DXU24 👽 Surreal 98

What is this BLASPHEMY??? Oh, just a scene from Kingdom Hearts running on a SEGA DREAMCAST! The dynamic duo of Mad Modder Esppiral and DC homebrew veteran, PH3NOM, has once again given us a juicy glimpse into a version of gaming history where the little white box of dreams wound up winning against Sony's PS2. If you're into righting historical gaming wrongs and seeing the impossible made possible on the Sega Dreamcast, be sure to follow Esppiral for more blasphemy! youtube.com/@esppiral

So how is the Sega Dreamcast's very own native port of Mario Kart 64 coming along? Well, lets take a look at some footage I just captured directly from my DC of jnmartin's latest build! Minor texture corruption is still present on some of the sprites here and there, plus there's no audio yet, BUT MY OH MY! She's running like a dream and looks SHARP as hell at with progressive scan at twice the resolution! You'll immediately notice virtually all of the texture corruption on the text and UI sprites have been fixed. You can now actually see your item box, and clouds are drawn properly in the background, rather than over the top of the scene in the foreground. Somehow, along with fixing all of this in the past few days, jnmartin has also found the time to get the monitors in the backgrounds of Luigi's Raceway and Wario Stadium correctly projecting a view of the scene onto their screens. This somewhat-advanced effect (for the time) was actually done on the N64 (in this game) WITHOUT doing a secondary render-to-texture pass, which requires submitting the scene a second time to the GPU. Instead, the framebuffer was divided into small, tiled chunks (1/6 of its total size), with only a single small chunk getting updated per frame. This way, the amount of direct VRAM access from the CPU (which is typically slow as hell) is kept to a minimum within the duration of a particular frame, with multiple frames being required to update the entire screen. But anyway, she's starting to look and play incredibly well, and those of us with early access to the builds have been thoroughly enjoying revisiting this title on our favorite platform!

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! gitlab.com/skmp/dca3-game#ba…