation was laid, some of the Renderware code such as the calculations for the lighting, updating bounding volumes, and deriving UV coordinates for specular environment maps on the cars was made faster automatically. The main gainz were actually made rewriting a decent amount of the collision intersection and contact resolution code, though, from using C++-style overloaded operators for multiplying single 4D vectors by a 4x4 matrix to doing batches of 4D vectors by the same matrix. This SUBSTANTIALLY reduced the number of times the backing 4x4 matrix bank had to be reloaded and allowed me to keep it resident within registers while it was being used by the intersection algorithms!

Falco Girgis

114,621 views • 1 year ago