shenmue dreamcast collection pc version

[south carmain]

hey everyone, after the recent good news of sega hinting towards shenmue being made I would like to hear your oppinion on something

seeing that if released it will get a pc port also, do you think this port will make shenmue easier to mod and extract from, do you think there will be any benefits for the modding community?

just a thought

[Master Kyodai]

I would be surprised if they change much. Change costs money, so if Shenmue comes to PC then my guess would be that it would be running in a selfmade deluxe NullDC. I really don't think much will be changed. But ah well i guess we will only know if it comes out.

[south carmain]

oh i see, i thought they rewrote the code to make it compatible, that's why it takes so lond between releases but it would make sense if they just camouflaged an emulator, a lot easier and less pricey

and that would also explain why they don't make any of the games wide screen

[Master Kyodai]

Again - before it actually comes out i can only be guessing. We'll definitely know only when we hold it in our hands. Until then everything is possible, although not everything is really probable.

I think if you look at the first Shenmue conversion - Shenmue 2 for Xbox - it reveals a bit of how "they" do conversions. Basically only the sound driver was changed (Dreamcast AICA is not really compatible with xbox) and the songs recompiled. The rest is pretty much the same. Of course the ingame emulators (Hangon, outrun, etc) were also a bit modified, but basically "that's it". And as an xbox is fairly similar to a PC i would be surprised if they did it "much different" for a PC version.

Another theory to take into account is a real "Dreamcast emulator". Unlike nullDC it would of course have to run smoothly and without flaws. I think the games they already released work like that. I don't really know any technical details so i am mostly guessing, but i think most of them run a "better nullDC" and just load the original game or at least very close to that. Obviously in that case there would be virtually no changes at all to the game.



Widescreen would just be a flag in the engine to output a different screen res. However not all games would be great in widescreen. In Shenmue i think some cutscenes are so much optimized for 4:3 that parts of the edges of the scene would look "cut off", you could not see that in 4:3 but in widescreen you'd see like "Oh the room ends there". Not sure if Shenmue would look "perfect" just by enabling widescreen or if at least some cutscenes would need to be remade.