Possible betas of system shock 2 and thief 2 for dreamcast found!

I`m trying to make it bootable but Dreamcast always resets after SEGA logo . What can be wrong ?

 

Very interesting, please upload more screenshots

 

my guess is its not anyware neer a playable state and thus cant be made self bootable without more or less working on the file on a dev kit

 

Here is a set of screenshots showing everything I have found so far. The game also has trouble with adding / removing controllers / vmus while the game is running. It will lock up, forcing a restart. The game has also done this by itself while walking up and down the corridor. The network part also locks up when you select "next." There also isn't any way to toggle between "host" and "join." Finally, there isn't any sound except when the SFD movies play.

Edit: For the controls, the only buttons that appear mapped are:

Analog: look around | D-pad: move | L / R buttons: rotate view

 

thanks man

 

There was a question elsewhere about Thief 2's *.016 and *.256 files. Open up an instance of whichever image editor you use (Paint works) and drag / drop the files onto it to reveal their real format.

(the extensions indicate the number of colors )

Will the game itself work? No, there unfortunately isn't any way to boot it. I tried using SS2's WINCEOS BIN and renaming the ICD file to match SS2's EXE, but it doesn't work. The ICD is an encrypted EXE which would need a bootloader to run.

 

Thank you. It was me who asked that.
So this is as far as we will go with this betas? :\

 

Cool thanks, when you say source would it have to be DC source or could PC source be manipulated to work? either way it sounds like a lot of work and I guess if Looking Glass / Vatical or whoever never did it the chances of home dev-ers making it fully playable are remote:crying:

 

Outrunner, yes, unless the other development kit contains a later revision of SS2 or the needed files for Thief 2, neither of them will be playable - they just weren't far enough along in the porting process.

Runk, the PC source is needed since the game is incomplete. Plus, it would be easier to start over than try to figure out what was done to get the game where it's at now.

According to this Gamespot article on the DC port of SS2, a team was put together just a few months before the timestamp on a lot of the files in the archive. If they weren't familiar with the WinCE environment, I wonder if they were aware of problematic areas like the double precision issue addressed in the WinCE SDK. I can understand the slowdown inherent in WinCE titles, but the map in SS2 is four walls and a ceiling. It shouldn't be that slow. :/

 

Cheers Dreamcast! you have been very good with your replies and patient with my lack of knowledge so thanks for that.

Its a shame then that they don't appear to be playable after all which is a real downer because I was pretty stoked for playing SS2 and would have been chuffed with Thief as well!

I should imagine that porting a game from scratch is very time consuming and difficult if not perhaps someone would have attempted SS2 already along with a bunch of other great PC games AvP Gold for example and one of my faves Grim Fandango...if only:nod:

Rob

 

Grim Fandango isn't open source and isn't supported by something like SCUMMVM so chances of it ever playing on a Dreamcast are slim.

Dreamcast, thanks for putting the time in. Hope there's more to come.

 

yeah I know, i think its grime thing instead of scumm I don't know how many games were made using grime so may be no point trying to develop an interpreter for just one game

 

Well, hopefully BlueCrab from over at Dreamcast-Talk will pull his dev kit's files and offload them to the community like I've done. Maybe then some progress towards a playable of either or both titles can be made.

Now a good time to mention there was a CD-R included with the dev kit? Well, just as BlueCrab has reported, mine also included a CD-R, but I don't recall which game title name was written on it. I vaguely remember popping it into my PC at the time and not being able to locate an install file so I stuck it in an empty DVD case. It's still around here somewhere, and as soon as I locate it I'll copy the files off, zip and upload them to. Hopefully the data hasn't corrupted after all these years.

 

Many thanks for sharing the files! Would love to see a bootable disc in the future!

 

great news! let's see if with collective effort we can made it someday and bring more life to dreamcast.

 

Awesome release gamer_s! Thanks a lot for sharing this with the whole community.

Good luck with the exploration Dreamcast!

 

awesome stuff dude!

 

Great release. Major kudos to gamer_s and all those who have helped.

 

Given how straight edged BlueCrab is towards anything remotely related to commercial games and potentially breaking copyright law I'm amused by the notion he'd help with this beyond offering knowledge and information.

Though kudos if he does get it functioning. I'll go rib him on IRC.

 

I kinda doubt that the copy of SS2 on my Devkit is significantly different than what has been released. Also, I know that Thief 2 on my devkit just looks like its an install of the PC version (nothing even resembling a Dreamcast binary is to be found).

Also, what APE says about me is mostly true... I'm not much on releasing that which would be a violation of copyright law to release. There's a reason why I've sat on what was on my Devkit for years without telling many people (basically, I mentioned what was on my devkit on one IRC channel, and that was pretty much the end of it).

If there's anything interesting/different about what's on my devkit, we'll see what will happen. As I said, I somewhat doubt there's much different there.