Warzard / Red Earth CPS3 Interpreter

[Christuserloeser]

Sounds crazy, I know... but I've read that the CPS3 runs on a single Super-H2 CPU at 20 MHz... could that fact be used to get CPS3 games working on Dreamcast....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPS-3#Specifications
http://mamedev.org/release.html

- The only game of the CPS3 library that never was released for Dreamcast was Warzard / Red Earth; but for that game alone it would be worth looking into it.

[Tyne]

Not enough RAM / CPU. Xbox could barely just do it and still not perfectly.

[MethodGit]

Xbox struggles with it? I guess I shouldn't hold my breath for a PSP/GP2X port either in this case. =[

[Christuserloeser]

Not enough RAM / CPU. Xbox could barely just do it and still not perfectly.

The Dreamcast's SH4 CPU is somewhat compatible with the SH2; that's why I assumed it would be possible. It should leave plenty of power for emulating the CPS3's VDP.

To a degree, the RAM limitations can be circumvented with using the Dreamcast's MMU.

[BlackAura]

The CPS 3 has 32MB of RAM, and the ROMs are at least 48MB. There's just no way you can handle that on a system with only 16MB of RAM and no hard drive, MMU or no.

[Christuserloeser]

The CPS 3 has 32MB of RAM

I knew I overlooked something


Edit: Is the RAM needed for actual gameplay or just to flash the game's data from CD-ROM ?

[BlackAura]

That's just the working RAM. The flash can vary, with different games requiring different configurations - anywhere between 44MB (Warzard) to 80MB (Street Fighter 3 Third Strike).

Having looked at the MAME driver's source code again, I may actually be wrong about the size of the system's RAM. The MAME driver seems to use 32MB, but I can't tell how much the actual system has.

[Ex-Cyber]

I haven't analyzed it at all, but having played Warzard and seen the huge animations, I somewhat doubt that its working set would fit into Dreamcast's RAM. That might explain why Capcom didn't port it, even though they were obviously able to port other CPS3 games (SF3, Jojo)

[Christuserloeser]

I doubt that that's the reason. - They just could have skipped certain animations like they did for PS1 ports. I think that with access to the game's source they could have done a pretty good job on porting a game like that.

[Christuserloeser]

I've emailed Andreas Naive for more info:

> do you know how much RAM the CPS3 actually has ? The MAME driver says it's
> 32 Mbytes but we aren't sure if that's the actual amount of the machine.

No, i don't. I only collaborated in the decryption; i'm not
knowledgeable about the CPS-3's hardware itself.