Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cyph0n | Hacker News Reader

Where is the Dreamcast code? I don’t see any non-Windows preprocessor directives.

I think this is an unofficial port. Populous is a lot older than the Dreamcast. It was originally released for MS-DOS and the Mega Drive / Genesis. As far as I know there wasn’t any official WinCE release. To be honest, by the time WinCE (let alone the Dreamcast) came to market there were already a few sequels to Populous so I doubt they’d have even bothered porting the original DOS game by that point.

I believe that, as most of the games in that era, it was originally released for Amiga. Wikipedia [1] seems to agree with me, but we both may be wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populous_(video_game)

It was. I meant on Microsoft and Sega platforms (since this is mentioned as a WinCE/DC port) but appreciate the way I worded that wasn’t clear at all.

Sure looks like a PocketPC app to me:

    REG_ORIENTATION_SETTING
    DEFAULT_STYLUS_CONTROL

Dreamcast games often run Windows CE as their host operating system.

Dreamcast supported Windows CE but it was mainly the homebrew community which used it because it didn’t perform as well as Sega’s own hardware specific SDK. So most games didn’t use WinCE

> Windows CE but it was mainly the homebrew community

Name some?

Granted I’ve been out of the homebrew dev scene for a while, but this doesn’t sound right. Developing for Windows CE would require a commercial/proprietary copy of Platform Builder and Dreamcast BSP. This is not very “homebrew” friendly at all - especially when there were a ton of homebrew libraries and OSes for Dreamcast through the years, eg Kallistios.

There are a few homebrew releases that used WinCE, but that makes up something like 1% or less of homebrew software. I think there was some MP3 player, a 3D FPS that was never released, and a Duke3D port? Maybe a couple more? KallistiOS is, by far, the most popular choice, and is used in probably 98% of homebrew.

Ok then… on the other hand there were a bevy of commercial releases targeting Windows CE

https://segaretro.org/Windows_CE

All generalisations have counter examples (hence it being a generalisation). The fact that the above link is a small portion of all the games officially licensed on the Dreamcast supports my generalisation.

I was responding to the claim WinCE was mainly used for homebrew. That’s not true. It wasn’t used much, but what it was used for was mainly commercial releases.

It’s been somewhere in the region of 20 years since I’ve played any of the original era homebrew games but there definitely were a few.

Modern titles like Intrepid Izzy I don’t think are WinCE though.

Sega’s own Sega Rally 2 used WinCE. This is often blamed for its performance issues.

I wasn't part of that effort directly so I only saw what occurred at a slight distance but I'll suggest that that might not be a fair characterization. The SR2 team got quite a lot of direct support from the WinCE for Dreamcast team since it was a launch title and issues from them were given high priority. Current builds of SR2 were available at MS for testing continuously; I recall one of the early techniques the SR2 team used for the dust kicked up by the cars looked nice but absolutely tanked the framerate and they had to be advised to use another approach. They were certainly not left to stumble around in the dark.

As for performance, having an OS instead of coding to the bare metal of course imposes overhead but, from what I recall hearing, 3D performance of the WinCE SDK was on a par with Sega's SDK. The graphics engineers had access to Sega's SDK so they were able to do their own comparative benchmarking and they knew game developers would be scrutinizing that.

Ultimately, SR2's frame rate was entirely in the hands of the Sega Rally 2 development team by what code they used and what level of detail they tried to show. The cheat code for SR2 for the Dreamcast that reduces detail to increase framerate is an example of that. They were highly motivated to replicate the arcade experience as closely as possible and constrained by a need to hit the launch date and made choices that resulted in the frame rate issues SR2 has. Had they been using Sega's bare metal SDK, they may have made the same choices favoring arcade fidelity over stable framerate and therefore laying all the blame on WinCE isn't entirely reasonable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com