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).
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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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?
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.
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28402640
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26199879
https://github.com/halpz/re3/
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.
Dead Comment
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.
http://lukasz.dk/files/making_of_sotc.pdf
https://www.froyok.fr/blog/2012-10-breakdown-shadow-of-the-c...
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.
In a way, the Xbox is kind of like the Dreamcast 2
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?
Dead Comment
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.
Dead Comment
It isn't like today where you can port a game pretty quickly. The architectures were hugely different.
> 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...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MFN7QiF83M
https://opentomb.github.io/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GVSLcqGP7g
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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...
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.
This nut job decided to make a portable PS4: https://youtu.be/bJSLscnFd_M
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
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.