BLEEMCAST HACKED!

Oh, I already knew that, I was the one who uploaded the boot discs up to Dcisozone when they were hacked in December 2009.

I was mainly letting him know that since it hadn't been done by now, and since others have tried before, it most likely will never happen.

Yeah, that compatibility list is always great to look at as it shows you there are so many games that are very playable without saves and FMV's or analog.

Yeah, we also have many self booting games there too, you would be surprised how many in fact. ;-)

 

I run my PSX games on an overclocked old phone without 3D core in VGA res from a
SD card.The emulator needs just ~20 MB RAM.
So a DC expert could get the 5.24 SDK and port PSX and N64 emulators or compile with gcc.
The difficulty lies in gamepad remapping and of course it shouldnt use C++ features.

 

The dc doesn't have enough power to emulate those systems by software only.
So it's not that easy and they would have to be optimied to use less resources and to use every single piece of hw the dc has.

Bleemcast is a masterpiece of engineering for achieving that.

 

I agree with that! I remember putting on the Metal Gear Bleem and being blown away by the transformation.

Watch the intro to the game on the Playstation then load it up in the Dreamcast and marvel at the difference.

My only issue is the controller as it just doesn't sit right.

 

Bleemcast is a marvel of coding. Seriously, the Dreamcast can emulate PS1 games better than the PS3 even does still to this day! Bleemcast runs in 640x480p VGA resolution, as opposed to the PS1's low 320x240 resolution, and features anti-aliasing and bilinear filtering, something the PS3 still don't do to these old games.

GT2 on Dreamcast in HD via VGA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-tQX-XZhX0

 

Rand Linden and a few others in a room coding in SH4 ASM optimizing the living hell out of one game at a time (for a total of 3 games) versus Sony with millions devoted to R&D getting about 90% of the games working but ultimately succumbing to the fact that they're a bunch of ingrates who prefer to count their cash?

Not too amazing when you look at it IMO at least. Give more enthusiastic and talented developers the cash Sony put towards backwards compatibility and you'll find Bleem! spanked. Corporate greed pretty much guarantees it won't get any better than it does now.

 

Still, bleem is of a rare-seen level of eliteness. With all the motivation and will on earth, only a few people on earth could have coded that. It's the definition of optimisation. Let's not forget that Mr. Linden completely reverse engineered the psx before he coded an emulator that improved over the original hardware in ASSEMBLY code! On a console barely more powerful than the psx!

That and the copy protection that took about 10 years and a mad russian sha4-asm-god to crack and you havce quite a unique piece of art.

Remeber no one has yet coded a 100% compatible fullspeed snes emu yet?

Of course it's only my opinion, but everybody has the right to share my opinion!

FG

[@APE regarding his post right under this one] Is the no offence intented directed to me? If so don't worry, I'm not offended at all. I'm a BC! fanboy but I'm also open to other opinons

 

I find it amazing in its own right, but to compare to the utter joke that is Sony R&D is and be surprised when a very talented group comes out ahead...well I don't have a word for it.

Let us compare penicillin with blood letting in terms of efficacy.

(No offense intended to anyone)

 

And has drastically lower compatibility. Many PSX games are 480i, incidentally (and it isn't limited to the two resolutions we're talking about, either).

DC's VGA is 640x480. It isn't "HD" in any common usage.

You're obviously a DC fanatic, which is great. Count me in. I'm not knocking Rand's work. I think comparing it to Sony's attempt at backwards compatibility is meaningless, though. As incredible as Bleemcast was, it would never have achieved 100% compatibility with all PlayStation games, which was what Sony had to aim for with PS2/3, and in order to do that they had to sacrifice any specific enhancements.

 

Well I consider 480p progressive scan the begining of HD, I don't know, others may not consider it HD, but it is VGA, which is better than standard definition.

Yeah, I know they had to keep all the enhancements that Bleem did out of the PS2 and PS3, but come on man, you would think they could have at least added AA and bumped up resolution to 480.

And yes, Dreamcast nerd here, but that is after not owning one since 2002, and just discovering all the magic I was missing out for all those years after getting mine I have now in 2009.

You have to admit though, the Dreamcast is a very unique console like nothing else.

 

Except for the XBox who had built in ethernet, 1080i capable, played DVDs and had built in storage. Nothing until the 360, PS3 and Wii could compare to it in terms of capabilities out of the box, not even the Dreamcast honestly. Hell the damn controllers are practically identical (Duke, not the S).

As for 480p being the "start" of HD:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced-definition_television

VGA is "better" than 480i in that it looks better overall but you might as well argue that PAL is better than VGA for having more lines of resolution (576 vs 480) which may/may not look better interlaced than VGA in progressive.

 

bleemcast betas shows that a good emu with great speed and decent compatibility level can be done in DC. Of course, you will need good coders that know a lot about psx emulation and sh4 assembly.

 

Bsnes emulates every SNES games, besides 1 japanese shogi game.
And it is fullspeed, as long as your computer isn't more thant 6 years old.

 

I was obviously talking about a snes emulator for dreamcast. There's two snes emu for DC, none of wich are 100% speed on most games.

Of course on PC a lot of 100% snes emu exist, snes9x or zsnes are my favorites.

FG

 

Yeah, but snes4all is getting updated by Chui to utilize the SD cards, and hopefully be a better emulator for it. If he can some how use the cards like ram, then amazing things can be acheived finaly.

But yeah, Bleemcast ain't great on every game, but those that do work really shine on the DC.

 

Using the SD card as cache would be... insanely slow. That wouldn't be a wise idea.

 

Agreed. SD cards are what, maybe 20mb/s on a good day for read speeds? Unless you can use them as SWAP space for the rom to free up some of the DC's ram then maybe there will be some benefit.

But there is no way you'll be using the SD card as additional ram.

Serious recoding in SH4 asm will be necessary to see a speed boost. The only game I ever found to run full speed was, drum-roll please.

Civilization.

 

From my own experience and from JJ1ODM (sd cable designer) tests, Dreamcast sd-card achieve about 500kiB/s. It's limited by the serial port DC-side. In theory this port is ~1.5MiB/s but somehow communicating with a sd-card over 500kiB/s is hard/unfeasible.


Way too slow to be used as ram, borderline to be used as swap IMHO.

FG

 

Did he document the copy-protection? I'd love to read about how he did it.

 

I'd love to know as well. Rand did a helluva job on it. I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't leave messages to the hacker midway through on it either.