PILMAN wrote:I preordered the game and one of the major reasons why I wanted a version for PC was because of the aging Dreamcast system and the GDROMS are not going to last forever. The alternative of course was DEMUL and ROMS which of course fall into a gray area in terms of legality at least for the ROM portion.
If you have a working Dreamcast, consider looking into one of the optical drive replacements available. It's an alternative that uses the original hardware but you don't need to worry about moving parts wearing out. I bought a GDEmu board for mine several years ago and dumped every single disc I own so I have digital copies that will never degrade. Games load from flash storage and load times are amazing, much faster than from disc media. Installation is pretty easy, you unscrew and pull out the original drive and the devices slide right into the drive connector on the mainboard. In addition to GDEmu there's a USB based one that may be easier to obtain but GDEmu seems to be the more favorable option as it has 100% compatibility with all retail games. There are also 2 different vendors that make HDMI adapters for Dreamcast. There's a cheap one that Adam reviewed recently, the results are somewhat blurry but better than old composite cables, and there's the Akura HDMI box which is kind of expensive but the quality matches what you'd get from a VGA box.
There's never been a better time to upgrade your Dreamcast for the modern era.
asdfguy wrote:You're right, they did use a better texture. It makes me wonder why they didn't use a high-quality texture for Roy's jacket?
Who's Roy?
The texture thing has a fairly simple explanation. The original textures were compressed in PowerVR format for the Dreamcast's graphics hardware. They can't be used as-is because the texture format is hardware specific, and none of Sega's previous Dreamcast ported titles (ex. Sonic Adventure, Phantasy Star Online, Jet Set Radio) used the original files either. In some cases like Sonic Adventure they took the original format (PVR) and made up their own GVR format for the Gamecube and later ports.
They basically had two options:
1. Unpack the already compressed textures and repack them in formats applicable to the platforms they're porting to now
or
2. If they have them, which apparently they do, take the uncompressed source textures that they compressed for PowerVR and package those up for other platforms instead.
Although the PVR texture compression format has been documented since DC homebrew started way back in 2000, they would actually have to write new code to be able to use those files as-is. Option 2 was probably the easiest option. This explains why we're getting better textures, but the same audio. The CRI middleware used for voice playback is not hardware specific and is available for other platforms already. For the music, AM2's DTPK music synthesis player had to be ported from AICA ARM to x86 for the Xbox port of Shenmue 2. (Shenmue 1 also used the same format, but I haven't checked to see if it's the same version. That driver was used by multiple AM2 games and some of the DSF ripping tools are aware of it.) Here's the interesting part though: The XBOX had 64-channel audio mixing in hardware just like the Dreamcast did. Essentially it gives them the ability to use separate channels for different instruments and not have to mix everything together manually in software which can be expensive. Modern gaming hardware isn't really optimized for synthesized music anymore though. If you look at the PS4 tech specs on Wikipedia, the only thing they list for audio processing is a variant of AMD TrueAudio, which is primarily for doing DSP effects and surround sound.
This gave me another interesting thought. Were they actually able to port the AM2 music driver to modern hardware? I don't know enough about the capabilities of modern console audio hardware to speculate on that. Back in 2012 I played with DSF support in one of the open source audio players on iOS to try and come up with speed increases so devices in the iPhone 4 era could play back DSF's at full speed which is when I learned just how heavy on CPU the mixing and DSP effects were. Disabling channels and mixing at lower quality had significant impacts on performance, enough to go from stuttering to full speed. (Modern phones now can handle the same AICA emulation code as PC full speed.) Unless they have a direct route to take on music with modern hardware I honestly can't see them implementing their own replacements. IF they can't do it in hardware anymore, the easiest route for them would be to just replace all of the music tracks with streamed (recorded) versions. Based on the other choices they've made, I could see this happening and it would go part of the way to explain the 30GB space requirement that Sega lists on the Steam page. Especially since the XBOX port retained separate folders for each disc with a bunch of duplicate files and it's easier for them to retain that structure than re-working things into shared locations. But it would also make some people wonder why they didn't do the same thing they did with the textures and just use the high quality versions like Shenmue Online had. I guess the only counter-argument I can come up with that those tracks weren't always identical to the 1&2 game versions, they could have been the "demo" tracks that were presented to Suzuki-san before being converted down to AM2's sound format and it wouldn't be good to change them.
I'll be interested in seeing whether there's any correlation between this proposal and how they actually handled the music. If it ends up being all streamed, then we've already got a good explanation as to why.