Dreamcast Tech demos from Sega US

Found these cool Sega Tech demos for the Dreamcast. While the Japanese had their Tower and iijima (think that's his name) head demo, the American side had their own. Take a look.

This Space Planet demo looks very nice



Landscape and room demos



Yakumo

 

Those look a bit better then the ps2 demos they showed, as far as texture goes.

 

I have the same screens in high quality, and some movies too. Need to find them.

 

I used to have videos of those Sega USA demos, but I deleted them a while ago. :Hangman: They were developed by Captivation Digital (The same team that made Half Life DC) and they had videos on their webiste, which is now non-existant.

 

i was showing Bert those screens the other day. Looks like i wnt need to scan them in :-D

 

If anyone has high quality (or any quality) pictures or movies, i would love them!

 

Yeah, I got from their webiste.
Will try to find the movies in this weekend.

 

Now were these demos in the form of normal GD-Rs or anything, or was this run exclusively on dev hardware? It would be cool to dig up a copy just for the fun of it.

 

I remember seeing those rubber ducky in a pool pics from a magazine, I think it's Next Generation, but I could be wrong.

 

Dreamcast tech demos

Those pictures were scanned from a later issue of the UK Official Sega Saturn Magazine, as I'd recognise those captions anywhere! However, I must point out that the "Future City" demo was not produced by Sega of America - this was a European project coded by Tom Szirtes, a former programmer and designer on the Sonic R team at Travellers' Tales. I haven't checked on this in a while, but Future City (and this is its official name) was developed on the second revision of Katana hardware, which was supposedly running with only 20% of the final Dreamcast's processing power. It might not appear too brilliant (look carefully and there are instances of polygon seaming), but Future City was created in two weeks and served as a good early indication of the 128-bit system's potential.

In addition to this, Sega of Europe also asked Core Design to produce the now-infamous Scud Race tech demo as well, though I don't believe that SOE were responsible for any other Dreamcast test software (although they did have in possession a copy of the Japanese demos, as previewed in SSM). If I remember correctly, each of the four US tech demos had a name based on the feature it was designed to showcase. For example, the wooden room/fruit bowl was called "Textures" (an obvious title), while the outdoor lake scene was "Polygons." The other two demos were "Animation" and "Lighting" from memory, though I had absolutely no idea that video footage from these was available - any chance of someone sharing these?

P.S. SegaWeb once had direct-feed screenshots from all of the tech demos I have mentioned in this post along with the Japanese Tower Of Babel and Iri-San head presentations from the New Challenge conference - I have copies of all these images somewhere, but I cannot promise to upload them (finding them in my large disc archive might be tough, especially since I never used to properly label things back in the Dreamcast days)!

 

Wow damn cool!
I'd love to see some more techdemos for other systems (I got a few 32X ones if anyone's interested). From what I heard the initial batch of PlayStation's in Japan came with a disc containing various techdemos, can anyone confirm this?

 

POST THE 32X TECH DEMOS!!! And yes, the first batch of demo cds for the PSX did contain some tech demos which were pretty cool.

 

I remember Sony making a similar rubber ducky demo. It was pretty cool but NO TEXTURES, nothing but goraud shading cuz it was all a purpulish color. It was a demo though to show off the number of polys it can push. It was also interactive where you can control a little submarine. I remember EGM saying the demo was revolutionary. :smt043

 

Go check they out by yourself

http://emulazione.multiplayer.it/ages/download.html


PD

 

Take a look at these two sites:

http://www.arlinart.com/Screens.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20001205085900/www.captivation.com/products.html

And these pictures:









Courtesy of the Way Back Machine (Internet Archive!)http://web.archive.org/

 

Great links Sonik. thanks :smt023

Yakumo

 

Yeah some real nice pics!

 

Credits to ShadowofBob for post the name of the company "Captivation Digital"
Makes a lot easier to find these images.

Now I need to find the videos. I know I have it somewere in my CDRs

 

Sonik, I remember I had one of that videos, but I'm in trouble just like you, because I'm not able to find this. It seems that they removed the videos from their website. I also had the Irimajiri and Babylon tech demos (also missing...)

I've to put a little of order in all thes files :S . Salutes .

 

a bit late

Just discovered this thread - whilst searching for something else entirely.

True, I wrote the Future City technical demo whilst working at Sega Europe.
(I'd like to point out that I was never employed directly by Travellers Tales, though I did work on Sonic-R, it was entirely as a Sega employee). I did actually write a pitch later to develop the demo (which was fully playable) into a game, but nothing ever came of it in the end.

For a bit of trivia - there are actually a couple of other demo's that were written at Sega Europe by a coder called Elton Bird who is still in the games industry that were never seen outside the office. There was a platform type game, lovingly referred to as Uncle Henry's Adventure internally, and another demo of a large sailing ship which one could zoom right into.