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[nkarafo]

PS: Portal 64 was not a port but a complete demake sharing no code with the original. It doesn't look like anything N64 hasn't shown as possible before that, the system had plenty great looking complex games in its time, but noone had thought of a Portal-like, before Portal (well, Narbacular Drop). Of course it was still an amazing project, but not exactly comparable to what the developers of this port are trying to do (and in the end for all we know they may fail in getting anything playable or will have to severely reduce the default settings to get it to anything resembling a playable game). Nor is it suddenly easy for a small team (even ignoring not every amateur dev is equal to the very best ever seen somewhere else) to make work equivalent to yesteryear's AAA projects as we came to know them, Portal itself was far from anything resembling AAA to begin with and no DC homebrew game so far is anything close to the system's best, unlike modern devs using modern knowledge and tricks to max out some much older 2D retro platforms where a full game is just a few MB with whatever that entails for the quality and quantity of assets and even the # of programming lines. Also, that's obviously not real 1080p rendering with the GSM or whatever faux patches, tweaking settings for an existing PS2 game with whatever placebo or subjective effects with unknown changes some may prefer is obviously completely different to porting a PC game to any other platform. Duh

Portal 64 is not the only modern N64 homebrew game nor the most advanced.

Homebrew devs have now made a game engine that van push more polys the N64 has ever done at high frame rates. Look at the latest Kaze projects. This is the kind of performance no devs ever managed to achieve back in the day. And Kaze is only one person.

 

[Alexios]

Just as you heard of Kaze, if someone makes such a breakthrough for Dreamcast with some kind of api or game engine that reaches or exceeds what came before with official titles, you'll hear about it. It hasn't happened as not every developer is Kaze and not every system the N64/game Mario 64.

You know Kaze because what he did is special, not because it's a case of "of course you can do that nowadays" hence why nobody did it before him and you've heard of him and use how special he is and what he achieved is in a complete ass backwards way to claim such things are to be expected.

It hasn't been done for many systems (including some with "impossible" ports/demakes downgraded in ways that make them perfectly fitting, see Tomb Raider 32x/Unreal Saturn). The Saturn has no homebrew exceeding the highs of its best, nor has anyone optimized Daytona USA's performance...

The Spiral engine is probably the most advanced homebrew one for DC so far and it doesn't do anything beyond existing games (even if it's been tech demoed with assets from Silent Hill 3 imported and not even properly converted in terms of hair, alphas, etc.). It's still awesome, for other reasons.

 

[Elfstar]

Just as you heard of Kaze, if someone makes such a breakthrough for Dreamcast with some kind of api or game engine that reaches or exceeds what came before with official titles, you'll hear about it. It hasn't happened as not every developer is Kaze and not every system the N64/game Mario 64.

You know Kaze because what he did is special, not because it's a case of "of course you can do that nowadays" hence why nobody did it before him and you've heard of him and use how special he is and what he achieved is in a complete ass backwards way to claim such things are to be expected.

It hasn't been done for many systems (including some with "impossible ports" downgraded in ways that make them perfectly fitting for them, see Tomb Raider 32x/Unreal Saturn). The Saturn has no homebrew exceeding the highs of its best, nor has anyone optimized Daytona USA's performance...

The Spiral engine is probably the most advanced homebrew one for DC so far and it doesn't do anything beyond existing games (even if it's been tech demoed with assets from Silent Hill 3 imported and not even properly converted in terms of hair, alphas, etc.). It's still awesome, for other reasons.

Maybe at this point the N64 is actually the only retro console with that much potential to unlock?

 

[Killer8]

This looks disgusting. "10x the geometry" yet it's struggling to even render the road under the car.

 

[Fat Frog]

 

[JohnnyTropics]

Ahh, GTA 3, THE game of my youth.
People today don't see what it achieved in gaming, you had to be there to experience it.

I was a senior in high school when it came out--just a month or so after 9/11.
Man, I must have played that game every day for a year, until VC came out.
Then I played VC every day in my dorm room.
*looks around*
What... what happened? Where did the time go?

 

[Alexios]

Maybe at this point the N64 is actually the only retro console with that much potential to unlock?

I don't even know if that is true, I think Kaze works with Mario 64's engine specifically, maybe that was just particularly unoptimized for whatever reason (it does make some sense for a launch title). Or maybe N64 engines in general used the same methods/tools so they all held the system back, Idk.

 

[Fat Frog]

 

[IbizaPocholo]

Comparison of Grand Theft Auto III between Sega Dreamcast and Original Xbox.

It's not my fault if people skip the beginning of the video, but for those who do, know that the Dreamcast game has only been in development for one month, and the update shown in the video is from August 22, 2024, while today is August 23, 2024...

The purpose of the video is not to ridicule the Dreamcast; in fact, it's quite the opposite. It's to show how unfairly this console was treated and to highlight the talent of all the fans involved in this port because it's turning out amazing!

 

[Fat Frog]

 

[Moses85]

Gimme a GCN Port

 

[YCoCg]

I wonder when this will get a DMCA from Take-Two, it's using re3 and the team behind that were sued by Take-Two and Rockstar so I can't imagine this getting off lightly.

 

[nkarafo]

Maybe at this point the N64 is actually the only retro console with that much potential to unlock?

I think this applies for consoles that were harder to develop for.

The N64 was probably one of the hardest, with many bottlenecks and weird design choices.

Modern devs see these things as challenge sometimes.

Maybe that's why the N64 is one of the cases where the best homebrew games/demos look more impressive than the equivalent official offers.

I would expect the same for other weird consoles like the Saturn, 32X and Jaguar. We saw this on 32X but not yet on the Jaguar. Maybe the latter didn't have more to offer after all? Or maybe people don't care? I doubt because the Jaguar homebrew scene is very active, more so that most other consoles. The Saturn has some demos but still, not yet something that exceeds the best official offers.

I don't expect massive improvements with consoles that were more straightforward to develop for. Pretty sure the Dreamcast was an easy console to develop, Sega made sure of it after the Saturn. Same with, say, Gamecube and XBOX. All three consoles have some of the most consistent libraries, visually speaking, when you compare early to late games. Some of the most impressive games in their libraries are early games. The PS2 though, this was the hardest to develop for and that's why it's best looking titles are later ones. And i think unlike the N64, this console was popular enough to be squeezed properly, i don't expect modern titles to do more.

I also think the PS1 was 100% squeezed. It was both vastly popular and the easiest to develop for during it's time.

 

[Fat Frog]

Well, well...

GtA IIi caNNoT rUN oN tHe DC !!!

 

[nkarafo]

"DoOM caNNoT rUN oN tHe SNEs"

Any game can run on any console if you downgrade it enough.

I do wonder how the final version will compare against the others though.

 

[Unknown?]

"DoOM caNNoT rUN oN tHe SNEs"

Any game can run on any console if you downgrade it enough.

I do wonder how the final version will compare against the others though.

I think a better game to try is The Getaway, not GTA3.

 

[cireza]

"DoOM caNNoT rUN oN tHe SNEs"

Well, it can't. This is true.

 

[West Texas CEO]

Who asked for this?

 

[nkarafo]

Well, it can't. This is true.

On the FX2 chip then.

 

[Fat Frog]

On the FX2 chip then.

YUP, unlike the Dreamcast that doesn't even need GD Rom to run GTA 3... It runs with simple CD Rom.

Plus, it doesn't look like a PSX gen boosted port. It looks 6th gen.

 

[StueyDuck]

this feels like a colossal waste of time.

 

[Aesius]

Ahh, GTA 3, THE game of my youth.
People today don't see what it achieved in gaming, you had to be there to experience it.

GTA 3 is one of the last "pass the controller around when you die" single-player experiences I had. I played it with my brother and his friends and my own friends. Stealing a car, driving around the city, and running over people kept us entertained for hours. We'd occasionally do a mission but mostly we just wreaked havoc all over Liberty City.

 

[Fafalada]

Maybe at this point the N64 is actually the only retro console with that much potential to unlock?

I mean what are we measuring 'potential' with?
The Mario example was potential that was there to unlock because the codebase was relatively poorly optimized, not because of something hardware did/does.
And if you applied similar methodology, you could push 'most' commercial titles beyond what they originally did (software has to ship eventually - and especially launch titles REALLY suffer with tradeoffs there) - but It's highly unlikely most of them would have the kind of jump Mario64 does.
That said - the launch title lens applies to all consoles - eg. if someone were to do what was done with Mario to Halo1, R5 or Luigi's Mansion- I am absolutely sure we'd get a lot more out of them. Eg. I'd be willing to bet with enough time, Halo1 could have been a 60fps title and possibly higher res, R5 run 480p SSAA and 85fps, and LM at 60fps Progressive too.

Late stage titles are a different story of course, but that goes for N64 too.

 

[Fat Frog]

 

[Fat Frog]

At the end of the road, we'll see if GTA3 Dreamcast is just a demake of the PS2/PC version or a worthy 6th gen port.

Streets of rage 2 on 3th and 4th gen...
If Dreamcast is really a boosted 5th gen console, then GTA3 could be almost as ugly as SMS SOR 2

 

[ShirAhava]

When I first played GTAIII I was like "what is this empty ass 3d world? this would be really cool if they finished it" and went back to playing the better game GTAII. When Vice City came out I was like "ok this is what I was expecting" but anyway I really like the look of the dreamcast version over PS2 for some reason the colors seem to pop more but nothing could get me to go back to gtaIII didn't even like it at the time.

 

[Corporal.Hicks]

At the end of the road, we'll see if GTA3 Dreamcast is just a demake of the PS2/PC version or a worthy 6th gen port.

Streets of rage 2 on 3th and 4th gen...
If Dreamcast is really a boosted 5th gen console, then GTA3 could be almost as ugly as SMS SOR 2

Even the PSP was able to run GTA games and the Dreamcast is obviously more capable than the PSP.

 

[soulbait]

I am curious to how this compares to the Xbox version that came with both GTA III and GTA: Vice City. I believe it supported 480p, but I cannot confirm.

 

[YCoCg]

I am curious to how this compares to the Xbox version that came with both GTA III and GTA: Vice City. I believe it supported 480p, but I cannot confirm.

That version had higher poly models for vehicles and characters and higher resolution textures for the map, plus additional rendering features for reflections and water effects.

So yeah the DC version is based on the pc version but using edited PS2 models and textures.

 

[nkarafo]

I mean what are we measuring 'potential' with?
The Mario example was potential that was there to unlock because the codebase was relatively poorly optimized, not because of something hardware did/does.
And if you applied similar methodology, you could push 'most' commercial titles beyond what they originally did (software has to ship eventually - and especially launch titles REALLY suffer with tradeoffs there) - but It's highly unlikely most of them would have the kind of jump Mario64 does.
That said - the launch title lens applies to all consoles - eg. if someone were to do what was done with Mario to Halo1, R5 or Luigi's Mansion- I am absolutely sure we'd get a lot more out of them. Eg. I'd be willing to bet with enough time, Halo1 could have been a 60fps title and possibly higher res, R5 run 480p SSAA and 85fps, and LM at 60fps Progressive too.

Late stage titles are a different story of course, but that goes for N64 too.

The N64 was a special case though. It had some bottlenecks that seemingly all games games suffered except a few games using microcodes from RARE, Factor 5 and Boss Studios. The later made a couple of games (World Driver Championship being the one everyone knows) that looked beyond anything else the N64 had done at this point in terms of geometry detail. And that's because for 99% of games, the N64 didn't even come close to maximizing it's polygon pushing potential. Your average PS1 game had more geometry detail. AFAIK, that's because the N64 had some mandatory features that bottlenecked the hardware and most devs didn't bother trying to not use.

I disagree on the premise that all consoles had worse looking early titles. Look at the Gamecube. Some of it's earliest titles are the best looking. I would say the same for XBOX and Dreamcast. I think the easier the console is to develop, the smaller the visual gap is between early and late games. Consoles like the N64, Saturn and PS2 were harder to develop for and that's why you see bigger gaps there, with the late titles looking much better.

At the end of the road, we'll see if GTA3 Dreamcast is just a demake of the PS2/PC version or a worthy 6th gen port.

It can be a demake and still being a worthy 6th gen port.

It depends on how big the regressions are. But even at this stage it does look like something beyond what the PS1/N64 could do.

If Dreamcast is really a boosted 5th gen console, then GTA3 could be almost as ugly as SMS SOR 2

It's not a boosted 5th gen console. It's a somewhat rushed 6th gen console that was released early during the peak of 5th gen so it got a lot of 5th gen ports.

I think most 6th gen games could have a DC port with various levels of downgrade but still resemble a 6th gen game instead of a boosted 5th gen one.

 

[Fafalada]

The N64 was a special case though. It had some bottlenecks that seemingly all games games suffered

That's not saying much without context - every console had bottlenecks that were common-place. The whole 'potential' argument is that they can be worked around somehow.
Let's be explicit here - a whole slew of Mario64 optimizations that were implemented by that homebrew dev (virtually everything CPU performance focused) - is 'very' similar to the types of problems that commonly plagued almost all 360/PS3 games. Or PSP for that matter. If I had to summarise it in fewer words it's : Memory access = bad. Which was true of basically all consoles in 00s, except for GameCube (and to lesser extent, the Wii) which were an over-correction to the problems N64 had.

Your average PS1 game had more geometry detail. AFAIK, that's because the N64 had some mandatory features that bottlenecked the hardware and most devs didn't bother trying to not use.

Well on paper PS1 had the faster geometry processing hardware.
Coupled with the fact that you needed more polys because it didn't do perspective correction and it helped Z-sorting - titles were forced to build a certain way, and not so much on N64.

Look at the Gamecube. Some of it's earliest titles are the best looking. I would say the same for XBOX and Dreamcast.

I'm not debating hypotheticals - I gave actual examples. Yes Gamecube was built to be as simple to extract raw throughput from as possible, but that doesn't mean launch software was.
See what I said above about LM. Same for XBox and something like Halo.
And Dreamcast - well I don't need to repeat the entire thread worth of arguing for the same.

Now - I'm not saying anything about 'average' titles here - because frankly, I am not a statistician and how would you even go about proving '%' of system utilisation. But were there titles that could have massive gains even on easy to develop for consoles? Yes - I would bet on my examples to start with.

Even the PSP was able to run GTA games and the Dreamcast is obviously more capable than the PSP.

I don't think there's anything obvious about this one. PSP had a ton of advantages on paper - higher clocked Dual core CPUs, perhaps the best Vector/Matrix processor of any console design to date, dedicated T&L chip with substantially more throughput than SH4, dedicated Audio/video codec accelerators etc. But it also was a design marred by enough bottlenecks to make even N64 blush. Most software punched well below its height.
So yes - there were a bunch of half-assed DC ports, and those GTA games were massively parred down compared to mainline releases. But on the flipside it was doing remarkably fine with 360/PS3 ports that it had no business running, had some excellent contemporary arcade ports and one of the more technically outstanding SH games of that era. In my book I call it a toss-up, albeit the two had wildly different strengths and weaknesses.

 

[kevboard]

Let's be explicit here - a whole slew of Mario64 optimizations that were implemented by that homebrew dev (virtually everything CPU performance focused)

if you're talking about Kaze's Mario 64 hack, then no, it's not CPU focused. the biggest issue on N64 was the shared memory and memory latency.

his optimisations are heavily focused on shrinking code and scheduling.

it just happens to be the case that Mario 64 was also very hastily developed which lead to many CPU related savings he was also able to accomplish by improving the game while cleaning up the code. his collision detection for example is far superior to the original game, yet uses less memory and less CPU time. but the CPU savings are basically a sideffect of writing better code here

 

[Fat Frog]

 

[Fafalada]

if you're talking about Kaze's Mario 64 hack, then no, it's not CPU focused. the biggest issue on N64 was the shared memory and memory latency.#

Yes - most of which improved CPU performance in the title.
Games are (on basically every platform) 90% about optimising data flow - ie. control for bandwidth, latency, size/access. Smaller code, better scheduling, all equals faster CPU runtime.

And yes - better code runs faster. It's called optimisation - not a ... 'sideeffect'...

 

[Sephimoth]

Now do the N64

 

[kevboard]

Yes - most of which improved CPU performance in the title.
Games are (on basically every platform) 90% about optimising data flow - ie. control for bandwidth, latency, size/access. Smaller code, better scheduling, all equals faster CPU runtime.

And yes - better code runs faster. It's called optimisation - not a ... 'sideeffect'...

by sideffect I mean that the CPU load wasn't the problem that he tried to solve.

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

Even the PSP was able to run GTA games and the Dreamcast is obviously more capable than the PSP.

The PSP had cut-down versions of GTA specifically built for the platform. Well, specifically it and the Nintendo DS.

They never got outright ports of the PS2 GTA games.

 

[SomeGit]

The PSP had cut-down versions of GTA specifically built for the platform. Well, specifically it and the Nintendo DS.

They never got outright ports of the PS2 GTA games.

They weren’t even done in Renderware, which surprised me a lot when I learned that.

 

[Drew1440]

That's not saying much without context - every console had bottlenecks that were common-place. The whole 'potential' argument is that they can be worked around somehow.
Let's be explicit here - a whole slew of Mario64 optimizations that were implemented by that homebrew dev (virtually everything CPU performance focused) - is 'very' similar to the types of problems that commonly plagued almost all 360/PS3 games. Or PSP for that matter. If I had to summarise it in fewer words it's : Memory access = bad. Which was true of basically all consoles in 00s, except for GameCube (and to lesser extent, the Wii) which were an over-correction to the problems N64 had.


Well on paper PS1 had the faster geometry processing hardware.
Coupled with the fact that you needed more polys because it didn't do perspective correction and it helped Z-sorting - titles were forced to build a certain way, and not so much on N64.


I'm not debating hypotheticals - I gave actual examples. Yes Gamecube was built to be as simple to extract raw throughput from as possible, but that doesn't mean launch software was.
See what I said above about LM. Same for XBox and something like Halo.
And Dreamcast - well I don't need to repeat the entire thread worth of arguing for the same.

Now - I'm not saying anything about 'average' titles here - because frankly, I am not a statistician and how would you even go about proving '%' of system utilisation. But were there titles that could have massive gains even on easy to develop for consoles? Yes - I would bet on my examples to start with.


I don't think there's anything obvious about this one. PSP had a ton of advantages on paper - higher clocked Dual core CPUs, perhaps the best Vector/Matrix processor of any console design to date, dedicated T&L chip with substantially more throughput than SH4, dedicated Audio/video codec accelerators etc. But it also was a design marred by enough bottlenecks to make even N64 blush. Most software punched well below its height.
So yes - there were a bunch of half-assed DC ports, and those GTA games were massively parred down compared to mainline releases. But on the flipside it was doing remarkably fine with 360/PS3 ports that it had no business running, had some excellent contemporary arcade ports and one of the more technically outstanding SH games of that era. In my book I call it a toss-up, albeit the two had wildly different strengths and weaknesses.

Don't forget the PSP spent most of its life running at 222Mhz, instead of the 333Mhz it was capable of running due to battery concerns. The few titles that run at 333 do look impressive.

 

[Fafalada]

Don't forget the PSP spent most of its life running at 222Mhz, instead of the 333Mhz it was capable of running due to battery concerns. The few titles that run at 333 do look impressive.

Even at 222/111mhz (CPU/GPU) PSP had a substantial on-paper advantage - especially with the dual core CPU.
But one of its major downfalls was not unlike the N64 (or PS3/360) - the memory subsystem was massively limiting the system. At 333mhz that was much less of a problem. I suspect the initial design was based on 166mhz bus and the downclock disproportionally affected the hw at lower clocks.

by sideffect I mean that the CPU load wasn't the problem that he tried to solve.

I mean - he was solving the problem of bus contention, of which CPU was a big part of. You can argue raw-cycles were less of a problem but that's semantics when you cripple the rest of the system.
It's not unlike the above example with PSP - except the situation there was usually reverse - CPU would get completely memory starved by the 'well performing' GPU - but that would still cripple your overall performance in the end unless you got GPU off the bus more often.
You couldn't simply 'optimize the CPU performance' in isolation.

 

[nkarafo]

Now do the N64

Honestly, that would be much more interesting to see how it would end up. It could be like a better looking Body Harvest.

The Dreamcast port, even if slightly downgraded, will still look and feel very much the same as the original.

 

[SirTerry-T]

When I first played GTAIII I was like "what is this empty ass 3d world? this would be really cool if they finished it" and went back to playing the better game GTAII. When Vice City came out I was like "ok this is what I was expecting" but anyway I really like the look of the dreamcast version over PS2 for some reason the colors seem to pop more but nothing could get me to go back to gtaIII didn't even like it at the time.

The PS2 image quality was a sack of shit, especially where reds and blues were concerned. DC had fantastic image quality for it's time.

 

[GriffinCorp]

Ahh, GTA 3, THE game of my youth.
People today don't see what it achieved in gaming, you had to be there to experience it.

It changed everything. I had never dreamed of what you could do in that game. I still play it today and when I hear the music I'm transported back to 2001. What a time to live through.

 

[amigastar]

It changed everything. I had never dreamed of what you could do in that game. I still play it today and when I hear the music I'm transported back to 2001. What a time to live through.

Man, it really is 23 years ago isn't it?
Yep, lol when i hear the radio stations memories come back.

 

[Hookshot]

It changed everything. I had never dreamed of what you could do in that game. I still play it today and when I hear the music I'm transported back to 2001. What a time to live through.

When I started the game I drove round the first corner, hit a lamp post and the car flipped, causing everyone to exit it. While it was a very stupid thing to do, it was incredible that it was possible.

 

[Fat Frog]

 

[Fat Frog]

 

[MrCunningham]

Who asked for this?

I think porting GTAIII to the Dreamcast was something that was bound to happen. Especially given that GTAIII was originally announced for the Dreamcast, and according to devs who worked on the game, the Dreamcast version was in development for roughly four months before it was canned.

Though in this case, Sega announced that the Dreamcast was going to be discontinued in 2001, and Rockstar moved all development of GTAIII to the PS2. There were also claims in the past that GTAIII couldn't be done on the Dreamcast, and this is more of an 'I told you so' type of port.

In this case, this port is a decompilation of the PC source code, so it is based on the PC version.

 

[ForAcademicPurposes]

Interesting video.

It was well optimized for the PS2 and I never experienced a single hitch back in the day. Rock solid performance.

 

[Fat Frog]