Just wanted to know if this was possible. OpenMW is the opensource morrowind engine. If morrowind was on dreamcast it would be off the wall. It almost makes the pc system requirements besides for ram. Couldnt the graphics be lessned to run smoothly?
If you have the Katana SDK, proper coding skills, and such, it might be possible. The only obstacle will be the renderer. You'll need specific Dreamcast libraries to subsitute DirectX/OpenGL, or maybe there is an OpenGL DC port? I guess that the hardest part will be translating ASM sources (if used), and swapping libraries. RAM limitations can be overcome only if it's about graphics and not the core engine. You'll probably need to use more efficient libraries, with less polygons and shading and lo-res textures (eg. 1024x1024 > 512x512) ecc. That said, i know nothing about the Dreamcast specifically, but those are the general issues you run onto when porting software.
Actually, a Katana SDK would not be needed since the semi-active Dreamcast homebrew scene has created an extensive amount of free development tools. The only advantage of having the official SDK is if you want to code with DirectX, since Microsoft officially supported the Dreamcast and developed their own tools for it. The DirectX that Dreamcast supports is pretty old though. OpenGL is not officially supported on Dreamcast, but there is KGL, which is essentially a subset of OpenGL that is tailored for the PowerVR hardware that Dreamcast uses. This is essentially what the homebrew community has produced, and so it may not be as optimized as Sega's official tools though. The Dreamcast hardware has no support for shaders, which I believe is why no modern-ish 3D engine has been ported to Dreamcast. This will probably be one of the major road blocks you will have to deal with in porting something like OpenMW to DC. It seems like OpenMW is using the Ogre 3D engine, although they may be switching to OpenSceneGraph. Interestingly enough, some guy did claim to have a port of Ogre to the DC many years ago, but as far as I know, he never released it...and I'm not sure if it would help you at all in porting OpenMW to DC, since it was obviously a port of a very old version of Ogre. I think that a Dreamcast port of Morrowind should be theoretically possible, given when it was released. At that point in time, PC hardware wasn't that much more advanced than Dreamcast hardware (for gaming at least). But I wouldn't expect to pull off a simple port of OpenMW to Dreamcast (unless the OpenMW devs are specifically trying to support older hardware, which doesn't seem to be the case). You'll certainly be able to use the knowledge the OpenMW developers got from reverse engineering the game, but you'll probably have to rewrite most of the game engine for the specifics capabilities of the Dreamcast. While the Dreamcast lacks shaders, it does have some cool unique features that gave it an edge during its era. For instance it has texture compression (which allows it to compete with systems that have way more video RAM) and it uses tile-based rendering (which allows it to compete with systems that can render polygons faster). It also has really good support for alpha transparency layers, which was used to create a lot of really cool effects on the Dreamcast. But to get the advantage of all these features, the game engine has to be designed for Dreamcast. I think it's a cool idea, but probably a lot of work to pull off.
Even if it'd be a huge undertaking for devs to attempt this i think i speak for the rest of the community by saying if morrowind was ported i wouldn't care if it was 10 discs and looked like 32x it'd play the crap out of it. Probably would be one of the best games on the system Maybe it could even show some untapped power the dc had. Bump this thread people if you want devs to consider it
Dreamcast has support for hardware texture compression, so I wouldnt dismiss the possibility based entirely on ram.
I hadn't seen that until i posted this thread But i'd f*cking melt my dc playing this. I have over 60 hours in oblivion and skyrim, bought morrowind but never played. I'd have no problem waiting for a port
Oh definitely. Oblivion and Skyrim are some of my favorite games of all time. I played Morrowind on OG Xbox and it was lots of fun. In fact I believe that you could play the older games with the Dreamcast Dosbox port. I tried to get it set up years ago but failed miserably.
That would be pretty interesting. Theres Fake86 also which i'm going to remake the cdi for soon, but its an early version and the speeds are slow. With the dosbox port it'd be interesting also if it could run windows 3.0-3.1 with decent speeds
