Half-Life's GoldSRC engine for DC is nearly identical to PC

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Doctor Dan
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Half-Life's GoldSRC engine for DC is nearly identical to PC

Post by Doctor Dan »

Hey dcemu, I've been looking into this for a few months. And what i've found is it looks like the GoldSRC engine in Half-Life for Dreamcast is nearly identical to the old WON PC versions. But what is significant is most of the functions for playing online also seem to be in the game/engine already. Along with multiplayer maps. Everything seems to be there. Even chat and teamchat

http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/hal ... nts.57318/



Sizious from the thread i linked re-enabled the 'connect' command and that looks like it functions as it should. The only thing it requires is an internet connection to test the engine networking. But that is the part that needs to be figured out


What I think is the best approach, is to port the HLSDK sources to compile in the Windows CE kit for Dreamcast. Then define the network initialization functions, and assign them to a command. There may be room to also add support for WININET.DLL. Which is what the WON version of half-life used to handle networking on PC. The WININET.DLL in the Windows CE Dreamcast kit has all the exports/imports of the WON PC version and more. I think that would have the highest likelihood of success. If that doesn't work, there may be some room to work with the Windows CE Registry within the Dreamcast. If that too does not work my only other idea is to develop a boot program that will initialize the network, then launch the half-life EXE while keeping the connection open

All those may be really difficult to do, but it'd be hard to convince me its 100% impossible. I do not have the skill to test these things, so i'm calling for the very skilled DC programmers and engineers to try to solve this problem. Again, it may be extremely difficult to pull off, but the result would likely be playing Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and more from our Dreamcasts. Which I think would be truly awesome



I made a GitHub for an SDK to port and create mods for HLDC, link here https://github.com/FaucetDC/HLDC_SDK
Since the ported sources are needed first to test this further, it would be a good idea to put them on Git. So nobody has to re-port them in the future. Even if this doesn't work it'd help people port many more single player mods than before
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PH3NOM
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Re: Half-Life's GoldSRC engine for DC is nearly identical to

Post by PH3NOM »

I remember some guys got into HLDC mods some years ago 8-)
The Multi-Player for Half-Life would have been one player per Dreamcast.
However, there is no source code for the DC WinCE build, so there is nothing major that can be changed there.

However, the future lies in open-source.
My DC Quake3 BSP Engine supports 2-4 players per Dreamcast in a map. Networking for more players in a map is a future dream :lol:
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