Mouse's Mistake

@falco_girgis Been a pleasure seeing this project grow on the discord. Excited to see where it leads!

Today we have a direct hardware capture of an upcoming Sega Dreamcast homebrew title, tentatively known as "DemoTek," from developer, ac3t1ne, whose goal is to create a Crash Bandicoot-style platformer. The game uses our GLdc implementation of OpenGL 1.2 for rendering, libADX for music, and with my own SH4ZAM library for vector math, all of which are first-party ports provided within the KallistiOS indie DC SDK. The engine already features a renderer with some fairly aggressive batching and pre-submission culling, some clever LOD tricks and frame blending (notice the lava animates at twice the FPS when the player is close to it), as well as a particle system, which drives the smoke and bubbles. Something that I find quite interesting and exciting is that ac3t1ne has also managed to create a kind of update manager which can check for newer versions of the game (or any other Dreamcast binary), then download it via dial-up modem or broadband adapter, and install it onto an SD card! Be sure to check out ac3t1ne's YouTube channel for more updates: youtube.com/channel/UCvahu….

@falco_girgis God that's so cool

This is a direct hardware capture of our Grand Theft Auto 3 port running on the Sega Dreamcast... which I'm still constantly receiving questions about to this day... So what's the deal? Do we ever plan to revisit it, or have we called it a day and moved on? What about all of these gainz that I keep posting about, surely they could be applied to our GTA3 and VC ports? The truth is... No, I'm not done. I constantly think about the day when SH4ZAM is ready to be pulled back into the codebase for what will hopefully be another round of epic gainz. GTA3 and VC on DC were probably the most exhilarating, satisfying projects I've ever worked on as an engineer--academically, professionally, and personally. SH4ZAM literally started out as hand-optimized inline ASM routines I was whipping out of my ass to optimize the physics and TnL for these ports... but I decided to extract the routines and develop SH4ZAM in isolation for a couple reasons: 1) I saw a gaping hole in the DC homebrew community and KallistiOS ecosystem, which prevented indie developers from truly harnessing the power of the DC's SH4 CPU and its epic FPU, due to us having no good generic software solution to democratize the hardware... I felt like my work on GTA3 and VC could help fill that void. 2) The linear algebra math and low level SH4 ASM was starting to get complex enough that continuing to work within the main game codebase when implementing these optimizations became unrealistic. It became too easy to break the game in obscure ways that weren't immediately apparent without playing the game for hours, which was not a very ideal workflow... I needed an isolated environment where I could rigorously unit test and profile my routines. In addition to SH4ZAM, though, there's all kinds of other stuff I wanted for the game... We have yet to implement mouse + keyboard support for the PC control scheme, also enabling players enter cheat codes. We had some cool goodies planned for the VMU, and we didn't support any rumble or haptic feedback either, just to name a few. Finally, we have one more super secret weapon we've kept hidden for many months now... A certain 3D modeling wizard, who goes by @AxleGear89, has been working on asset-side gainz, by reducing polygonal complexity of pedestrian models among others, while astonishingly still managing to get EVEN MORE DETAIL out of the models as well?!

Playing around with on-the-fly vertex UV manipulation, allowing Jeenie to emote :)

@John_Vithor @funkin03 Ah right, I completely forgot about that lol. That's true!

I hate that a lot of french peoples still call Sonic's side cast "shitty friends"

@imanespreading @NoNo31687631 @rchlle__ @petite_rpgiste Je ne suis ni l'un ni l'autre particulièrement, mais force est de constater que les deux s'en sortent bien indépendamment

@NoNo31687631 @rchlle__ @petite_rpgiste Bah si, désolé si j'ai heurté les fans de Seb la frite ...

Le titre est nul a chier mais l'article est intéressant. Léna Situations est une jeune femme qui a réussi. C'est insupportable pour les hommes. Elle a malheureusement choisi de rendre sa vie de couple publique, et c'est pour ça qu'elle est harcelée depuis des années. Je cite : "Elle n'aurait pas assez mis en valeur la carrière de son mec. Elle viserait "plus haut". Elle serait une diva. Ce discours qui dégouline de sexisme n'est pourtant pas nouveau. Depuis leurs débuts publics, Seb est le compagnon exemplaire. Lena, celle qui ne le mérite pas. Une femme qui réussit mieux que son partenaire, qui occupe davantage l'espace médiatique ? Impardonnable." "Ce que vit Lena Situations autour de cette rumeur de rupture n'est pas un accident. C'est un épisode de plus dans une série qui dure depuis des années. Quand elle danse avec son meilleur ami, homosexuel, les internautes tranchent : elle trompe son conjoint. Quand elle porte un décolleté, elle ne respecte pas son couple. Trop couverte, trop dénudée, trop ambitieuse, pas assez discrète. Chaque geste devient prétexte." Elsa Bois a eu droit au même traitement. Et bien d'autres. Toutes celles qui réussissent. C'est un bon article.

@MBLeumlixo30 @maria_eva36078 @falco_girgis Yeah... that's exactly why I won't use gen AI for my projects. No offense, feel free to play around with the tools if you like them, but I appreciate the hardship of art as much as the finished product, and with that: to each their own

@mousesmistake @maria_eva36078 @falco_girgis IA IS Life.

Today we're taking a look at an upcoming, all-original Sega Dreamcast homebrew game, Magic Dust, with this direct hardware capture of an early gameplay mechanic tech demo. @mousesmistake has taken inspiration from the great 3D platformers of the 6th generation and is aspiring to help tip the scales of gaming history after the Dreamcast missed out on so many great titles that the other 3 major consoles of the time received. The game is powered by the same Simulant Engine which brought us the Dreamcast's first commercial online homebrew game, Driving Strikers, and is now being used here to do some pretty complex and heavy skinning for the animations. @mousesmistake has been a total Chad, working with me to help accelerate some of his skinning and matrix math with SH4ZAM and working with @kazade to help improve the Simulant engine. @kazade and me are both hoping that between SH4ZAMification of the math, general Simulant optimizations, and low-level driver gainz for our GLdc OpenGL implementation, that Magic Dust can become one of the first homebrew games made with a fully homebrew, general-purpose engine that also manages to be a polygon pusher and technical showcase of the DC's power. Be sure to follow @mousesmistake for more updates as development progresses!

@maria_eva36078 @falco_girgis I certainly will not use AI-generated assets for the game, as it goes against the artistic intent I am going for. Graphics will naturally and dramatically improve as development progresses, however

@falco_girgis @mousesmistake Fico feliz mais um projeto 3D pra o Dreamcast. Estou contente que estão tendo um salto tecnológico na Engine. Espero que o grafico final seja diferente desse que esta aí no video, que utilizem as ferramentas gráficas que temos no mercado como IA pra criação de Texturas e etc.

@greayson2532 @falco_girgis

@falco_girgis @mousesmistake When a project is totally original and unique It's wonderful Who is responsible for this new project?

@Frogbull55 @falco_girgis Thank you very much!

@falco_girgis @mousesmistake Great work @mousesmistake !

@Chaosbringerkey @falco_girgis I see, reverse psychology.🤫KH is a popular franchise, just give it time...

@falco_girgis there is so much wrong with this cus that is kh2 sora in kh1 traverse town and a dreamcast will NEVER ve able to run any kh game

What is this BLASPHEMY??? Oh, just a scene from Kingdom Hearts running on a SEGA DREAMCAST! The dynamic duo of Mad Modder Esppiral and DC homebrew veteran, PH3NOM, has once again given us a juicy glimpse into a version of gaming history where the little white box of dreams wound up winning against Sony's PS2. If you're into righting historical gaming wrongs and seeing the impossible made possible on the Sega Dreamcast, be sure to follow Esppiral for more blasphemy! @esppiral" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">youtube.com/@esppiral

Whooo! Everyone on the team working on porting Sonic Mania to the Sega Dreamcast has been eagerly awaiting this coverage of our current working build, brought to you by @SEGAGuys, who did a freaking amazing job with this video! Be sure to check it out if you're eager to see our latest progress and how our little white box of dreams with its whole 16MB of RAM and whopping 200Mhz SH4 RISC CPU stacks up against the other, more modern consoles with Sonic Mania ports! youtu.be/lKAE1dZZGlA

@ToucanPeck @falco_girgis Because there's little intellectually and technically challenging -to a DC dev- to be found in porting a game to PC. Working under the DC's constraints and have the balls to make it run well is half of the fun already.

@falco_girgis Why not just play the pc ports... The issue is the dreamcast is a doomed piece of hardware. Theres less of them working every year Its like reinventing the wheel. 2x the res? Why not 10x the res with much higher framerate on a 4k monitor?!

Someone said that our Sega Dreamcast ports were a pointless waste of time today and that nobody will play them… Meet my son, who was the first kid to ever play Mario 64, Doom 64, Mario Kart 64, Starfox 64, Sonic Mania, Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City, and now The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time—some of my all-time favorite games from childhood—on my favorite console, the Sega Dreamcast, for his first play-throughs… and his little sister plays with us as well. Despite the fact that we actually do have a thriving homebrew scene of people playing and supporting us, I could not give less of a shit if anyone else plays them or appreciates the work… This is all the validation I need.

@falco_girgis Used to indulge a lot in music production before studying programming, even without much of an audience I remember a common motto was that "if it reaches even one ear or impacts just one person's day, it's worth it". Sometimes, that person can even be yourself. Keep dreaming!

"Wait, WTF is this," you ask? Oh, nothing much... Just "The Tomb of Raithwall" from Final Fantasy 12... RUNNING ON AN ACTUAL FREAKING SEGA DREAMCAST!!! Mad modder Esppiral has cooked us up another round of epic console blasphemy with this one, this time teaming up with DC homebrew scene veteran, PH3NOM, who was also one of my partners in crime on our Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City ports to the Sega Dreamcast. Anyway, Esppiral has managed to warez this iconic scene from the big bad PS2 for our little white box of dreams by leveraging PH3NOM's new engine, the aptly named "Dreamcast Engine." I've been watching those two cook up crazy new scenes and push the DC to new levels for most of the week in our Discord server, so be sure to tune in to the two of them for updates! Follow PH3NOM for more updates on the engine and his science experiments with new rendering techniques using the DC's PowerVR GPU here: itch.io/profile/ph3nom… Follow Esppiral for more blasphemous experiments with bringing iconic scenes from other platforms to the DC here: @esppiral" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">youtube.com/@esppiral

@SliceWaifu @darcag3nt Would require decompiling said game, unhooking all the proprietary sega sdk code (decompiled, I know, but still) and rehooking using KOS equivalents. It helps to easily port anything made over DC KOS, but it doesn't help officially released stuff directly. Still would need work

@darcag3nt Can native Dreamcast games be ported to GameCube in the same way? Do they need to be decompiled first? If the GC could play the Dreamcast’s fighting game library, I’d be so incredibly happy.

This is Super Mario 64 for Nintendo GameCube, a very rough port that barely took an afternoon. How? Leveraging the Sega Dreamcast ecosystem. Last year I started porting the Dreamcast's homebrew SDK, KallistiOS, to the GameCube. It's now to the point where I can quite easily port DC software over. So I ported GLdc, the Dreamcast's OpenGL implementation. Then I worked with @falco_girgis to get a portable standard C backend incorporated into SH4ZAM, the Sega Dreamcast SH4 fast math library. Dreamcast's Super Mario 64 port is built upon KOS + GLdc+ SH4ZAM. Thus, with the pieces in place, it wasn't difficult to bring up Super Mario 64 on the GameCube. Sure, it needs some love and polish, but again, this was just an afternoon.

@SchellerTrevyn @falco_girgis Heroes requires a decomp. Beyond that, a bulk of the work is already studied, considering it ran on RenderWare (same as GTA3), so it seems like a natural fit. Don't quote me on that until I can take a look at the code, but I'm not ruiling it out just yet

@falco_girgis Playing it on a Sega console would just feel so right. Can we also see Sonic Heroes get ported someday?

It's finally time for the massive update I know EVERYONE has been eagerly waiting for... Presenting to you over 6 straight minutes of spliced footage directly captured from my actual physical Sega Dreamcast... RUNNING THE LATEST BUILD OF OUR SONIC MANIA PORT!!! I can't even begin to describe to you how polished and fantastic it's starting to feel... as though it belonged on the Dreamcast all-along... Thanks to the hard work of jnmartin, sonicfreak94, and a few others, not only is the Dreamcast port nearing completion, but... wait for it... THE 3D STAGES THAT STRUGGLED ON EVERY UNOFFICIAL PORT ARE NOW ALL RUNNING FULLSPEED!!!! Trust me when I say that this took an absolutely ENORMOUS amount of effort from jnmartin and the crew to pull off, considering the low-end for this game was the original Nintendo Switch, and ports running on consoles with twice our processing power struggled to run these levels fullspeed. The first and most obvious thing is that the 3D software renderer was ditched and all rendering was done natively with our PowerVR GPU... which actually wasn't as simple as it sounds. The tilemaps for these levels have had to be tessellated into a bajillion PVR quads and transformed and rendered as individual polygons to look correct and run faster than a slideshow. Mr anonymous Ocarina of Time chad developer came up with a pretty slick LoD scheme for drawing tiles closest to the player at 1x1 pixel sizes with sizes increasing with distance up to 2x2 and 4x4 pixels, allowing them to reduce the overall number of tile vertices that have to be transformed by the SH4 CPU and submitted to the PVR GPU, by strategically keeping the majority of the polygon detail closest to the camera, with detail decreasing as the tiles get further away. Next, the 3D geometry was preprocessed and converted from being triangle-based to being triangle-strip based, drastically reducing the number of vertices per model that our 200Mhz SH4 CPU had to transform (with plain integer arithmetic and no FPU vectorization, since this is all slow-ass fixed-point integer math)! Finally, it was discovered that the lighting was a disproportionately significant contributor to the TnL load on the SH4 for processing vertices. Jnmartin came to the realization that 99% of the time only the Y axis direction is considered for lighting equation intensity with just a white color. So this simplified lighting model got baked into the renderer, which gave another round of gainz. So in the end, after all of this work came together, a draw distance of 75% the distance of the retail Sonic Mania versions was achieved for the decorations, plus the character models have their full geometry count and have not been simplified on a freaking Sega Dreamcast with a 200Mhz SH4 CPU and only 16MB of RAM! 🔥