Dreamcast Collection for Steam is finally being sorted out

Is the analog control in Crazy Taxi...actually analog control yet?

 

I think this new update broke Fusion's Chao Editor. I think the gamesaves got moved to a different location or are now in a different format. Anyone wanna confirm this for me?

 

Can't run it at all now? WTF? It crashes at a white screen. That's some real improvement. It's probably going to require a PC upgrade or new computer at this point (probably the later as Sonic Adventure 2 gives me slow as Hell type of Hell with anything other than 800 x 600 window at the lowest possible graphics settings).

 

Seriously though, I was expecting the ports to have been actually improved. I'm not that bothered since I play all my Dreamcast games on original hardware anyway, but it would be nice to have improved 'definitive' versions.

 

I can't test that at the moment. But it's totally possible it can just be rewritten to take care of the problem. Depends on what the editor tries to affect is located at and what was changed.

99.9% of the time, the original is always better for some kind of reason, whether that reason is a real reason or something people feel entitled it should be when it could have originally be intended to be something else at the time. Games are a mixed bag of better or worse between different systems and even with in the same platform.

You can hack surround sound mixing (done properly and everything) into DX and people still complain that Mono sounds better or Dreamcast software QSound mixing assisted by hardware DSP effects sounds better. Some stuff is truly subjective and matter of preference (native widescreen support for example) that was not in the original to begin with or not even originally built with it in mind, though it please a lot of people for sure.

 

Sky Chase still doesn't have the Sonic R model for Sonic, so it's still the inferior version.

 

That's subjective. Either a major oversight in the original or a cameo that was removed in later versions for reasons of seeming updated.

One thing that will make sense is the ability to switch between the Dreamcast version or Game Cube version (shut up a lot of people). You can do it with the PC version of Sonic Adventure 2. I'm sure it's not happening though.

 

I'd love that, actually. The resources are still in the game's files and I think that Sonic Adventure has a much cooler title screen than Sonic Adventure DX.

 

I agree that the original title is much better. Fits better with the game overall. Especially the later versions of the Dreamcast version animate the title with water ripples (which is awesome).

 

Sonic Adventure's going to better on DC just because they never did shit to deal with the gouraud shading, so Sky Deck is gonna look dead.

But "no widescreen" only applies to sadx here since the others have always had it. Certainly, sadx never really worked at any res other than 480p before now.

 

When porting to the PC that should been fixed to work with higher resolutions than 640 X 480 in the first place as most PC users prefer to use higher resolutions. It's just lazy. The original WMA in 2004 release thing was lazy in itself. I think the team just got lazy with it or simply didn't care much. After the Dreamcast releases they just went the easy route. Many of the bugs that plagued the Dreamcast version should have been fixed with the Game Cube release. It was more, how much they can change and add and what could be made to look prettier, instead of what they could fix to improve the overall experience.

 

There are many other ways the Dreamcast version is superior to any of the ports, actually a lot of stuff got changed or cut out even in the first port on the Gamecube, for example shiny cars/window reflections in various stages (most visible in Chaos 0 battle and Speed Highway 3), a lot of objects used to have environment mapping in the Dreamcast version that was replaced with a simple texture in the Gamecube version. There was also a dynamic lighting system in Dreamcast SA, which really added to the atmosphere in Ice Cap and Casinopolis, it was replaced by a much more basic system on the Gamecube (the casino still looks neat though). The original reason for these changes, as Morph suggested a while ago, may have been hardware limitations (particularly VRAM) of the Gamecube. With the nextgen consoles and PC ports we obviously don't have these limitations, but I don't see this stuff coming back anytime soon. Which is really sad.
I tried to add back some of these things by importing the original SA level models into SADX 2004, and it's indeed possible to bring back window reflections and other material effects, but it seems impossible to port Dreamcast lighting to the PC port. It may be possible to recreate it more or less faithfully in 3DS Max though.

 

If you ever finish up porting the levels over, you should put up a download. I'd love to try it. Chao gardens included.

 

Chao Gardens are particularly difficult because the PC version uses hardcoded object placement, rather than a SET file.

 

Nah man Sonic R model is better one because it's the one more like classic Sonic so it's objectively the better one not sure how you can argue against that really because well it's the better model.

Spoiler

I can get that it can sometimes be hard to see if something on the internet is a joke, but come on now I even ended it with to make it extra obvious.

 

I don't think I'll ever finish porting them over, it's sort of pointless because the imported levels look pretty bad due to their lack of dynamic lighting (and, as far as I know, lighting data in SA Dreamcast remains to be discovered).
If you're interested, I have some videos I recorded about 2 years ago. Look at Casinolopis to see what I mean about lighting.

 

New update for Sonic Adventure came out today. It was almost 40mb in size but I hardly see anything other than the fact that windowed mode has been returned to the config.

 

So did anybody else notice this:


Edit: still no luck on the disassembly front.

 

The porting is going to continue?