pouët.net

I suppose Freeze in his DC ownage rant forgot to write VRAM instead of RAM when claiming 2x the amount. but frankly since he hasnt coded for neither of the platforms the point is pretty uninteresting.

Yeah and it's not as if that double amount of VRAM on the DC makes it a winner, all of the sudden. Not to start about the PS2's main CPU being quite a bit faster..

Reed: Lambasting morons for a living!

care for a lamer roast by the campfire? mm-mm!

Too much has been said which won't help anyone here. I'm sick of that bashing (even some won't recognize it as bashing) and I don't see any need in justify myself for this offer, idea or whatever you call it.

As I said, if you're interested, send me an email to "max [at] dreamcast-scene [dot] com".

And now more and more borning facts and infos.

You can get Dreamcasts for 30 - 40 Euros at http://www.ebay.com, http://www.ebay.de, http://www.ebay.fr, http://www.lik-sang.com/list.php?nav=over&category=30& and other places.

The coders cable is available here: http://www.lik-sang.com/info.php?category=29&products_id=48&

Good websites and communities for learning can be found here: http://cadcdev.sf.net/, http://www.consolevision.com, http://www.dcemulation.com/phpBB/


Official specs of the DC:

CPU: Hitachi SH-4 128bit 200Mhz
Graphics Processor: NEC/VideoLogic PowerVR
Main RAM: 16Mb
Memory bandwith: 3.2Gb/sec
Graphics RAM: 8Mb
Theoretical performance: 3 million polygons
Estimated performance: 1.5 million polygons


And yes, I'm not a coder. I've done some C++ a few years ago at work but I almost forgot everything. It's non of my business.

That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.

You cannot compare any polygonpush performances between a pvr2 chipsets and a normal pc graphics card due to the architecture is completly different, you really cant.

And to be honest, dreamcast was a hell to code on, fun, but a hell, probably great fun with a real devkit, but with a serial codercable and buggy compilers/libs it was no fun. Kos sucks...

I'm no coder, but even I understand that porting a PC demo to the DC is a little more involved than changing one letter in an acronym.

And I'm somewhat sure that this supposed "tile rendering" the DC possesses might be a significant porting hurdle.

Why port pc-demos to dreamcast?
Freeze: you should be looking for dreamcast-demos

arneweisse: it was long ago that you tried KOS. some people say it made key improvements since then.

I have estimated peak transformation speed at about 7 mio polys per second, but i'd say one has to be happy to reach half of it due to various limitations. and keeping in mind that all geometry is transformed on the CPU, but has to be uploaded to the graphic RAM before drawing, consider that you give up about 3 megs for 100 000 polys - so probably at most half of that polycount would be sane. however, i haven't tried.

VRAM is a hard limit on a DC, while it's a soft limit on a PS2. On the other hand, the work is *really* offloaded to the GPU, and one doesn't have to think of drawing order etc., so the CPU speed should be enough.

You mean the hw sorting on the DC? It's nothing you really can use in anycase situation since it will just freeze if its overloaded (wich happens very easy.. for instance a particle effect is impossible to do with this).

hmm... use the trick as old as hardware - additive blending and forget sorting completely? i had already thought of that (nothing beyond triviality), on a Dreamcast one wants as much as possible solid and second best stippled. As for that small bit of everything else, one can decide to only have few objects use it, otherwise sort that still little amount. On any other system, one would need to take care of front-to-back sorting of solids and stippled, and back-to-front of everything else, which is certainly more strain. my point still valid. looking at the best DC games, they really have very few alpha objects.

it was just an example how to get the machine to lock up, it was not an example of something who cant be solved.

and your sorting thing is the sollution, so yes, you prolly would have to do it on the dc to be sure it wont hang up in a game or in a demo :)

SR1 has no problem with the HW translucency sorting..

(Oh and yeah, it *has* particles..)

if you overload one of the 32x32 (iirc) grids then it just hangs ;)

RA5MUS, if you area serious about that DC thing, then drop me a mail, I might have a DC and a cable that you could burrow.

if i recall correctly, the PVR can handle (ie sort automatically) up to 64 levels of transcluent surfaces on each tile in hardware. what happens if there are more, i don't know - perhaps you're right and it hangs, but then it's outside specification and really noone's fault. :). and the speed with which it renders them is probably too little to make many layers even if hw-sorting is disabled.

problem is that we can talk about VERY small stuff, i mean, sometimes in a large dynamic scene bad stuff happens for fillrate, and before you have seen that the fillrate has dropped.. voila, the shit has hanged, not very nice imo, would be better if they just skipped drawing them ;-) (usually when this happens they are so small they arent even noticeable)