- Joined
- Jul 27, 2018
Great article that goes into a bit of the behind the scenes on what it took/how many people it took etc, to get these working on PC (& modern consoles). Great read and really makes you think how much work went into these!
https://www.pcgamer.com/how-sega-brought-shenmue-back-to-life-on-pc/
Interesting bit about the audio:
Edit from My post: (spud1897)
PCGamer have released an interview with D3T detailing the challenges around developing Shenmue for modern platforms. https://www.pcgamer.com/how-sega-brought-shenmue-back-to-life-on-pc/
This is essential reading for all of us trying to understand everything with these games and just how much has gone on behind the scenes to get this to becoming a reality.
This particularly stood out:
Was bringing a 20-year-old game to modern PCs difficult?
"Incredibly difficult! At D3T we have worked on some very challenging projects, but this was by far the toughest. For example, there was no source code for the Dreamcast libraries, but luckily the Shenmue 2 Xbox version had source for the ported Xbox libraries.
It was definitely not a case of dropping the Xbox libraries in and building Shenmue, but it gave us a good starting point. Even with that there were still many files missing which we had to reverse engineer from assembly code.
The Dreamcast and Xbox had 32-bit processors, but PS4 and Xbox One are 64-bit. This has a big implication with how memory and data are handled. It was a massive engineering effort to convert the code and resulted in many obvious and many subtle bugs, some of which were still being found close to release."
Were there any quirks of the Dreamcast hardware that made getting the first game working on PC especially difficult?
The Dreamcast hardware had some features which would prove difficult to emulate, particularly the audio and graphics systems.
The audio on the Dreamcast is mainly driven by a completely different chip to the main CPU. This chip is loaded with different programs defined by the original developer, specifying things such as loop points, reverb, volumes, envelopes, etc. We didn’t have the source data for this, which meant a lot of reverse engineering to get it sounding okay.
Regarding the graphics, the Dreamcast GPU had some powerful and unique features not found on modern cards. The two features which caused us the most headaches were the modifier volumes used for shadows and light volumes, and the ability to sort transparent geometry on a per pixel level. The lack of modifier volumes on our target platforms led us to use a hybrid stencil shadow approach similar to the Xbox version of Shenmue 2. This is different to the original and artefacts can occasionally be seen because of this.
https://www.pcgamer.com/how-sega-brought-shenmue-back-to-life-on-pc/
Interesting bit about the audio:
The audio on the Dreamcast is mainly driven by a completely different chip to the main CPU. This chip is loaded with different programs defined by the original developer, specifying things such as loop points, reverb, volumes, envelopes, etc. We didn’t have the source data for this, which meant a lot of reverse engineering to get it sounding okay.
Edit from My post: (spud1897)
PCGamer have released an interview with D3T detailing the challenges around developing Shenmue for modern platforms. https://www.pcgamer.com/how-sega-brought-shenmue-back-to-life-on-pc/
This is essential reading for all of us trying to understand everything with these games and just how much has gone on behind the scenes to get this to becoming a reality.
This particularly stood out:
Was bringing a 20-year-old game to modern PCs difficult?
"Incredibly difficult! At D3T we have worked on some very challenging projects, but this was by far the toughest. For example, there was no source code for the Dreamcast libraries, but luckily the Shenmue 2 Xbox version had source for the ported Xbox libraries.
It was definitely not a case of dropping the Xbox libraries in and building Shenmue, but it gave us a good starting point. Even with that there were still many files missing which we had to reverse engineer from assembly code.
The Dreamcast and Xbox had 32-bit processors, but PS4 and Xbox One are 64-bit. This has a big implication with how memory and data are handled. It was a massive engineering effort to convert the code and resulted in many obvious and many subtle bugs, some of which were still being found close to release."
Were there any quirks of the Dreamcast hardware that made getting the first game working on PC especially difficult?
The Dreamcast hardware had some features which would prove difficult to emulate, particularly the audio and graphics systems.
The audio on the Dreamcast is mainly driven by a completely different chip to the main CPU. This chip is loaded with different programs defined by the original developer, specifying things such as loop points, reverb, volumes, envelopes, etc. We didn’t have the source data for this, which meant a lot of reverse engineering to get it sounding okay.
Regarding the graphics, the Dreamcast GPU had some powerful and unique features not found on modern cards. The two features which caused us the most headaches were the modifier volumes used for shadows and light volumes, and the ability to sort transparent geometry on a per pixel level. The lack of modifier volumes on our target platforms led us to use a hybrid stencil shadow approach similar to the Xbox version of Shenmue 2. This is different to the original and artefacts can occasionally be seen because of this.
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