DCEmulation

Now that Quake, Doom and Wolfenstein have been proven to run on the Dreamcast and Marathon is well under way I wonder what else can still be released for the Dreamcast?

Would the dreamcast be capable of running 3DRealms' build-engine? That would/could result in at least 3 more great games. Duke Nukem 3D, Terminal Velocity and The Shadow Warrior.

Of all these games there exists a shareware-version so it wouldn't really violate any laws (except for the not using it longer than 30 days rule).


I am just wondering, what else can be done on the Dreamcast? She has proven to been of the feistiest consoles around. It is the succesor of the Commodore64 which did marvellous things as well when being programmed well.

According to posts I seen in the past the source code for Duke Nukem 3D was lost. I think that is bull myself, but that is what 3D Realms said. Without the source codes nobody can do any conversions. It is ashame too Duke3D on the Dreamcast would rock!

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Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior are out the question. They were both based on the build engine, but the source code was never released to the public. To make matters worse, the author of build lost some of his code.

Terminal Velocity is based on an entirely different engine, and it is open source. However, most of it is x86 assembley which makes porting very difficult. Luckily there are a few projects devoted to porting Terminal Velocity to linux, and they are converting the assembley components to c which makes a dreamcast port a good possibility down the road.

I wonder since American McGee's Alice uses the Quake engine, could it be "ported" somehow, like a Bleem bootdisk...

Of course, I know the answer is "no", but a man can hope

Well there is the Duke3D port which runs duke in OpenGL, but I was told that it could not be ported to the DC, but then again the same people told me that Wolf3D would never happen either so....

As for other projects, Marathon for one is not a sure thing, at the moment is just a GREAT idea from a guy who is still learning to code, so don't get your hopes up till he says he is ready, and of course till he gets some help, you know none of this gets finished without a little help.

The Quake 2, and Alien V.S. Predator sources are also available now as well. Granted I do not think any of the coders in the community are quite up to those tasks quite yet, but as time goes on and more people join up, and skills improve, you never know, we may well just see a team or two pull together to port these baby's! Least that's my optomism at the moment.

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http://files.frashii.com/~sp00nz/Doom/
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The Official DC DOOM Homepage

There is a program coming out that will let you use the dreamcast as a stove. Also rumors of a way to convert it to a toilet :)

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It is a wonder no one ever took to my DC Happy Cake Oven emulator... :/

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http://files.frashii.com/~sp00nz/Doom/
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The Official DC DOOM Homepage

The source to Terminal Velocity was released? Can anyone point me to a URL?

I took it up with 3D Realms and what I was told is that the source of Terminal Velocity being released is just a false rumour. Really a shame, but alas, more shall be developed for the Dreamcast. Of that we can be certain.

why is companys so worred about sourcecodes being released to older games. I mean what are they going to lose?

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everything...dreamcast can do EVERYTHING!

Yeah but the dreamcast doesn't have enough RAM to emulate your momma!

Maybe one should accept that RAM-limitation and focus on what can be done within those limitations. Most times one can program around the RAM-limitations. With the N64 one can't because the RAM is required to load the complete ROM. With most other programs however good programming can result in better performance. Examples being Dreamsnes (for the homebrew scene) and Metropolis Street Racer (for the professionally publishing scene). Dreamsnes is getting faster because of increasingly better programming and Metropolis Street Racer that pumps more polygons than the hardware specs was thought to be able of (if I'm not mistaken in the title, I know there was a title that did).

RAM shouldn't be a real issue when clever programming is involved. I still remember editing the systemfiles of my old 864-33mhz with 8MB up to the point where I got both Duke Nukem 3D and Quake working in 800x600 resolutions with full speed and no qualitycompromises.

D'oh! I was thinking of Descent not Terminal Velocity.

Anyway if there are coders interested in porting Descent here are some links to the linux projects:

http://shelob.classrooms.washington.edu/d2x/
http://www.muppetlabs.com/linux/descent/

Also here are some links to the linux Duke Nukem projects based on Ken Silverman's Build Engine:

http://www.icculus.org/BUILD/
http://openduke.sourceforge.net/

har. quake on a 486 with 8 megs of ram @ 800x600 would be SO slow. it was slow on the 686s back in the day :) hell it was slow on my 200mhz k6 with 32 megs of ram! come to think of it, even DOOM ran slow on 486 33s....hmmmm.....anyways...

Doom ran perfectly fine on a 486 DX 33.

Ah memories... I remember getting my brand-spanking-new 486 box back in the early 1990s... 486/DX2 clocked at 66mhz, 8mb of RAM, 1mb onboard Cirrus Logic vid chipset, twas great... Doom ran dreamily on it... Duke Nukem 3D ran well on it... well... an early shareware version did... when I finally bought the full version (well, Atomic edition to be specific) I noticed that it ran like ass :p... note that this was all at 320x200/320x240 (whatever DN3D used)... and now we get on to Quake... this was the most difficult to get running well on a 486 box but it could be done... you could get CD music and sound, but... the graphics had to be 320x200, and the game wouldn't run smoothly enough to play unless you had the screen size a few notches below full...

ah the glory days of pc games :/

also note that Descent properly configured was smooth as hell on a 486-66 as well :\

Yeah I had an old 286 SX that i used... it ran like nothing. It did run the version of office before 95... those were the days.. it took 25 disks.. or at least 25 to load up MSOffice and then it took like a minute and a half to load word.

Then i jumped up to a 100MHz pentium.

Doom and Quake both ran perfect on a 486/33 with 8mb at 800x600. Duke Nukem 3D did slow down a bit when too many enemies(sprites) appeared on screen, but otherwise it ran like a dream at 800x600. You should've just used SDD's Univbe VESA 2.0 drivers. A nice peace of SOFTware that gave incredible speedboosts. Second pumping as much as possible to the UMB as possible and use the extra memory for smartdrive gave you a lot of extra speed as well.

Hardware was not the limitation, just should've tweaked your systemfiles better.

"it was slow on the 686s back in the day hell it was slow on my 200mhz k6 with 32 megs of ram!". The Cyrix (if I'm not mistaken) 686 chipfiles were a PEST. Pretty much none of the speedboosting programs I used recognized the chipset. They gave me readings of a 486 DX 278mhz while it was a 686 166mhz. I used the 686-chipset for 2 months when I jumped back to intel.

I was just thinking... what about Quake 2?? The source code was released back in December of 2001 (i think). Here is the link to the source directy from id software:

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/quake2.zip

Here are the sys requirments that I was able to find on my Quake 2 CD:

a. System Requirements
-----------------------
General Requirements
* English Language Version of Windows 95 or NT 4.0 with 100% compatible
computer
system
* Pentium 90 MHz processor (133 MHz recommended)
* Memory:
Win 95: - 16 MB RAM Required (24 MB recommended)
Win NT 4.0 - 24 MB RAM Required
* 100% Sound Blaster-compatible sound card
* Joystick and mouse-supported (3-button mouse recommended)
* Supports LAN and Internet play using the TCP/IP protocol

Minimum Install Additional Requirements (Play from CD-ROM)
* Quad-Speed CD-ROM drive (600k/sec. sustained transfer rate)
* Hard disk drive with at least 25 MB of uncompressed space available

Normal Install Additional Requirements (Play from Hard Disk)
* Quad-Speed CD-ROM drive (600k/sec. sustained transfer rate)
* Hard disk drive with at least 250 MB of uncompressed space available

Maximum Install Additional Requirements (Play from Hard Disk)
* Dual-Speed CD-ROM drive (300k/sec. sustained transfer rate)
* Hard disk drive with at least 400 MB of uncompressed space available

GLQuake II Additional Requirements
* 24 MB RAM for all operating systems
* GLQuake II supports some OpenGL 3D accelerator cards. Consult your
hardware manufacturer to determine compatibility. Latest version of Glide
(2.4x) drivers can be found at http://www.3dfx.com.
-------------------------------------------------------

Those requirements are for the Full Version. I wonder if it would be possible to get atleast the quake 2 demo to run on DC.


I'm sorry if this has been a topic before.

The only problem is that I'm not sure if that source is just the game or the game and the engine or just the engine. Anybody know?