The GTA III port for the Dreamcast has been released | Hacker News Reader

The GTA III port for the Dreamcast has been released

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Make sure to stash the copy of the source code somewhere before Rockstar copyright mafia comes and takes it down, like they did with the original re3:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28402640

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26199879

Re3 is online again, however, in some form at least:

https://github.com/halpz/re3/

Not sure why would they do that as the re3 engine require a copy of the game to run.

We're living in a world of frivolous take-down demands, where the law says shoot first, ask questions later, and all the power is concentrated with the copyright mafia. (How meta.)

Retro games are highly lucrative. They don't want any competition to remasters and rereleases, which require a new purchase. Nintendo has been doing this "release the same game every 5-10 years" bs since the Wii (ironically often using ROMs found on the internet).

RE3 was a reverse engineered product. It used the original source and logic to derive an ABI compatible implementation. This has always been a grey area-outright illegal activity. It's the entire reason Compaq clean room engineered (or, at the very least, claimed to) their BIOS all the way back in 1982.

Every time I hear people complain about this, I just have to roll my eyes. Go do a clean room implementation like OpenRA and you're legally pretty safe. Use their IP and you're just asking for them to easily shut you down once you catch enough attention.

People are complaining about it because they think it's unfair and it's abuse of IP law. People's interests aren't defined by court decisions.

Your example is akin to there being a very clear "No Jaywalking sign", jaywalking anyways because you see no traffic/others doing it, having a cop hit you with a ticket, and then complaining that the cop is abusing his power. No, you just got caught; and are whining.

Society has decided they don't want people doing that. If you don't like it, convince enough of your peers to change it; or accept that the society you're in doesn't agree with you. Welcome to democracy.

Exactly, jaywalking is also a made up crime that benefits some (car users) at the expense of everyone else. Just like copyright it is a bad deal for society and should be ignored whenever possible. Reclaim pedestrian spaces AND reclaim your culture!

I really wish Dreamcast had a longer life most people underestimated how great of a console it was. However I believe this was completely Sega's fault for not pushing the system harder. The hardware was vastly superior to the PS2 which launched the same year. I think Sega didn't consider how much more expensive the Dreamcast was against the competition. Of course XBOX sealed it's fate.

The Dreamcast launch price in Sep 1999 was $199 (US market).

The PlayStation 2 launch price in Mar 2000 was $299 (US market).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2

So the Dreamcast was much less expensive than the PlayStation 2. Did you mean to say that rather than saying it was more expensive, or am I missing some detail?

The PS2 was basically you buying your first DVD player and also getting a game console with it.

This. You got a cheap-ass "home cinema lite" setup and a PSX retrocompatible console with it.

I wouldn't even call it "lite". The PS2 was, in terms of features, one of the best DVD players on the market at the time. Component video, DD/DTS 5.1 optical out, if you had a good quality CRT you didn't need anything better (though you might want to chip it to go region free).

Two game consoles! Full back-compatibility with PS1, if you didn't already have one or were short on space or TV inputs.

Wasn't the PS3 the cheapest Blu-Ray player available at its launch? Like, it was a free console if you wanted a Blu-Ray player.

And it was cheap enough relative to its other specs that the DoD bought a ton and built a top 50 supercomputer out of them.

This I think was one of the main reasons for the ps2 success. DVD players at the time costed hundreds of dollars and were often not that good. The ps2 as one of if not the best and with backwards compatibility so you had access to the huge ps1 library.

I managed an EB Games during the Dreamcast and ps2 launches. You can’t overstate the value proposition of the ps2 as a dvd player. It made the ps2’s extra $100 over the Dreamcast completely tenable.

The second biggest reason for the success of the ps2 over the Dreamcast was that EA Sports never came to Dreamcast. Sega made the 2k series to compensate and it was definitely a good try, with some 2k titles definitely better in gameplay to their EA Sports competitor. But none of the 2k series ever sold anywhere near EA Sports.

It wasn't the price but the cost of production. Most consoles are loss leaders. Also the lack of backwards compatibility made the library so small compared to PS2.

The lineup of early PS2 games was pretty weak but yeah, back compat with PS1 helped them a lot. Dreamcast was surprisingly strong out of the gate as console launches go.

Dreamcast was muuuuch cheaper to manufacture than PS2. Seems Sega finally learned their lesson from 32x and terribly complicated Saturn. Too little too late.

At the time, Sega did ok marketing the dreamcast. They had a huge line up of titles. It was almost everything one could ask for.

The issue was Sony released the PS2 a year later and convinced almost everyone it was far superior with the emotion engine.

Most people I knew at the time were convinced PS2 was next coming of Jesus and worth waitng for. Few people had multiple consoles, so Sega really got crushed by the competitive market and accumulated losses from their past mistakes.

Give "The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 2" a read. Sega America did well marketing-wise but Sega Japan was a shitshow and really dragged them down. Sega could have done much better with the Dreamcast than they did given the cheaper price point, one year head start, and solid lineup of games.

Going too early would mean a hardware spec that'd inevitably get demolished by PS2. I think delaying a year, going DVD and maybe bumping the RAM up would have resulted in a product more competitive, but Sega were completely dead outside of Japan by 99 and they probably couldn't afford to wait

They were screwed either way. The Dreamcast, no matter what form it took, could never have saved them. Saturn was the fatal blow, it's weirdly esoteric tech choices, over-complicated and expensive design making it impossible to compete with Sony's simple, cheap polygon pusher. It just took them a while to bleed out.

Kinda seeing it play out again with the Xbox brand, interestingly.

I don’t think Microsoft have any interest in hardware consoles. They get their money from Xbox subscriptions so for them it’s more about pushing Xbox live rather than hardware.

I get their move though. Hardware is an expensive business and full of risk.

I was referrinng to how the repurcussions of the failure of the Xbox One are still felt 2 generations on, with it seemingly going to end in Microsoft's divestment from the console business.

Though how that'll play out will be different, given Microsoft's portfolio is far wider than Sega's ever was and the weird hybrid-with-PC state of their games portfolio.

Xbox One sold 58 million so it’s a bit of a stretch to call it’s a failure.

The thing you’re missing is the exact point I made in my previous comment:

Microsoft’s strategy is to own the software stack. They’re not really a hardware company. Xbox One was more about leveraging Microsoft as a platform. And Xbox Live is a very competitive and highly popular service. You don’t need an Xbox for Xbox Live. But you do need a subscription to Microsoft for it. The Xbox was just there for people who still wanted to pay the upfront cost for a dedicated gaming system but it was never Microsoft’s priority.

This is also fully in line with how Microsoft has pivoted most of its business over the last two decades: Microsoft Office and Azure AD are great examples of how Microsoft have switched emphasis to subscription-based services.

Much as I prefer physical hardware, it’s hard to deny that Microsoft’s approach is the the future. PlayStation might appear like they’re more successful than Xbox today but in a generation or twos time, people won’t be buying new hardware like they are today. We are already seeing this trend in fact. And Microsoft have a massive head start in the subscription games market. So unless Sony switch gear soon, they’re more likely to go the way of Sega than Microsoft are.

As for Nintendo, it’s hard to guess what will happen there but I suspect they’ll weather the change in consumer habits because they have both the IP and the unique position of being more positions as kids toys than grown up gaming devices.

Xbox as a console is a failure in as much that it's coming third in a market of three and that in response to that, Microsoft are significantly changing their strategy, something they probably wouldn't have done if they were market leader.

But I agree with you on all points and I think the direction Microsoft are going in is the right one, though they should have done it sooner, the Series consoles have felt rather superfluous. They should have been working on adding a solid console UI to Windows a generation ago.

> Microsoft are significantly changing their strategy, something they probably wouldn't have done if they were market leader.

You have cause and effect the wrong way around there. Microsoft have been pushing this strategy from the start.

There’s a reason they partnered with Sega to put Windows CE on the Dreamcast. And their failed attempt at XNA on the Xbox 360. It was always about owning the software layer rather than them being a dominant hardware manufacturer.

If they cared about hardware then you’d see Microsoft PCs. Instead we have decades of IBM-compatible clones, some half hearted attempts at Windows Phones, which they again didn’t manufacture the hardware for, and a few Surface Pros which are basically just templates to inspire HP et al into action.

The Xbox was always about software dominance but at the time MS knew they had to get their software onto the consoles first.

Whereas Sony was originally a hardware company. They didn’t even own any studios when the first Playststion was released (hence why they released an SDK for the Playststion while Sega still expected 3rd party developers to write assembly like their in house teams were)

So the difference in hardware sales isn’t at all surprising when you factor that in.

If you look at Xbox Live subscriptions you’ll see just how hard Microsoft are pushing this strategy. And to get where they are with it, it cannot have been just a reactionary approach due to coming 3rd in hardware sales. The fact that Microsoft Windows has been pushing Xbox Live for literally years too is further proof of that.

Also when you look at some of the controversial decisions regarding the Xbox One, which MS backtracked on, those unpopular design choices make much more sense when you think of the console as a fat terminal for subscription-based games.

I’m honestly a little worried for the future of the Playststion because if things pan out the way they’re going presently, Sony might just end up an OEM for Xbox Live compatible devices.

> They should have been working on adding a solid console UI to Windows a generation ago.

A lot has been said in the past about Microsoft’s design team and not just for the Xbox One. They’re the only billion dollar company that consistently gets UI more wrong than Amazon.

30 years ago I honestly think they were best in class for designing UIs. But somewhere around XP they lost their way and they’ve been getting worse at it with each coming year.

If Microsoft could have a large piece of the console market, they would have taken it, corporate strategy be damned. Whatever got them into the market (and you're right, they did it as a long term power play for the living room) doesn't mean Microsoft has some kind of purity of vision or grand unchangable plan, their corporate culture is notoriously factional and fragmented. They aren't a hardware company... until they are.

There are risks to giving it up too. Make the Xbox open and Steam could potentially gobble up what's left of a la carte game distribution on PC. Xbox Live is inevitably going to die, why pay for online services when every other store offers them for free? All that's left is Game Pass, but the long term viability of subscription models for games is shaky, they're getting more subscribers but they aren't hitting their target numbers and they need to scale for it to be able to turn a profit.

There's the cloud and they're in a great position to compete there, but I remain unconvinced that it's good enough. It's less a primary way to play games and more a value-add, most people, even casuals, seem to treat it as such. And what about them owning the software layer? They don't even have a monopoly on running Windows software anymore, at least in the domain of games. I suspect this might be a problem for them down the track.

The way I buy their games is as Microsoft only as publisher, since I buy them on Steam. I play them on my Linux PC. In a way, they're already Sega post-Dreamcast.

> If Microsoft could have a large piece of the console market, they would have taken it, corporate strategy be damned. Whatever got them into the market (and you're right, they did it as a long term power play for the living room) doesn't mean Microsoft has some kind of purity of vision or grand unchangable plan, their corporate culture is notoriously factional and fragmented. They aren't a hardware company... until they are

You’re making a hypothetical point here though. And not only hypothetical, but one that flys directly against all of the actual behavioural evidence we do already have.

> There are risks to giving it up too. Make the Xbox open and Steam could potentially gobble up what's left of a la carte game distribution on PC. Xbox Live is inevitably going to die, why pay for online services when every other store offers them for free? All that's left is Game Pass, but the long term viability of subscription models for games is shaky, they're getting more subscribers but they aren't hitting their target numbers and they need to scale for it to be able to turn a profit.

You’re completely missing the point of what Xbox Live is here. It’s not just support for online play, it’s “free” AAA games and game streaming. It’s Steam, Google Strava and PlayStation Plus all rolled into one. It works on PCs, tablets and even Meta Quests too.

That’s why MS are buying studios and why the Xbox is less relevant. Hardware becomes irrelevant if you’re streaming the games to customers.

It also got a massive user base already. In fact they’re the leading online gaming service provider. And if you read any of the market analysis for this online gaming services, streaming and gaming from non-traditional gaming hardware (eg portable devices and XR headsets), those markets are set to explode in popularity over the next 10 years.

Apple knows this too, which is why they have Apple Arcade. But Apple are focused on hardware lock-ins while Microsoft are focused on software dominance.

> There's the cloud and they're in a great position to compete there, but I remain unconvinced that it's good enough.

They already dominate there ;)

> It's less a primary way to play games and more a value-add, most people, even casuals, seem to treat it as such. And what about them owning the software layer? They don't even have a monopoly on running Windows software anymore, at least in the domain of games. I suspect this might be a problem for them down the track.

Competing for operating system dominance is a thing of the past. Outside of server licensing, no one charges for desktop operating systems any more and mobile operating systems have always been a free bundle. Plus with more and more applications being web-based, half the time the “operating system” is just a web browser.

Microsoft knows this, which is why Edge is based on Chromium and why Windows 11 is a free upgrade.

These days real revenue is generated from subscription based services. Hence the Office 365 and the Azura AD examples I gave. Hence why Apple are moving into subscription services. Hence why Adobe products are now subscription based. Whereas what you’re describing is the industry 10+ years ago.

> The way I buy their games is as Microsoft only as publisher, since I buy them on Steam. I play them on my Linux PC. In a way, they're already Sega post-Dreamcast.

That explains why you have very little understanding of Xbox Live and Microsoft’s pitch for subscription based gaming services. :) I don’t mean that in a negative way, just that you haven’t really explored cloud gaming yet so haven’t been exposed to just how large that market already it.

Personally I much prefer your way of gaming too, albeit I’d almost always opt for physical copies if any exist. I’m definitely and old school gamer. So I can’t say I relish this new future where you don’t own the title you play. But like it or not, that’s where the industry is going.

Have a read about some market analysis for online gaming services and popularity of gaming platforms. Quite a lot of them are going to be industry-aimed and thus not free to read but there’s enough resources out there that you should get an idea of what I’m talking about. The whole console industry is on a verge of a significant shift. It’s like the shift from cartridge to optical disc. Or from single use circuit controlled games to ROM cartridges.

> You’re making a hypothetical point here though. And not only hypothetical, but one that flys directly against all of the actual behavioural evidence we do already have.

How is any of that hypothetical? Microsoft has always been opportunistic.

> You’re completely missing the point of what Xbox Live is here. It’s not just support for online play, it’s “free” AAA games and game streaming. It’s Steam, Google Strava and PlayStation Plus all rolled into one. It works on PCs, tablets and even Meta Quests too.

No no no. You do this repeatedly, trying to say that I'm naive, it's extremely condescending. I've tried this stuff, I know how it works, I understand what the technology is and the services on offer. I just don't believe the hype, I don't think streaming is the panacea for video games and based on the way I'm seeing most people around me engage with video games, I don't think I'm alone in thinking that.

Latency will always be worse and the only solver for that is throwing expensive graphics hardware into edge datacenters. Meanwhile, smartphones are starting to run AAA games without needing to stream anything at all, compatibility layers are being developed that allow for Windows games to run on ARM/Android. You're not wrong that "gaming on everything" is becoming a thing, but I don't think relying on streaming alone is going to cut it.

You sound like the people hyping up Stadia. Games everywhere, man, streaming is the future! I'm sure you'll try to make the argument that their business model was a poor fit (it was) but a subscription model wouldn't have saved them either. The future isn't streaming, the future isn't a la carte, it's all of those sales models at the same time. The future of Microsoft as a games company is that they sell their games any way people want to buy them, that is, they act like a regular old publisher.

> How is any of that hypothetical? Microsoft has always been opportunistic

It’s hypothetical because you are discussing a different reality to the present.

Hypothetically you might be right, but seems unlikely given their past actions and the current industry trends. However it’s impossible to prove or disprove your point because it depends on conditions other than our current reality.

> No no no. You do this repeatedly, trying to say that I'm naive, it's extremely condescending.

I don’t mean to be condescending. However it’s going to be difficult to discuss Xbox Live without actually discussing the features of Xbox Live.

> I just don't believe the hype, I don't think streaming is the panacea for video games and based on the way I'm seeing most people around me engage with video games, I don't think I'm alone in thinking that.

The “hype” is a combination of extensive market research that extends far beyond your social circle, and the intentions of big corporations.

You might be right that the reality will not live up to the hype, but citing your evidence as “based on how most people around me engage with video games” isn’t a particularly wide sample.

Seriously, read some of the market research on this (I have, given my background and social circle also being industry experts) and it massively contradicts your anecdotal analysis on Microsoft and the wider games industry: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=video.game.market+research&t=iphon...

> Latency will always be worse and the only solver for that is throwing expensive graphics hardware into edge datacenters.

Latency isn’t a problem for all types of games.

You’re also focused on just one aspect of subscription services and an area that’s still underdeveloped at the moment too.

Lastely there have already been examples of streaming games that have proven the concept does actually work.

> Meanwhile, smartphones are starting to run AAA games without needing to stream anything at all, compatibility layers are being developed that allow for Windows games to run on ARM/Android. You're not wrong that "gaming on everything" is becoming a thing, but I don't think relying on streaming alone is going to cut it.

Alone it won’t cut it. I never claimed Xbox Live was a streaming service alone. I said it was an area for growth.

> You sound like the people hyping up Stadia. Games everywhere, man, streaming is the future!

A future, not the only future.

Subscription services are the future but there multiple facets to that. I’ve repeatedly discussed each of them so I’m confused why you keep thinking online can only be one thing or another.

> The future isn't streaming, the future isn't a la carte, it's all of those sales models at the same time.

That’s literally what I’ve been saying. Are you even reading what I’m posting or just automatically opposed to them because I disagreed with your assessment on Microsoft and the “failure” of the Xbox One ?

> The future of Microsoft as a games company is that they sell their games any way people want to buy them, that is, they act like a regular old publisher.

You’re implying that people have the ultimate say in how they consume software yet history has proven that rarely proves to be the case. For example Adobe moving to subscription model.

You’re also implying that most people don’t want a subscription abased model for gaming when actually it’s already proving very popular with people who like to play lots of different games (as the market reports I’ve linked to have demonstrated).

Fortnite “Seasons” is a similar concept. While the base game is free, you have to pay for any season exclusives. Epic saw a massive growth in revenue and engagement after switching to this model. While on the surface this model might seem contradictory to the subscription model, it’s really not:

Both other regular updates offering exclusives to keep people coming back, and those exclusives aren’t available as part of their base free package.

Nintendo are doing this with their emulators being exclusive to Nintendo Online and new ROMs drip fed over a period of months.

Sony are doing this with their emulators being Playststion Plus.

Only Microsoft are pushing their online subscription as being hardware agnostics.

I can totally see why they thought "Sega is so uncool, hey come to my place I've got a PlayStation" is a ecstatically phenomenal ad campaign in context of late 90s Japan, and with hindsight how close it was to try to shoot a target by intentionally ricochetting the bullet on one's own forehead.

The Dreamcast was pretty much on par with the PS2, GameCube, and XBOX. I'm surprised it didn't keep getting games.

Sega's announcement that they were discontinuing the console relatively early on while it still had a lot of life in it put a stake through its heart. Nobody wanted to develop for a console that was a Dead Man Walking when they could develop for PS2 instead.

Not in sales which is what matters.

It isn't like today where you can port a game pretty quickly. The architectures were hugely different.

The PS2 released more than a year later in Japan, and while only a few months after the DC in North America, but straddling the holiday season, so essentially the following year. But the announcement seriously gimped the DC launch.

I love the Dreamcast, own multiple, started hacking with KallistiOS back in the day, it has much more significance to me than the PS2, but it’s just not the case that the hardware was vastly superior. It’s no slouch, there are aspects that are better. The GPU had some neat tricks and more VRAM+HWTC was nice, you get better image quality, but it was plainly bested in most of the metrics that mattered more, geometry, lighting and fill rate, and most people did not use VGA out at the time. The “Emotion Engine” is absolutely ungainly compared to the elegance of the SH-4 simply tied to the PowerVR and AICA, but you simply can get more out of it both in raw FP/SIMD (geometry) and DMA. Simplicity of architecture doesn’t matter to the vast majority of gamers. Some of the early titles looked like shit due to the difficulty of leveraging the hardware, but look at the longevity and late stage PS2 games (especially Konami), quite beyond DC capabilities. And a DVD was objectively superior to GDROM (and it made a good movie player).

The Xbox was released after Sega already shitcanned the Dreamcast, its fate was sealed before.

Sony overstated the PS2 capabilities, but it did have DVD drive and the graphics were better after developer learned how to use it, it had strong franchises and simply more S tier ones. The Dreamcast was too arcade port heavy. The Dreamcast simply got fucked in the winner take all market at the time. Maybe if they released in 1998 with a larger library they might have had enough run way.

Shadow of the Colossus on the PS2 was a techical marvel

http://lukasz.dk/files/making_of_sotc.pdf

https://www.froyok.fr/blog/2012-10-breakdown-shadow-of-the-c...

I was about to ask if the DC could do the odd shading (fur shells, bloom) that SotC did on PS2. IIRC it used the vector units in addition to the GPU.

An SotC decompile would be killer...

In addition to what the others said, Xbox was released long after the DC was already discontinued. What’s more, some of the same people behind the DC were also behind the Xbox.

In a way, the Xbox is kind of like the Dreamcast 2

The PS2 had DVD playback, huge popular franchise support, and the very positive reception of the PS1 going for it.

I don't know how it compares to the Dreamcast in raw horsepower, but compared to the GameCube and Xbox it was firmly at the bottom of the pack in that regard. It ended up not mattering in light of the games and its ability to play DVDs.

i think dvd playback was THE feature that sealed the dreamcast’s fate.

The PS1 monstrous success sealed the DC's fate. It created a huge new demographic of first time gamers that equated "PlayStation" to "console".

You are really underestimating how many people bought ps2s as a dvd player+ both “gamers” and everyone else.

Probably true for the US. In Europe, it was very country-dependent. Here PS2 sold simply because it was the new PlayStation, to a public that for the vast majority wasn't even aware there was competition.

Weren't a good chunk of DVD players almost as expensive as the PS2? You basically got a free gaming console with your DVD player.

This. Thrifty parents with no interest in gaming saw the PS2 and thought "Sony DVD player". The GameCube was merely an expensive Nintendo time sink. To this end my brother and I took out a loan to buy out GameCube but could have gotten the PS2 for free for Christmas - we wanted to play Super Smash Brothers et al that much and knew that we couldn't avail ourselves of the PS2's better-selling titles anyhow due to their M ratings.

As I write this it does feel like both Sony and Microsoft really started to push the whole living room entertainment convergence thing around this time while Nintendo happily stayed in their lane. The same dynamic continues to this day.

I bought the PS2 because it had a DVD player absolutely. Same thing for PS3; my only Blu-Ray player.

I wouldn’t say that, but it certainly was a big one.

The other big thing is that Sega had just burned so many bridges during their surprise gotcha Saturn launch in the US that a lot of retailers didn’t want to deal with them again.

If they had been coming from a stronger position I wonder if they would’ve done better.

But it was a Sony, MS, Sega and Nintendo race. That’s just too many, someone wasn’t going to make it. And as the weakest of the bunch they were the most likely.

As an unknown Microsoft could’ve been, but they got a huge hit with Halo and had the money to push through either way.

In what way(s) do you consider the Dreamcast hardware vastly superior? It had a slower CPU, slower GPU, and less memory if I remember correctly.

The DC had double the VRAM (and 4MB on the PS2 was paltry) and hardware texture compression, texture quality was better, and the analog video output path was better and most games run 480p vs 480i. 480p on the Dreamcast looks better (an advantage that most North American consumers using the included composite cable would not have been able to appreciate). All said, indeed it was not vastly superior.

Good read: Development stories of the GTA trilogy & IV [0]

> The first prototype of gta3 ran on a Dreamcast. We all had Dreamcasts and all played Phantasy Star Online. This didn't last long as the Dreamcast lost out to Playstation 2 and we switched.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20231120194646/https://insideroc...

Last archive with all of the articles up: https://web.archive.org/web/20231122134155/https://insideroc...

Thanks for the updated version! I'll use it from now on.

Screenshots: https://dca3.net/screenshots/

Yup, those look like GTA3 screenshots alright..

On an unrelated note, there's an amazing 3D Sonic Game that just released for the Sega 32X. It's a port of "Sonic Robo Blast 2", which is Doom-based.

Now there’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time (maybe 20 years)

Modern Vintage Gamer has a great video on this release, basically calling it the most incredible port he's ever seen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MFN7QiF83M

Bit of hyperbole considering opentombs Tomb Raider can run on the GBA.

https://opentomb.github.io/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GVSLcqGP7g

I love retrocomputing. It completely flips the idea of "outdated consoles" on its head. Instead of being less valuable because there are better options, they are instead a forever-immutable computer for developers to target.

The produced consoles will last many more years (I have an N64 still kicking running new ROM hacks on an Everdrive). And even if every bit of hardware becomes defunct, the emulators will live on preserving that architecture in an immutable state forever.

I used to think "what's the point of creating new software for old consoles" but once I reframed them this way, I find them as or more exciting that writing software for modern hardware.

excellent, did you try SM64 - Through the Ages? Great custom level design.

It's on my list :) I kinda wanna replay SM64 first for a comparison.

I replayed Majora recently but insisted on replaying OoT first for similar reasons.

EDIT: idk now thinking about it again, I think I'll just play it. I want something pure and fun to play. Sadly it doesn't play on original N64 but alas. I can always use my Steam Deck :D

Hardware does fail over time, apparently due to stuff like leaky capacitors. Enthusiasts and repair shops can keep a few alive for a while, and shops like PCBWay may produce replacement parts.

That said, I think your point about emulators is very on point because they facilitate experiencing these long after hardware becomes impractical. And folks can try a huge variety of games without a lot of travel or shipping. I'm also curious to try some FPGA solutions, especially if they can support save states.

re: FPGA, the Analog Pocket with an Everdrive also works great. I use it to play GB/GBC/GBA games on my TV via its dock. Sadly, those don't support sleep and stuff but that's worth it.

Why bother with an Everdrive on an Analogue Pocket? Mine has only seen a cartridge once, just because my partner happened to have an old GB game she wanted to see if her save had survived on, otherwise it runs entirely off SD.

I guess it's mostly because I already had it? That's a good point though.

Not a bad reason, especially if you have saves on it. I'm sure there's a way to transfer them and make it work but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't perfectly straightforward so I can totally see not finding it worth the effort.

I never had a Game Boy, back in the day I was the kid tethered to the power cord with his Game Gear. I almost bought the adapter, but then I realized none of my games had saves so I had no reason to want to use the real carts.

The save transfer is very simple. You just copy them to the correct folder.

I already had a GBA Everdrive but I picked a GB/C one up because for about a year after release, the FPGA cores didn't support the display emulation features of the Pocket, which is a good chunk of the reason I bought mine. I believe they are now all fully supported though. The Pocket's sleep doesn't really work with flash carts either, so arguably the core + SD card route is now the better option, though I still own my AGS-101 model SP and GB micro, and it's cool to play on those still sometimes.

Real Time Clock support for GBA games that need it. The OpenFPGA core doesn’t support it.

There are also companies like Analogue who are producing high quality clones which will keep gamers (mostly) happy for at least another generation.

Analogue makes FPGA-based emulators. These are pretty cool because they can eliminate a number of downsides with software game console emulation while still retaining some of the upsides, and versus pure hardware clones, they can be updated and patched, either to fix bugs or add new targets. Another bonus of FPGAs is that they're accessible to hobbyists. I don't know what the current preferred solution is but a while ago people were buying DE10 Nano boards for running MiSTer, which could support a large variety of cores.

MiSTER is going strong and the recent release of the excellent-but-confusingly-named MiSTER Pi [1] board has brought the cost of entry down considerably. After I do some more SD card shuffling and verify game compatibility I plan on selling my N64 and Saturn and using OEM controllers with my MiSTER Pi. Unfortunately the Altera Cyclone FPGA in it doesn't have the horsepower to run anything beyond fifth-gen systems so a new platform would be required for the Dreamcast, Gamecube, and PS2. The common refrain from FPGA enthusiasts regarding these systems is that because the hardware has many more layers of abstraction they're less dependent on cycle-accurate timing than older consoles so the juice might not be worth the squeeze as far as building HDL cores for them is concerned.

[1] https://retroremake.co/pages/store

> they're less dependent on cycle-accurate timing than older consoles > so the juice might not be worth the squeeze as far as building HDL > cores for them is concerned.

There's also the question of the huge amount of engineering effort required to recreate the more advanced platforms.

The Replay2 board should provide both a much more capable FPGA and loads of RAM bandwidth to go with it. (Finishing touches are apparently being made to the prototype board layout, and production is slated for the Spring)

And for anyone who thought FPGA gaming was a new phenomenon, work on the original Minimig FPGA recreation of the Amiga started in January 2005 - 20 years ago!

It's worth nothing that while they do eliminate many of the drawbacks with emulation, FGPA solutions are still not 1:1 recreations of consoles.

Yeah, totally fair. I was actually debating whether "clone" was appropriate. I've also struggled with how to explain how my Pocket works to friends who don't know what FPGA means. "It's like emulation but ..."

In my experience relatively few of the components on old computers and game consoles are particularly failure prone and most of them can have a future contingency plan:

- Electrolytic capacitors can be replaced relatively easily. Some people are replacing them with solid state capacitors to try to improve reliability and avoid corrosion from leaked electrolyte.

- Batteries likewise can be replaced easily, and you can usually fit a socket in there if there isn't already one.

- Damaged traces on PCBs (usually caused by leaky capacitors or batteries) can often be patched. It is definitely not the easiest work, but if patching a few traces is all that's needed to get something back into working order, then it's probably worth it.

- Some of the old AC-DC transformer blocks are dying or horribly inefficient anyways. Most of them are outside of the machine and can be replaced with readily available modern equivalents, so this one is extremely easy. For old computers, ATX supplies are easy to adapt to pre-ATX standards and even some different machines entirely since they provide some of the most commonly-needed voltage rails (some new supplies lack -12V but it will be listed on the PSU specs either way). There's even very small form factor ATX supplies using GaN based transformers that can fit pretty much anywhere.

- CD-ROM lasers are definitely starting to wear down, but there's quite a lot of optical drive emulators available nowadays for a variety of machines, with more showing up every year. As long as small-order PCB manufacturers remain around, it will probably remain viable to make more of these ODEs.

- Likewise, floppy disks and their drives can fail for a variety of reasons, but floppy drive emulators are at the point of reasonable maturity and can support a lot of machines, too. I'm sure there's some weird standards where emulation may be spotty (thinking of NEC) but for typical Macs, PCs and Commodore computers I imagine most of the ground is covered already.

It is true that a lot of hardware is failing and some of it is not so easily replaced, but honestly, I think if we wanted to, we could keep a good amount of the retro hardware working for possibly hundreds of years longer. The real question is if enough people will deem it worth their time and money to do so. But then again, I suppose it's not much different in that regard from vintage automobiles.

There will always be a place for emulation, probably a much larger one at that. Not only does emulation give a very nice long-term solution to keeping software libraries accessible, they offer plenty of advantages over actually using old hardware, and it's obviously a lot more accessible.

P.S.: to whoever does eventually come into possession of the machines I worked on next, I apologize for my soldering. In fairness, some of these old boards are stubborn even with a ton of flux.

>- Some of the old AC-DC transformer blocks are dying or horribly inefficient anyways. Most of them are outside of the machine and can be replaced with readily available modern equivalents, so this one is extremely easy.

Except the commodore ones that fry the computer when they stop working.

I believe the Commodore 64 power supply I am using I ordered from c64psu.com. I did not evaluate the quality in any way, but years down the line it hasn't failed me. So, at least working replacements are available, and while they're not necessarily cheap, it's probably worth it considering you're definitely right about the fact that the Commodore ones tend to fail in pretty ugly ways.

The optical drive emulators are great but sad: being able to play games with original disks is half the fun, IMO

The DC will be around for a long time, but games won't be played from optical discs much longer. It used a format that was double the density of the yellow-book standard, and when my drive failed, it was much cheaper to replace it with a flash-based option than to buy a replacement drive.

Yes, optical drives tend to fail. A couple of days ago I tried to play with my old Gamecube that had been in storage for at least 10 years, and surprise, it doesn't read the disks anymore.

On the other hand, a few months ago I bought a Saturn and despite being much older, it works flawlessly. That thing was built like a tank...

I've got one of those, bought and installed it a few years ago. Unfortunately it doesn't work with all games. Maybe that has been fixed, but was very annoying to find that hydro thunder didn't work!

If you're using an HDMI converter then that's most likely your reason for Hydro Thunder not working. Hydro Thunder notoriously doesn't work well with VGA output (HDMI converters for the Dreamcast usually convert the VGA signal)

I figured out how to fix Hydro Thunder's compatibility issues last year (it would very briefly change the pixel clock). You can either use a Codebreaker code to fix the game if you're running from a real disc, or if you use an ODE, you can patch the disc image.

https://www.dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=165...

This reminds me, I remember back in early 2000s hex editing games to force 60hz on my PAL Dreamcast. This looks like a similar idea. Thanks.

To be honest I now pretty much just play Dreamcast games via the redream emulator on my steam deck and pc under my TV. Though obviously there are drawbacks with emulating. Every so often I bother to setup my Dreamcast with my ossc and play on real hardware.

VGA to my ossc is usually how I connect to my TV. But yes I believe you are right, it's a vga issue too

Completely agree and I'll go a bit further. I see old consoles and computers as the only VMs that will last. In 500 years, assuming we all survive, I believe it's more likely that code targeting the NES will be runnable than code targeting today's browsers, .NET or the JVM. The reason is that while these competing VMs are well documented, they are extremely complex and code targeting them tend to rely on idiosyncrasies of current operating systems, browsers and even hardware.

Also, the retro hardware itself is the ultimate documentation. You can look at every chip using (nowadays) accessible equipment and create an absolutely perfect replica in software or FPGA. VM documentation, however, can contain inaccuracies.

My speculative fiction statement of the day is that only software targeting relatively simple architectures will stand the test of time.

Not to mention that so much more modern software will fail due to requiring network connectivity to non-existent services

Isn't this general idea what the 100 Rabbits people theorize? i.e with uxn and all that

I had never heard of it, so I went to find out more. Yes, I think it's the same philosophy. Very cool project.

Unfortunately, it seems that they went against the project's very principle by inventing a new language, new VM and toolchain instead of simply targeting one of the existing platforms. I can see why they wanted to build an abstraction layer, so their code is portable across different classic (and modern) platforms, but this is one more case of https://xkcd.com/927/.

It would have been totally okay if they had said "The future of software is creating applications targeting the Amiga 1000", or anything else from the 80s-90s, which I'll arbitrarily define as "simple enough to accurately emulate forever".

> Unfortunately, it seems that they went against the project's very principle by inventing a new language, new VM and toolchain instead of simply targeting one of the existing platforms.

The intentions of Uxn are not directly in line with using say, a commodore 64, for preservation and as a portability layer, which is a monumental project to implement for each new system. The project's core principle is to design something perfectly tailored at hosting a handful of specific programs, document it in a way that if needed, others could create their own systems based on their own vision, and not centralize all preservation efforts around a handful of retrocomputing emulation.

https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/devlog

https://100r.co/site/weathering_software_winter.html

It's more akin to using brainfuck or subleq, or Another World's VM or even Alan Kay's Chifir where the goal is to target a virtual machine that is so small(< 100 loc) that it can be easily ported. As opposed to a system so complex that it might take someone months to implement a passable C64, Amiga, or ST80 emulator.

https://tinlizzie.org/VPRIPapers/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf

Other related similar projects:

https://dercuano.github.io/notes/uvc-archiving.html

Thank you for the great links!

It can be really hard to get accurate emulation with a somewhat loosely defined, high level VM such as some of your examples. If it's that small and simple, programmers might accidentally create a dependency on implementation idiosyncrasies. Just see what happens on the retro computing scene when emulators aren't perfectly cycle and hardware accurate - applications, the "demoscene" being a good example of them, that rely on very low-level details of the architecture don't work on certain emulators.

If we want to create a new "forever VM", that VM would have to very strictly define behaviors across I/O, graphics, audio and other areas. I don't want the application to stutter or run too fast on future emulators. I want the emulation to be perfectly cycle accurate.

Exactly, you get it. That's the goal of the project, no undefined behavior, no hazy specifications. :) I've dabbled in this space for quite a while now, I can assure you that dependency on implementation idiosyncrasies get increasingly worse with complex VMs.

Another aspect of this is the relative simplicity of the toolchain.

On my 10-year-old PC (Core i5 something or other) I can build a cross assembler and C compiler for the Amiga in around 21 seconds (vbcc, Vasm, Vlink).

I can build the same on the Amiga itself in minutes (admittedly quite a lot of minutes!) rather than hours.

Meanwhile, I read recently of a build of llvm on a RISC-V SoC taking well over 12 hours.

I think it has less to do with the architecture or medium and more to do with the type of media itself.

We are more likely to actively preserve art in usable forms than something like JIRA. We play Chess more than we use whatever contemporary accounting tool. We read old novels more than we read transcripts of business meetings.

So we'll be more motivated to keep these architectures and games continually preserved.

> code targeting the NES

Well, the 6502 in general. It's an extremely important processor in history. People want to emulate NES, Commodore, Atari 8-bit, Apple II - so an accurate 6502 emulator has a HUGE base of nostalgic geeks to improve it.

Yes, and we have freely available, cycle accurate 6502 emulation code bodies along with full coverage tests that include both the official opcodes and many illegal ones. Mostly the ones people used such as LAX, which can get the same value into both registers on a single read.

I just had a fleeting thought right now related to that behavior:

Basically, that opcode works because of how simple the design is. Electrically, wiring both registers up does the trick. And many parts of the chip can work together like that even though none or it was intended.

I wonder what a revisit, that takes these now well understood behaviors into consideration, would look like!

Zeroing all or multiple registers, same with bit ops, maybe inc, dec...

Many new, efficient instructions are possible. Would be a fun programming exercize and design one too.

Also reminds us that line goes up is often more a perceptual FOMO than real technical milestones.

The people who mod retro machines into more “modern” formats are pretty wild on the hardware side as well.

This nut job decided to make a portable PS4: https://youtu.be/bJSLscnFd_M

From my limited understanding the Dreamcast also has one of the simplest architectures of that generation (since Sega learned from the monstrosity that was the Saturn) which I would think would make it a good target for homebrew. The GPU was also an early PowerVR design so maybe contemporary mobile GPU expertise can be leveraged instead of trying to target the Gamecube or PS2's proprietary architectures.

Of course the OG XBox is probably simpler to port a PC game to since it basically _was_ a PC so it doesn't really count in this discussion.

Is this possible because GTA III was originally coded in such a way to be compatible with the Dreamcast, and this is simply tying together lose ends, or did someone go through an absolute butt load of work rewriting huge chunks (or maybe even all chunks) of the engine to make it Dreamcast compatible?

It's an engine port from the decompilation project RE3. A lot to changes to get it to run

More the latter. I was following its development and one trick they played was converting the model geometry from triangle lists to triangle strips better suited for PowerVR. That let them push triangles to the hardware faster with a corresponding increase in framerate.

https://x.com/falco_girgis/status/1821266502412075174?lang=e...

Falco is very funny, BTW. He writes a lot of his Dreamcast posts like that gen of the console wars is present day.

It also helps that GTA III was made using a well-known game engine (RenderWare).

Running on Dreamcast hardware

https://youtu.be/6MFN7QiF83M?si=kYSxVa0N2GDsrAfP

do we have a gameplay capture on real hardware?

Judging by ~15 fps video Yes.

https://x.com/falco_girgis/status/1873520002306871358

https://youtu.be/ofn3F16ZKk4?si=wNdArUZ5WyznFgXL

He asked about real hardware and you linked Emu :)

Turns out MVG as usual went the whole mile explaining the port internals and including captured VGA CRT monitor output :)

https://youtu.be/6MFN7QiF83M?si=HSTUNAMgUOMUdRsg

https://youtu.be/6MFN7QiF83M?si=kYSxVa0N2GDsrAfP

These days it’s better to use an emulator. You can easily replace textures for higher res and get much better performance. Not sure why this effort was even performed? As an exercise/challenge it’s awesome but there are so many (better) ways to play gta 3 it seems like an odd endeavor.

The cooler thing here is that it’s a fully decompiled game.

Yea it’s for fun.

What makes you think the goal was to play GTA…?

The hacking is the point.

From the creator of reicast. Skmp is such a legend in the DC community.

"We got GTA III on dreamcast before we got GTA VI"

"Don't make me tap the sign."

The sign: "Games are enterprise software now, with all the bloat that implies"

Does one need the original textures for this to work?

Edit: Yes

There is a whole section of the README written just for you :)

https://gitlab.com/skmp/dca3-game#prerequisites

Oh I know, I was just hoping that someone might generate their own texture pack

and models and sounds and fonts and text and paths and configs and ...

Hope they will contribute back to re3 project because it's stalled for a while

As an admitted Dreamcast fanboy, I love seeing work like this.

n00b/serious question - What's the point of these ports?

There's something kinda beautiful about this.

What a time to be alive.

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