Vids of Icarus in action!

MKE · Post by **MKE** » Sun Nov 23, 2003 7:31 pm

yeah, i just re-read them and saw that. im still keeping track of the emu, but im not really looking forward to getting it. i have a dc to play dc games on. however, i suppose the one good thing is if it does come out and work perfectly, there would be no reason to buy seperate keyboards, mice, controller converters, etc. and also online gaming with the dc would be back again, and no need to buy a seperate 100$ bba for it.

compacho · Post by **compacho** » Sun Nov 23, 2003 11:00 pm

BlackAura wrote:Last I heard, Icarus was running quite a few commercial games, and doing a pretty good job of it too. It is not a fake.

However, there are three reasons it's not been released.
1 - It's slow.
2 - It's not finished.
3 - Piracy.

I think you forgot one more reason.

4 - They don't want spoiled gamers complaining on how slow it is and the features that are missing.

DC Cab · Post by **DC Cab** » Tue Nov 25, 2003 9:55 pm

I just don't see the point of it all when we can just buy a VGA adaptor and play the DC with a computer monitor right now as it is. It would make more sense if they were to work on a DC emulator which would work on a Xbox.

law56ker · Post by **law56ker** » Wed Nov 26, 2003 1:09 am

If they ever got dreamcast emulated on pc I'm sure they could add some sort of lan or online play.

CoasterKing · Post by **CoasterKing** » Wed Nov 26, 2003 10:31 am

compacho wrote:
BlackAura wrote:Last I heard, Icarus was running quite a few commercial games, and doing a pretty good job of it too. It is not a fake.

However, there are three reasons it's not been released.
1 - It's slow.
2 - It's not finished.
3 - Piracy.
I think you forgot one more reason.

4 - They don't want spoiled gamers complaining on how slow it is and the features that are missing.

What, you mean instead of spoiled gamers complaining about there being no alphas/betas, "lack of proof" and no definite release date?

steven36 · Post by **steven36** » Wed Nov 26, 2003 2:07 pm

DC Cab wrote:I just don't see the point of it all when we can just buy a VGA adaptor and play the DC with a computer monitor right now as it is. It would make more sense if they were to work on a DC emulator which would work on a Xbox or a ps2.

dc emulator on ps2?? why dont you have another drink there pal... the dc is pretty close to the ps2 as far as power goes and it actually overpowers it in a couple of areas... even the thought of a dc emulator on xbox makes me laugh and it is far more powerfull than ps2... although i think n64 emulator on xbox may be possible but i highly doubt it would reach full speed

MKE · Post by **MKE** » Wed Nov 26, 2003 2:24 pm

um, there are already full speed n64 emulators on the xbox........but no, the dc on the ps2/xbox isnt likely

mkjones · Post by **mkjones** » Thu Nov 27, 2003 2:49 am

MKE wrote:um, there are already full speed n64 emulators on the xbox........but no, the dc on the ps2/xbox isnt likely

It would be like the SNES emulating the Genesis!

pepitonet · Post by **pepitonet** » Mon Dec 01, 2003 11:46 pm

the xbox has a n64 emu already it play oly a few games due to the emu not being completed but it play mario 64 at 100% speed with sound, it also plays zelda and more i haven't tried anything else beside those two i just listed

MKE · Post by **MKE** » Tue Dec 02, 2003 4:35 pm

its pretty good, the only reason i wanted it was for excitebike 64, but i just bought that and got it for 12.25$ on ebay so i dont use it anymore, i would rather use the 64 controller over the xbox anyway..........

Storminator16 · Post by **Storminator16** » Tue Dec 02, 2003 6:53 pm

MKE wrote:...or a couple of them, it sais that the release date for it isnt untill 2007

Please, let's not start rumors. I don't know why that forum even exist. It attracts pubescents looking for warez.

Tall Israeli · Post by **Tall Israeli** » Thu Dec 04, 2003 9:19 am

It sure will be nice, but I predict you'll need one hell of a rig to run the games at full speed.

Post by **Quzar** » Thu Dec 04, 2003 5:44 pm

where is the proof of its existence? The videos look like someone took a video capture of their DC gameplay and the pics could easily just be touched up screens from actual DC play. I dont mean to be negative, but to say you have a even slightly functional DC emu but nobody gets to see it seems suspicious to me.

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Thu Dec 04, 2003 11:26 pm

Look at one of the screenshots, especially the ones of Soul Calibur.

First, the resolution of the image is 800x600. Dreamcast games only run at 640x480. The images are very clear, and show virtually no signs of being resized from 640x480 (see below for the one exception).

Second, as far as I can tell, there is no anti-aliasing. Soul Calibur on the DC does do anti-aliasing, and it would be difficult to fake.

Third, the 2D overlays aren't being shown at their true resolution - they've been scaled up. They look like they've been drawn by the game at 640x480, and scaled up to 800x600, which is consistent with the different resolutions. This is what happens in PSX emulators when you run them at a different resolution.

Fourth, in the videos, there are graphical errors which would be very hard to duplicate. The same goes for many of the earlier screen shots. Textures are drawn in the wrong texture mode. There are polygons missing or drawn incorrectly. Some of the blending is very wrong. This would be pretty difficult to fake.

Post by **Quzar** » Fri Dec 05, 2003 12:36 am

well, the videos are of such low quality that it is hard to see things like that, but im sure that if i hit my DC with a hammer once or so i might get something like that.

as for the resizing, you can resize using Lanzcoz or something like that, i dont know the good real name but it is similar to that, and you can almost not tell that the image was resized.

even though there is anti-aliasing in SC, there are some points in the game, where you can still see aliasing effects especially when there is a lot going on.

also, the images are not at 800x600 because you lose some to the frame of the program. so it has to be resized to some extent either way.

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Fri Dec 05, 2003 3:47 am

The images are 808x644, including the window frame. The window frame is four pixels on each size, plus an additional 36 pixels at the top for the title bar and menu. That makes the image 800x600. That means it's been rendered in 800x600.

It's not that hard to do in an emulator - the game spews out a display list, which has all the vertices between the points 0,0 (upper left) and 639,479 (lower right). These are then scaled up to the appropriate resolution, then rendered. That means the image has not been resized - it's just been drawn at a higher resolution. Try playing an N64 or PlayStation game in an emulator, and the result will be an image at higher resolution than the original, with exactly the same kind of filtering artefacts on 2D overlays.

The overlays are textured polygons, which are usually drawn either at the original size of the texture (a 16x16 texture is drawn at 16x16 on the screen), or some integer multiple (a 16x16 texture is drawn at 32x32). This will result in a clean image. If you resize the image so it's a non-integer multiple (1.25 times larger, in this case), the image will be irregularly resized, leaving some pixels larger than others. Combined with bilinear/trilinear filtering, this makes the overlays look slightly wobbly.

That artefact can be observed in the shots of SC2, as well as in N64/PSX emulators running at high resolutions. If you resized the image using an algorithm other than bi/tri-linear filtering, that artefact would be eliminated.

No image scaling algorithm, no matter how good, can enlarge and image and increase the detail. It's just not possible - they have to work with what is there. Even something as simple as a line does not contain all the detail at a lower resolution that it does at a higher resolution. When resized, even with the best resizing algorithms, edges don't look quite right. They have slightly exaggurated stepping artefacts, and they either look wobbly or fuzzy. These edges look very clean, don't wobble in the slightest, and are no fuzzier than I would expect from a JPEG compressed images. The PNG screenshots of Icarus I've seen did not have that fuzziness at all.

Aside from image analasys, there are other factors...

First, the guy who's writing it. He's done a fair bit of DC coding stuff, he does know the hardware pretty well, and he's done a fair bit of work to discover how parts of the Dreamcast work. He's also done work for other consoles. Why would he go to the effort of faking it?

Second, I've never seen any TV grabbing hardware which can approach the quality of those screen shots.

Third, many of the screenshots display glitches. Polygons are rendered in the wrong mode. Scenes that use modifiers don't look quite as they do on a Dreamcast. Textures get corrupted. On 2D overlaid graphics, there are stray pixels from parts of the image which wouldn't be shown on a Dreamcast (such as part of another letter from a font texture). Some of the older screenshots had very, very severe graphics glitches, huge chunks of missing geometry, missing textures, textures that were rendered in totally wrong modes...

Post by **Quzar** » Sat Dec 06, 2003 2:33 am

well, ill just go with it for now, i am just saying that the screenshots and videos alone give very little proof of the actual existance of the emulator, especially when lacking any kind of documentation.