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!show more

Great work, the only thing missing is the transparency in the Radiant Emerald track, as the PC version was missing this effect. Here is the PC version with it modded back in

The last stage still lacks the semitransparency effect of the Saturn version. I wonder why Sega removed that effect from the PC port, because it looks beautiful on the Saturn. iirc, the original programmer from Travellers' Tales did an YouTube video explaining the vfx.

Ohhhhhh yeah, I used to watch the SHIT out of GameHut on YT, so I’m intimately familiar with dudes (forgot his actual name) work while at travelers tales. To me, it seems like anything that was even remotely Saturn-specific about the renderer—lighting model and transparency—was totally dropped from the PC version (what I grew up playing). Idk if they were just lazy or a bit amateurish or had the ulterior motive of making Saturn look good, but they for sure never bothered redoing that crap for DX/GL or whatever API the PC release used. As for the missing transparency in the port… yeah, it has been communicated back to jnmartin as of yesterday by a SHITTON of people… and ohhhh he’s not happy. The irony is that the effects are a weakness of the PVR as well, because the HW transparency sorting and TA bucketing is disproportionately expensive for TR shit, so they have significantly reduced fillrate in proportion to how many screen-space TA tile buckets they overlap… and let’s just say radiant emerald terrain is about to overlap every goddamn bucket. 🤣 Jnmartin will EITHER: not bother, because he will not put himself or his port in a position where something isn’t 100% perfect on DC, OR he will moan and whine and bitch until he can’t take it anymore then finally cave and give it his all until he figures something out. Trust me, I’ve worked with him on a lot of stuff by now. 😂

Thanks for reminding me of the name of his channel (GameHut). Here's the video, and now I know why the PC version doesn't have the same effect:

The Saturn only performs semitransparencies between the polygons and the background plane. Which means that semitransparent environment geometry has zero overdraw (a semitransparent door will let you see the skybox plane behind it, but not the actual environment behind the door).

Having the entire environment semitransparent with overdraw would kill the secrecy of any hidden items and shortcuts. So, they likely didn't enable this vfx on the PC version of that track for gameplay reasons, since its PC renderer wasn't able to perform zero overdraw blending.

Maybe a way to fix this would be to invert the rendering order of the background plane, rendering it over the environment geometry, and enabling the semitransparency on the background plane instead of the environment.

First! And the draw distance has been increased dramatically too!

Amazing work! I wonder if it's possible to play online using the W5500?

Yeah, that should be supported. It's already been tested with by at least a few people in his testing group.

What The Fuck CROSSPLAY?!

How can people hate this game?

Incrível, O que mais impressiona que o proprio Jnmartin fez a decompilação do jogo, cara fez o impensável. Nada contra aí quem é fã de PS2 e Game Cube, mas esse port de Dreamcast esta bem mais bonito em comparação a outros port da sexta geração.

@psxdev Still waiting to see the other possible platforms where to port it…

@psxdev Me too, man. :/

We are one year away from entering the 21st century. Introducing… Sega Dreamcast!

Can't wait to play this game online with my BBA

@bitinkstudios olha que legal.

@OverJumpRally Falco, you and your pals need to make a repository of your finished ports!

@OverJumpRally They're all on GitHub, lol. I guess maybe you want a centralized place with links to the different repos? A bunch are in my SH4ZAM documentation: ...but fair. I'll tell jnmartin to buy us or 😅

what are the chances of this getting the pallette lighting restored like they did with the 2004 pc port? (i can tell it's not working in the video because radical city is meant to be blueish)

Wow :)

I'm so excited for Sonic Mania that it actually hurts a little every time I see a new post and realize it's not about the game 😅. Thanks for all 🙏

I ABSOLUTELY NEED THAT FOR MY RASPBERRY PI4

What could have been

A lot of Dreamcast homebrew lately I’m curious how far it’s gonna go, imagine 360 homebrew

There already is an Xbox 360 homebrew scene. Or there used to be. Almost every console has a retro home brew community of devs writing SW for it. There just isn’t as much interest in 360 homebrew as DC, evidently, so that community is much smaller.

Would naturally take longer to figure out

Insanely brilliant!

Really is exciting stuff!

We eating good tonite boys

Looks crispy af, but yea f this game it induces psychosis

Oh my, one of the best. That's awesome @falco_girgis

@swooper_d Is there Linux version out there?

This is sick, what a great work. Fucking Love it ❤️❤️❤️❤️