Topic: Dreamcast games on XBLA and PSN!

[Kytim89]

For some reason I find software emulation fascinating. I just like the idea of having a bunch of different console and its games on one console. Especially games of yester year, or the golden oldies. 

[Dirk Temporo]

POWER STONE?

[Morari]

Power Stone 2 was almost up there with Marvel vs. Capcom 2 in terms of how often everyone gathered to play. At least with Power Stone everyone could play at the same time, instead of having the loser passing the controller on after a match.

[SixthAngel]

Given that the Saturn was notoriously hard to program for and just as hard to emulate, I highly doubt we'll see Saturn games on the Wii.  Besides, what games would you want to play, anyway?  There's Nights (for some folks, I guess.  If the sequel's any indication, I'm definitely not interested in the original), Panzer Dragoon/Dragoon Saga, and....and...yeah, that just about sums it up.

I've been playing Sega Saturn games for the last month so yes it does have good games to play.  You already named 4.   No list wars here but I'll name two more amazing games Guardian Heroes and Shining force 3.

The best saturn emulators for the PC are still incomplete so it is incredibly difficult to emulate and they require a pretty fast computer.

[BranDonk Kong]

The Saturn is "so hard" to emulate because it had 2 CPUs and no 3D acceleration.

[Chozo Ghost]

I am betting my last dollar that the wii2HD will be able to properly emulate atleast the Dreamcast. Mainly because Nintendo does not want its competitors to have something they do not have and SEGA being partnered with Nintendo solidifies that possibility to happen.

Yeah, because Dreamcast emulation is the feature that will make or break a system.
/sarcasm

[Morari]

Dreamcast emulation would sure be a lot more entertaining than half the other systems that are already supported by the Wii.

[BranDonk Kong]

I'm telling you, the Wii 1 could have an awesome Dreamcast emulator written for it. Anyone ever see Bleem! for Dreamcast? If some non-affiliated developers can get a full-speed (albeit with limited compatibility) PlayStation emulator on the Dreamcast, then surely Sega could easily develop a full-speed Dreamcast emulator for the Wii. Hell, Daedalus 64 runs several games perfectly on the PSP.

[NWR_insanolord]

It might be possible, but Bleem for Dreamcast was only able to be released as separate versions for individual games. Such an emulator for Wii would need to be extensively tweaked for each game, and I'm not sure if that would be worth it. Maybe it could be used to bring over Shenmue 1 & 2 before Sega releases Shenmue 3 (it's gonna happen, dammit!). Hell, even an emulated Shenmue looks better than half the games on the Wii.

[Chozo Ghost]

I'm telling you, the Wii 1 could have an awesome Dreamcast emulator written for it. Anyone ever see Bleem! for Dreamcast? If some non-affiliated developers can get a full-speed (albeit with limited compatibility) PlayStation emulator on the Dreamcast, then surely Sega could easily develop a full-speed Dreamcast emulator for the Wii. Hell, Daedalus 64 runs several games perfectly on the PSP.

I remember that, and how pissed off Sony was about it...

But I'm not sure it would really work, though, because somehow I'm thinking the leap from the PS1 to the Dreamcast is greater than the leap from the Dreamcast to the Wii. That said, the Wii is a more powerful piece of hardware than the Dreamcast for sure, but is it powerful enough? From what I understand about emulation, the host system needs to be a great deal more powerful than the system it is emulating. A system that's on par with, or only slightly more powerful than its client system probably won't cut it. The GC was more powerful than the DC, and we know the Wii is more powerful even than that, but is it enough?

[BranDonk Kong]

It depends on the type of hardware doing the emulated, the type of hardware being emulated, the skill of the coder, availability of documentation, etc. Lets not forget that the Dreamcast and the Wii both use PowerPC processors, which would be a huge benefit.

[Kytim89]

I do not know that much about emulation, but the wii could possibly emulate the Dreamcast with no problems, but the biggest obstacle is memory. The disc based games carry much more memory and would take up a lot of space on the SD. I imagine nothing less than an 8GB or 16 SD card could accomadate the DReamcast games. That is why the PS3 and 360 is getting the Dreamcast because of the large amount of storage memory at their disposal.

Hypothetically, let's assume that the wii 2 does have the ability to emulate the dreamcast. I know the the Saturn is hard to emulate, but could SEGA repurpose the older Saturn  and then emulate them as dreamcast games?

[NWR_insanolord]

That wouldn't work. The Saturn and Dreamcast used very different hardware.

[Chozo Ghost]

I do not know that much about emulation, but the wii could possibly emulate the Dreamcast with no problems, but the biggest obstacle is memory. The disc based games carry much more memory and would take up a lot of space on the SD. I imagine nothing less than an 8GB or 16 SD card could accomadate the DReamcast games. That is why the PS3 and 360 is getting the Dreamcast because of the large amount of storage memory at their disposal.

Hypothetically, let's assume that the wii 2 does have the ability to emulate the dreamcast. I know the the Saturn is hard to emulate, but could SEGA repurpose the older Saturn  and then emulate them as dreamcast games?

No offense, but you have no clue what you're talking about (as usual). The Dreamcast games ran on CD-Roms, which have a maximum capacity of 700MB. While that is far more than, say, an N64 game, its still perfectly manageable on even a 1 or 2 GB SD card. And considering many games probably didn't even use all that space, and that much of that space was taken up by things like FMV which can be taken out or compressed, the total size could be made much smaller.

And as Insanolord said, the Saturn and Dreamcast were completely different pieces of hardware. Sega threw reverse compatibility completely out the window (come to think of it, they neglected reverse compatibility with every system they ever made), which was one of the main reasons Sega was forced out of the hardware business, but that's another story...

[Kytim89]

I do not know that much about emulation, but the wii could possibly emulate the Dreamcast with no problems, but the biggest obstacle is memory. The disc based games carry much more memory and would take up a lot of space on the SD. I imagine nothing less than an 8GB or 16 SD card could accomadate the DReamcast games. That is why the PS3 and 360 is getting the Dreamcast because of the large amount of storage memory at their disposal.

Hypothetically, let's assume that the wii 2 does have the ability to emulate the dreamcast. I know the the Saturn is hard to emulate, but could SEGA repurpose the older Saturn  and then emulate them as dreamcast games?

No offense, but you have no clue what you're talking about (as usual). The Dreamcast games ran on CD-Roms, which have a maximum capacity of 700MB. While that is far more than, say, an N64 game, its still perfectly manageable on even a 1 or 2 GB SD card. And considering many games probably didn't even use all that space, and that much of that space was taken up by things like FMV which can be taken out or compressed, the total size could be made much smaller.

Let me just say that I resent that. Second, if the virtual console were loaded up with a bunch of 700 MB games eventually it would get filled up. Two 700 MB games puts the data over one gigabyte. Factor in that there would be atleast ten to twelve Dreamcast games on the VC service. There is just no way for these games to be stored without a lot of memory.
 
 

[broodwars]

I do not know that much about emulation, but the wii could possibly emulate the Dreamcast with no problems, but the biggest obstacle is memory. The disc based games carry much more memory and would take up a lot of space on the SD. I imagine nothing less than an 8GB or 16 SD card could accomadate the DReamcast games. That is why the PS3 and 360 is getting the Dreamcast because of the large amount of storage memory at their disposal.

Hypothetically, let's assume that the wii 2 does have the ability to emulate the dreamcast. I know the the Saturn is hard to emulate, but could SEGA repurpose the older Saturn  and then emulate them as dreamcast games?

No offense, but you have no clue what you're talking about (as usual). The Dreamcast games ran on CD-Roms, which have a maximum capacity of 700MB. While that is far more than, say, an N64 game, its still perfectly manageable on even a 1 or 2 GB SD card. And considering many games probably didn't even use all that space, and that much of that space was taken up by things like FMV which can be taken out or compressed, the total size could be made much smaller.

And as Insanolord said, the Saturn and Dreamcast were completely different pieces of hardware. Sega threw reverse compatibility completely out the window (come to think of it, they neglected reverse compatibility with every system they ever made), which was one of the main reasons Sega was forced out of the hardware business, but that's another story...

Actually, Dreamcast games ran on GD-Roms (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GD-ROM), which have a maximum capacity of 1.2 GB (significantly larger than the size of a CD-Rom).  What was that about you having "more of a clue" about the specs than him?   : :

That said, I think that if we managed to get Turbo Grafix games on the VC, which used disc-based media, they could probably release Dreamcast games on the service.  Space is a serious consideration, though, without a high-capacity SD card.

[ThePerm]

yeah they were GD roms, although you could compress and port games to 700 mb cd-roms if you were pirating thief. You would suffer fmv and audio quality loss, but you could still play the game at 70% the data size. Lossless Real time decompression wasn't as possible back then, so there would be huge uncompressed videos eating CD space. The Wii could emulate Dreamcast, but theres no where to store the games on your system....well that is unless they make wiiware remakes where theres no fmvs and everything is ran in real time. Only 3 out of 10 games would have fmv quality you couldn't replicate in real time on the Wii. If thats not possible theres real time decompression, and or real time decompression + lowered video quality standards. It would just be easier to release a port, but few games need to be ported because they were already ported to Gamecube. Sega needs to get their **** together and release Shenmue games on Wii, I think as far as style of game Wii fans would appreciate it the most.

[TJ Spyke]

come to think of it, they neglected reverse compatibility with every system they ever made)

Not quite true, they did sell an adapter for the Genesis that let you play Master System games on the system. It doesn't matter that the Master System sold like **** and that the adapter was very expensive.

[Kytim89]

come to think of it, they neglected reverse compatibility with every system they ever made)

Not quite true, they did sell an adapter for the Genesis that let you play Master System games on the system. It doesn't matter that the Master System sold like **** and that the adapter was very expensive.

So it seems that Chozo Ghost is the one who does not know he is talking about. 

[Chozo Ghost]

come to think of it, they neglected reverse compatibility with every system they ever made)

I was wrong, but that doesn't make you better than me, because you were wrong to. But since the GD-ROM format is based on CD-ROM I wasn't very far from the mark.
Not quite true, they did sell an adapter for the Genesis that let you play Master System games on the system. It doesn't matter that the Master System sold like **** and that the adapter was very expensive.

So it seems that Chozo Ghost is the one who does not know he is talking about. 

[Kytim89]

@ Chozo Ghost
 
What I originally stated was that the Dreamcast games would take up large amounts of space even for an SD card because they are disc based games. I originally figured that the dreamcast games were about 1 GB a piece and I was fairly close to the truth with the GD-rom.
 
This might be the reason why Nintendo did not allow Dreamcast emulation on the wii because it would consume large amounts of memory even with the SD card channel. One might wonder "why Can't I buy a higher capacity card?" You would need atleast an 8 GB SD card and 32 GB SD card at the most. Take it from a 16 GB is about fifty dollars new at wal-mart.
 
Dreamcast emulation on the wii will either come fourth with the wii 2 in a few years when flash memory is even cheaper, or it might happen with the current wii system, but I do not see this happening with out higher capacity SD cards getting cheaper or an external hard drive support for the wii.
 
On a side note, if you have a problem with me or the way I write on this forum take it up with the administrators and let them inform me on how to write and report properly on this forum. Piece.

[ThePerm]

also to note, that even with a higher capacity disk size..some Dreamcast games still aren't very huge file sized, same with Saturn games

[Kytim89]

I would wager that both Saturn and Dreamcast games are no less than 500 MB each. Although they could compress the files FMV and audio, but the whole point of the virtual console service is to relive the older games in authenticity. As a consumer I am becoming becoming very comfortable with DLC and having all my games in digital form as long as the companis I buy from take care of me when my DLC is lost or damaged.

[NWR_insanolord]

You would lose that wager. There are plenty of games on both systems, especially the Saturn, that are less than that.

[Kytim89]

What is the toal file size limit on the wii imposed by Nintendo?