DDR for DC

Wasgo · Post by **Wasgo** » Sun May 04, 2003 5:00 pm

Shilar wrote:Stepmania also uses Directx, which is on the DC. The program Stepmania only uses 4-8 megs of memory, leaving the rest for songs/video. If the DC can run PSX emus (which requires a PC with 64 megs of RAM at least, and a 400Mhz processor to run good) A DDR sim is not a huge hurdle.

There's only two psx emulators. One is Bleem!, which was coded in asm. The other isn't and doesn't run all that well. Coding Stepmania in asm wouldn't be porting, it would writing a whole new program.

Lartrak · Post by **Lartrak** » Sun May 04, 2003 9:10 pm

A DDR sim is not a huge hurdle.

I don't disagree - just that a port of Stepmania would be hard to make workable. Is it even open source?

Yumeii · Post by **Yumeii** » Mon May 05, 2003 1:27 am

The source code was released... along with the normal downloads.

http://www.stepmania.com/stepmania/downloads.php

Shilar · Post by **Shilar** » Tue May 06, 2003 11:16 pm

Personally, FoF looks like a waste, and it should not be too hard to make a REAL DDR sim, with so many already there/in the works (there's even one in Java).

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Tue May 06, 2003 11:36 pm

FoF is not supposed to be a DDR sim - it's supposed to be a game by itself, and it's unfair to treat it otherwise.

Shilar · Post by **Shilar** » Wed May 07, 2003 12:04 am

mink03 wrote:so yea but does anyoen know the best psx to dc adaptor for the dance pads??

Why, there are DC DDR pads, soft and hard, on the market.

-=DC_Zach=- · Post by **-=DC_Zach=-** » Thu May 08, 2003 6:45 pm

Personally, FoF looks like a waste

Wow. All this hard work these programmers put in and you try to say it isn't worth anything in 6 words? Give me a break.

it should not be too hard to make a REAL DDR sim

Hey man, if you think it shouldn't be too hard (which it shouldn't, right? right????), why don't you MAKE ONE YOURSELF? Now theres a great idea!

I know FoF may not be the game you are looking for, but you don't have to say its a waste. I mean, come on! You haven't even fricking played it! It's a cool homebrew game, possibly one of the best out there. If you haven't played it, and even if its not the type of game you are looking for, then give it a try. And if you don't wanna try it, don't diss it until you can make something better. Ok?

Zach out.

zickfun · Post by **zickfun** » Fri May 09, 2003 1:37 am

The guy who said the DC's GRFX engine is better then a KYRO2 is incredibly mistaken....A KYRo2 would kick a PowerVR2's engine anyday.....kyro2 is about geforce 2 gts level except it doesnt have hw t&l....PowerVR2 can't even beat a TNT2 Ultra in some benchmarks so how can you compare?

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Fri May 09, 2003 9:01 am

Actually, it's the SH-4 that slows things down, not really the PVR. Unless you're rendering a lot of transparent polygons (which slow things down, because it has to render all of them, and can't do deferred rendering properly), the PVR is actually very fast, especially compared to the rest of the hardware in the DC.

Shilar · Post by **Shilar** » Sat May 10, 2003 7:13 am

And note, my setup was more along the lines of the DC (550Mhz CPU with a Kyro II GPU and 128 megs of memory is NOT recommended for gaming), and it handled a lot of things very smoothly. Actually, The Kyro blew away the Geoforce 2 in a lot of the rendering, but its main prob is overheating.

This in mind, if my old POS can handle the graphics of Stepmania, then so can the DC.

Shilar · Post by **Shilar** » Sat May 10, 2003 7:21 am

-=DC_Zach=- wrote:
Personally, FoF looks like a waste
Wow. All this hard work these programmers put in and you try to say it isn't worth anything in 6 words? Give me a break.

it should not be too hard to make a REAL DDR sim
Hey man, if you think it shouldn't be too hard (which it shouldn't, right? right????), why don't you MAKE ONE YOURSELF? Now theres a great idea!

I know FoF may not be the game you are looking for, but you don't have to say its a waste. I mean, come on! You haven't even fricking played it! It's a cool homebrew game, possibly one of the best out there. If you haven't played it, and even if its not the type of game you are looking for, then give it a try. And if you don't wanna try it, don't diss it until you can make something better. Ok?

Zach out.

Why don't I make one? Simple, I have -very- little programming experience (I only worked in Turbo Pascal and HTML, and that was years ago), and right now am working more in 3D graphic art (Poser renders, trying to learn Bryce).
What I do know though is the DC is almost, not quite, as easy to program for as compared to the Xbox/PC, especially if the design was already made for the PC (Not Mac, sorry). The average time to program for a normal, educated programmer from PC to DC was around an hour for the program. Knowing this, and knowing the power of the people outweigh anything one person does or says, one should surmise that if enough people speak up, someone with the right experience will listen, and therefore design the program. I have no problem burning it, or maybe (if I can figure it out) putting it together to burn, but I cannot program my way out of a paper sack.

Swiss_Cheeseman · Post by **Swiss_Cheeseman** » Sat May 10, 2003 9:00 am

Shilar, why dont you just fuck off, learn how to code, make your OWN goddamn DDR clone, and then jump around on a dance pad like an idiot.

Or, failing that, get a PS2 and just play the real version, whilst jumping around on a dance pad like an idiot.

Nyarlathotep · Post by **Nyarlathotep** » Sat May 10, 2003 10:42 am

Shilar wrote:The average time to program for a normal, educated programmer from PC to DC was around an hour for the program.

I think you seriously under estimate what is neccessary to do before a program will run on a DC.

KrazieTai · Post by **KrazieTai** » Sat May 10, 2003 7:07 pm

Nyarlathotep wrote:
Shilar wrote:The average time to program for a normal, educated programmer from PC to DC was around an hour for the program.
I think you seriously under estimate what is neccessary to do before a program will run on a DC.

Well getting stuff up and runing doesnt take effort it manly optimizing and error checking.

Shilar · Post by **Shilar** » Sat May 10, 2003 7:32 pm

Swiss_Cheeseman wrote:Shilar, why dont you just fudge off, learn how to code, make your OWN goddamn DDR clone, and then jump around on a dance pad like an idiot.

Or, failing that, get a PS2 and just play the real version, whilst jumping around on a dance pad like an idiot.

The PS2 only has 1-2 DDRs, the maxes, and they don't have the things I want, and the PSX DDRs suck. And if that was said by every programmer, we wouldn't have games period.

BTW, I bet you think DDR is easy. I use it for exercise, and I barely creep on novice/light mode. Let's see you play Candy (Star) in light mode, and make a AA rating.

Shilar · Post by **Shilar** » Sat May 10, 2003 7:38 pm

mink03 wrote:why?
becasue i already have psx dance pads, and the adaptors got for 20 bucks where as the pads go from like 40 up....

Be shocked, most DDR pads for the DC are about the same price as the PSX adaptors.

http://www.moddedunits.com/dreamcast.html

Dan Potter · Post by **Dan Potter** » Sun May 11, 2003 1:10 am

/me drags himself out for the once every few months DCemu post...

Why don't I make one? Simple, I have -very- little programming experience (I only worked in Turbo Pascal and HTML, and that was years ago), and right now am working more in 3D graphic art (Poser renders, trying to learn Bryce).

So this is another one of those "port my game for me!" threads, eh?

Anyway, I don't expect everyone to like my work (or the rest of the FoF team's work), though I do wonder what was meant by it "being a waste". Are you also one of these Slashdot types who talk about how spending time writing a web server in Postscript is a waste because that time could have been spent instead on improving KDE so that "Linux can be brought to the masses"? The problem with that argument is that developer time is not a zero-sum game. If that guy didn't write his web server, he certainly wouldn't have been working on making KDE more user friendly. Likewise, if I wasn't working on FoF, I most certainly wouldn't be working on a DDR clone, so if that's the reasoning, I wouldn't classify it as a waste. I'm putting words in your mouth though, I don't really know what you meant...

Also to the point, FoF has massively advanced the state of KOS due to how demanding it's been on the libs in general. Tons of bugs have been worked out, and things have improved dramatically in a number of areas thanks to it. So even if we never released it, I'd say it was worthwhile for the DC community. Bero, of course, has also been advancing the SDL libs greatly, along with a couple of other guys. Thank them for the 2 hour ports you hear about.

FoF vs a real DDR simulator -- not even gonna argue that point! We all openly acknowledge and encourage the idea that FoF is not a DDR simulator. It's a standalone game with its own theme and gameplay which just happens to be able to take some DDR-like inputs if you want. It's certainly not a game for everyone, and if you just want a raw DDR simulator then it's not the right answer, though some of those requests have been answered through the configurable practice mode in the FoF release version. You can basically turn it into DDR minus the zero-health-death part of the game.

FWIW, back to the technical question, FoF uses FAR more rendering time than CPU time currently, because it uses almost all translucents to get anti-aliasing on the textures, fonts, etc. Looks nice but it costs a pretty cycle in the ISP/TSP.

During gameplay for example, the registration and all CPU processing per frame takes less than 2ms on average, but the rendering takes around 10-12 depending on what's on the screen. You get about 16 to complete a frame with NTSC at 60Hz. Since they're working in parallel, you get a ton of CPU time per frame compared to the rendering speed. So I think porting things like StepMania would be totally feasible from that perspective.

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sun May 11, 2003 4:35 am

Well, it's a 2D game, so I'd expect it to use much more rendering time than CPU time calculating it.

Bero, of course, has also been advancing the SDL libs greatly, along with a couple of other guys. Thank them for the 2 hour ports you hear about.

Bero (original port of SDL), BlueCrab (getting it working), Reaper (doing most of the ports of SDL games) and I think a couple of other people.

Porting stuff to raw KOS isn't as easy as porting it using SDL in most cases, since you have to write new system code, instead of re-using the SDL stuff. Doing native ports to other operating systems is the same sort of thing, since you do need to write extra system code instead of using the stuff someone else has written. In my opinion, the closer you can get to the hardware on a system like the Dreamcast the better off you'll probably be. SDL, for example, does not take advantage of any of the DC's hardware features (3d acceleration, multi-channel sound, whatever), unless it's an OpenGL game, of course, which is a bit of a waste in my opinion.

Shilar · Post by **Shilar** » Sun May 11, 2003 9:12 am

Dan Potter wrote:/me drags himself out for the once every few months DCemu post...

Why don't I make one? Simple, I have -very- little programming experience (I only worked in Turbo Pascal and HTML, and that was years ago), and right now am working more in 3D graphic art (Poser renders, trying to learn Bryce).
So this is another one of those "port my game for me!" threads, eh?

Anyway, I don't expect everyone to like my work (or the rest of the FoF team's work), though I do wonder what was meant by it "being a waste". Are you also one of these Slashdot types who talk about how spending time writing a web server in Postscript is a waste because that time could have been spent instead on improving KDE so that "Linux can be brought to the masses"? The problem with that argument is that developer time is not a zero-sum game. If that guy didn't write his web server, he certainly wouldn't have been working on making KDE more user friendly. Likewise, if I wasn't working on FoF, I most certainly wouldn't be working on a DDR clone, so if that's the reasoning, I wouldn't classify it as a waste. I'm putting words in your mouth though, I don't really know what you meant...

Also to the point, FoF has massively advanced the state of KOS due to how demanding it's been on the libs in general. Tons of bugs have been worked out, and things have improved dramatically in a number of areas thanks to it. So even if we never released it, I'd say it was worthwhile for the DC community. Bero, of course, has also been advancing the SDL libs greatly, along with a couple of other guys. Thank them for the 2 hour ports you hear about.

FoF vs a real DDR simulator -- not even gonna argue that point! We all openly acknowledge and encourage the idea that FoF is not a DDR simulator. It's a standalone game with its own theme and gameplay which just happens to be able to take some DDR-like inputs if you want. It's certainly not a game for everyone, and if you just want a raw DDR simulator then it's not the right answer, though some of those requests have been answered through the configurable practice mode in the FoF release version. You can basically turn it into DDR minus the zero-health-death part of the game.

FWIW, back to the technical question, FoF uses FAR more rendering time than CPU time currently, because it uses almost all translucents to get anti-aliasing on the textures, fonts, etc. Looks nice but it costs a pretty cycle in the ISP/TSP. During gameplay for example, the registration and all CPU processing per frame takes less than 2ms on average, but the rendering takes around 10-12 depending on what's on the screen. You get about 16 to complete a frame with NTSC at 60Hz. Since they're working in parallel, you get a ton of CPU time per frame compared to the rendering speed. So I think porting things like StepMania would be totally feasible from that perspective.

One: Not a game port, but a program that is already out port.

I'm trying to get Stepmania/DWI (Latter not likely) ported to a workable DC simulator, so as to work with every aspect of the arcade game, with the pads, without configuring/finding the one dance pad.

Two: As much as you say, FoF to me looks "like a waste" cause it's not what I want. MAME, SMEG, etc. is what I'd more be in tune to (Yes, even DC Divx, which I'm still trying to work on using.

). You're trying to be a game, that's well and good, but I like the flexibility of the simulators on the PC, and would really enjoy a DC version that works with them. Until then, I'm going to have to find a converter that works, and let the DC alone til I get DC Divx working.