Porting original House of the Dead & Virtua Cop to Dreamcast - Possible?

Hi all,

I was just thinking the other day whilst playing Dreamcast House of the Dead 2 that it was a shame there isnt more light gun games available for the Dreamcast, and I started wondering - given that that the HKT-0120 included a Windows CE SDK designed to make porting from the PC easier could the original House of the Dead and Virtua Cop (Which run easily on Windows 98) be ported from the PC versions? If so how easy would this be to do?

Just curious ;-)

 

If you've got the source code to the games you want to port it could be simple... I'm going to assume you don't, though, so the answer is basically "no". The Windows CE SDK doesn't allow the Dreamcast to run standard Windows binaries or anything like that (there is actually a Dreamcast WinCE loader application out there in the wild that'll let you run WinCE exe's that have specifically been compiled for sh4, but that won't help you run any of the games you're talking about).

However, you might find that the game engine didn't change much between versions, so the level assets from HotD could be hacked into HotD2 or whatever. Be prepared for a lot of trial and error.

 

Souce Code Sir. Source Code.

 

im afraid its not that easy, but there are some homebrew out which use the lightgun

 

Oh well, it was just an idea!

...can you not possibly use a disassembler program to read much of the game code? (I probably dont know what im talking about here)

 

No. You'd get a large amount of unintelligible x86 assembly code and you'd be no nearer to getting it to run on the DC's SH4 architecture.

It's probably worth reiterating that the Windows logo on the front of the DC doesn't mean anything. There's no Microsoft OS inside, WinCE was just a potential development environment.

 

Precisely. It's a bit like saying, "Hey, this bike is a BMW! So let's get an M3 engine and put it on the bike!" It just doesn't work.

 

even if you did have the source code, there's some low level stuff in there (it was the fashion back in the era before the GC/DC etc) that won't be possible to "port" over to the DC from the Saturn.

 

Thanks for all the replies - its ok I get the picture - its not possible! :nod:

For what its worth I wasnt actually thinking about porting the Saturn versions (which is notoriously hard if not impossible to port from) I meant the PC/Windows versions of each game, but I now understand thats not possible without the original source code.

Also, Merry Christmas everyone :icon_bigg