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X Box To Be Dreamcast-Compatible - Updated
palo0019 writes "These are tough times for Sega fans, with rampant rumors of buyouts, sellouts, and every other scenario under the sun. The latest one actually makes sense, Microsoft needs a hot developer, and Sega needs a machine to call home. Gamers.com is reporting that the Xbox will be compatible with Dreamcast games. They are also reporting that that Sega is developing "a" Virta Fighter game, that may or may not be the new Virtua Fighter X. " Interesting rumor - I tried calling both Microsoft and Sega and got a firm "No Comment" from people. Update: 01/26 12:20 PM by H :Microsoft has apparently denied the rumor once more.
The pirates use modified Dreamcasts to spool the data to a hard drive--in effect, using the DC as an external GD drive. You won't be able to fully read a GD for some time, if ever.
Being able to create pseudo-GDs is more a case of luck and lax format specs--since almost no developer has used the high-density ring in the center of a GD. The rips aren't nearly the quality of PSX burns either--a friend tried DoA2(locks up repeatedly after about 15min) and Capcom Vs. SNK(loses music periodically), with less-than-stellar results.
--
Which is a pretty funny claim anyhow- seen the POVbench scores for the PS2? (I was impressed they could even _compile_ POV to run on the 'emotion engine'). You have to continually remember that Microsoft may be and probably is lying outright to you. It's like continually remembering that spammers lie as you continue to be slammed by their claims day after day after day. Just because MS has claimed for the Nth time that 'XBox will be more powerful than anything in the world!' doesn't mean it's not a midrange PC with nice NVidia graphics acceleration and midrange CPU and HD.
When the Dreamcast market collapses and you can pick them up for 20 UKP at CEX, and the good folk over at NetBSD get their port ready for primetime, this will be a great source of cheap, powerful hardware. I won't say the B word, but you know that you can build a parallel supercomputer in your shed...
Don't you love how they tossed that little marketing tidbit in there?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
As for the different graphics subsystem on the DC, it would be trivial to bung a translation layer between the two systems. In fact the hardest part of the DC to emulate would be its curious bumpmapping format, although the Dx8-style pixel shaders on Xbox could do a lot to help this out. The shadow volumes supported by DC could also be translated into equivalent stencil-buffer operations too.
Just my two-penneth - as an engine coder on a DC game who's now working on an Xbox title I've got some idea what I'm talking about ;)
GodboltBlog
But that royalty can be renegotiated as part of the deal, so that both parties come out in front. As long as there's something in it for both sides (and there is) deals can be done.
I still think this rumour is probably false, but by no means impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
You could if your CD-ROM's fucking firmware could deal with the big physical fucking gap in the middle of the physical fucking disc. The HD area of a GD is a fucking ISO9660 filesystem with a boot block. The spiral is longer and thinner, but it's still motherfucking pits and lands punched out of a motherfucking piece of foil so that you can have just like every other fucking normal cd, only instead of 6115200 of the fuckers on the spiral you have about 9182208.
Are you forgetting that a cdrom drive is just a fucking piece of hardware that shoots a laser onto a disc and sees if it reflects or not? The density of the spiral on a GD is not much higher than on an 80 minute cd. I would venture to say that most commercial CDROM drives have laser diodes with focus fine enough not to spill over the edges of the spiral. It's a matter of math and it's in the SOFTWARE INSIDE THE FUCKING CDROM DRIVE NOT IN THE ELECTRONICS.
How in the fuck did you get the comment bonus without a fucking brain?
~GoRK
The high density area of GD-ROM is really nothing more than a cd with a thinner and therefore longer spiral. A normal DVD-ROM mechanism or a good CD-ROM mechanism with firmware to handle the bizzare physical format of the disc can read a GD-ROM. It's not about the hardware. Use standard hardware. Use special firmware!
/. editors after so many years not yet realized probably around 95% of console game news that originates as rumors is total bullshit?
As far as promoting the sale of games for a competing system, do you really think that M$ wouldn't get a kickback on SEGA's royalties if they made their system compatible.
All that aside, I really wish that slashdot would stop it with the game bunk that they've been pushing out recently. Honestly, have
For a real bit of console news, try that the first 3rd party developed (license-free, reverse-engineered) program that uses the Sega Dreamcast's ethernet adaptor was released yesterday. It is an app that allows you to upload and execute compiled elf binaries using TCP/IP. Shouldn't be too much longer before we can see some homebrew games or other software (like Operating Systems) that take advantage of this.
~GoRK
What is it with the rumors? So many different ones about Sega, lets see:
1. Nintendo is buying Sega
2. Sega is stopping production of the Dreamcast
3. Sega is developing for the PS2
4. The X-Box will support GD-ROM games from the DC
What next?
I also love the rumors about the iPaq handheld.
1. A 64 Meg version will be released any day now. It will be the H3635, H3640, H3660, or the H3670.
2. An iPaq with built in wireless (Wireless what?)
3. An iPaq running at 412mHz and 64MB Ram.
Even better are all the Linux ones involving MS
1. IE is being ported to Linux
2. Office is being ported to Linux
3. MS is making their own Linux
Why do I even bother to read any "news" sites anymore. All it is now is a big social rumor circle, with some saying this is true, others denying it, all while the actual companies sit back and laugh.
As other have said, this has been done before but it still made me laugh to think of initially... imagine this Quake session:
[User accidentally fires rocket too close for four hundredth time]
[Up pops PaperClip!]
PaperClip: I see you are trying to rocket jump. Would you like more help on rocket jumping?
[Rail from other gamer obscured by PaperClip comes through PaperClip, killing user]
Gamer: Damn you @^!#&@!$#*& PaperClip! I just can't aim!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Remember, Sega makes a loss on every Dreamcast console they sell. Where they plan to get that money back is from game licenses. For every Dreamcast game sold, some of the money goes into Sega's pockets. Microsoft being who they are, it's very likely that you'd need to pay a similar fee to get your game to boot on the X-box, despite it being the same game that can run on a PC.
If the X-box could play Dreamcast games, then the continuing sale of those games would take money from Microsoft and put it into Sega's pockets. I don't think Micosoft will do that.
"The good die first." "Most of us are morally ambiguous, which explains our random dying patterns." --- MST3K
This seems unlikely. The Dreamcast uses its own proprietary gigabyte CD standard for games, which AFAIK requires dedicated hardware. X-Box uses DVDs, and a specially made DVD-ROM which could read GB-CD would raise the price of the X-box, as well as promiting the sale of games for a competing system.
"The good die first." "Most of us are morally ambiguous, which explains our random dying patterns." --- MST3K
I guess that would mean that the XBox runs linux by emulation.
In separate news, Microsoft announced suits against upwards of 35 programmers and several hardware manufacturers for using the term "X" or "X-windows." Ballmer stated "We don't want consumers to be confused in the marketplace. X is a very strong branding image and is a registered trademark owned by Microsoft (76041367 and 76041368). These other individuals and companies are introducing confusion into the marketplace."
Microsoft's above trademarks cover the use of the X trademark in conjuction with games, operating systems that can run games, chat and message services involving gaming situations, e-mail, text-editing, and OS utilities supporting gaming.
Insiders at Microsoft hinted that Microsoft is willing to drop the suit against companies distributing UNIX and LINUX products if they remove all games and ability to play games on their product or cease the use of the X trademark in conjuction with above products.
Xbox is based on Intel hardware. Something like a Celeron 400 CPU and Nvidia geforce video. Dreamcast uses a SH4 and ARM7, respectively. Completely different set of hardware. Even if they were able to read the disc properly (not bloody likely, read above posts, I'll not repeat) they won't be able to do anything with it. They can't do any kind of software emulation; the cpu is not powerful enough for low level full speed emulation of both the ARM and SH4 (the sound interface isn't a DAC you can just ship PCM data to like sound cards; its it completely separate system, with its own RAM that contain binary executable code as well as data. The ARM would have to be emulated as well). The Nvidia works completely different than PowerVR chip in the Dreamcast; again, more emulation done by this one poor Intel CPU.
Sega is looking into selling the chips for use in other components; this is a granted. However, it is very late in the Xbox development cycle to add this major feature to the Xbox. Not to mention OMG the heat this thing would produce. This gives no mention of the hardware needed (How do I play Phantasy Star online w/o a modem? How would I use my Seaman microphone or Samba de Amigo maracas?) This is a pipe dream.
Just cause a rumour is posted on some other website on the Internet doesn't make it any less a rumour, Slashdot. I personally am really curious who at Andover is getting paid off for all of the anti-Sega BS thats been coming down from here in the past week. (Remember the 'Sega dropping the DC' from two days ago?)
Toodles
Toodles D. Clown
I'm surprised that nobody knew this. This compatibility is absolutely not possible. Dreamcast games are not written for WindowsCE (except for some early ones) but for the close-to-the-metal SegaOS (guess why!). That means serveral things:
A) Lots of SH4 ASM
B) No Win32
C) Direct coding to the PowerVR, no DirectX used.
The whole situation is made more complicated by the fact that the PVR chipset has to have code written specially for it. That means that although DirectX does work with it, it works suboptimally. That also means that most games ditch D3D and use their own routines to access the graphics card. Hence, these games would not work on an XBox.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
-----------------------
Nicotine free Amish .sig.
Remember, this is Microsoft, where Bill Gates discussing market dumping in magazine interviews. When they priced WinCE below cost, he explained that they didn't make money on DOS 1.0, but by becoming the standard, they did well later.
The XBox will be sold at a loss. MS needs to be in the console/IA market, and needs software for their system. MS doesn't need the cash, but they need the presence in this market.
If people hack the X-box, Linux users will by up the suckers to setup Linux boxes. While these boxes cost MS money, and generate no sales revenue, it is another X-box sold. MS needs to have a big chunk of the marketshare, and if they can get another 5%-10% of the market this way, they will.
When you are a game developer, the bigger MS's X-box seems, the more likely you are to develop for it. Expect the X-box to be hacked either within 48 hours of shipping, or before shipping with MS getting some presales to Linux hackers.
Alex
** Note: Slashdot is actually a sham, a haven for immature "Linux users" (Windows-using wannabes) who provide flamebait for each other and pageviews for Malda. But Hemos shouldn't tell that the MS or Sega.
Damn, this is some good crack!
All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
It was called the Pentium III because at the time Intel wasn't shipping a Celeron at over 400MHz. If you look at the specifications posted on the web(I'd suggest staring at xbox.ign.com) and look at the specs on the processor, you'll discover that it looks very much like a Celeron (ie, same cache size)
Doh!
"Dreamcast DOES run WinCE"
Incorrect.
"Dreamcast CAN run WinCE"
Correct.
Most DC games don't use WinCE.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
a slashdot editor checking ... facts
... must lie down ...
head light
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Anything that makes it more likely that we'll get Shenmue 2 is a good thing...
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If nothing else, emulators could just be tweaked for the version of linux that will inevitably be ported to the X-box.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
http://boards.gaming-age.com/message.asp?topic=879 5611&replies=33
:)
" Well.. believe it, as it is true
At least according to people that we know (who will remain nameless), that work directly with the Xbox, inside MS.
DC2, here we come!
--Jim"
Jim happens to be the Senior Editor of Gaming-Age.
Despite MS and Sega's denial, It's true.
Funny, that MS denies it since they also denied the XBox initially
What is far more likely is that future games from Sega will be dual-platform games. That is, the same CD-ROM/DVD-ROM will come with both the Dreamcast version and the X-Box version. Also, yes, I know that current Dreamcast games come on GD-ROMS which can't be read in a PC CD-ROM drive. However, the Dreamcast can also boot ordinary CD-ROM's.
Sega had previously announced plans to use the dual-boot strategy for releasing Windows/Dreamcast games.
Cryptnotic
My other first post is car post.
You know, this would actually be VERY nice...
Ever since the dreamcast's release, it's games have been extremely impressive. Not just graphically, (Yes they're pretty) but as far as gameplay and innovation. Sega has been churning out some very top notch pieces of software for their system, many of which have sadly gone unnoticed, or not been enough to save the dreamcast. Samba de amigo is reputedly awsome, if you can get past the $200 pricetag for the game (you have to buy 2 maraccas at $70 apiece to get the full experience) Grandia 2 and Skies of arcadia are getting incredible reviews as far as RPGs go. Guilty gear X and Marvel vs Capcom 2 are probably the two prettiest fighting games I've seen in a long time, in terms of graphics.
etc, and so on.
The problem with the dreamcast has definatly not been a lack of quality gams. So the idea that these games might survive and endure beyond the dreamcast's now dismal-looking lifespan should make quite a few people happy. If nothing else, it beats waiting around the extra couple of years for Dreamcast emulators to become usable...
By the way, check out these sites
Skin Cancer Humor
Hitler Humor
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
1. Dreamcast games work, but, the user must successfully cut the disk into a square first.
2. One of the features included will be the ever popular "gamers assistant" who will pop up in mid game, (usually when you are rolling along quite fine) and ask "May I be of assistance?" The assistant will be quite useless if you happen to get stuck in a game, producing only clickable buttons that take you even further into obscurity.
3. Every game sold for the X-Box will actually contain only a 6 meg coded instruction for downloading the actual game. The rest of the disk will be filled with advertisements on how great Microsoft really is.
4. Hitting all buttons but one brings up a special screen, where you can view all the developers names in better 3D than any game available. It will be called an "Easter Egg"
5. Attempting to save the game will spawn going through 19 different cycles of power on, power off, reload the software, obtain a firmware upgrade, install it, and try the file parameter again.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
There's the proof. Sorry. I'd like to see it too.
--
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
'nuff said.
MS Tech: Hello, Microsoft technical support.
Hemos: Is Sega going to be making games for the X Box?
MS Tech: Can you hold for one moment. (muzak)
Hello, Microsoft technical support.
Hemos: Is Sega going to be making games for the X Box?
MS Tech: (pages flipping) Have you tried rebooting?
Hemos: Is that a yes or a no?
MS Tech: That sounds like a driver problem. You may have to reinstall Windows.
Hemos: (Hangs up, types "no comment").
Sega Rep: Hello?
Hemos: Are you guys going to be making games for the X Box?
Sega Rep: We make great many games, super good Sonic running bush pig, you buy at store.
Hemos: Yeah, great, but are you going to be making games for the X Box?
Sega Rep: YOU BUY AT STORE! (click)
Hemos: (types "no comment")
Ok, mod me down, I had my fun.