It's 2024, we’re now into July, and the SEGA Dreamcast is still not dead. Critics are baffled. "It was supposed to have been declared dead in 2001, dammit!" - some PlayStation 2 owner, probably. In fact, there's been so much Dreamcast news recently that I've found it hard to keep up with it all, so in an effort to convince you all that I'm still in the loop (perhaps not sanity-wise), I've rounded up all the best items of recent news into one post. So, here's everything that has happened in the world of Dreamcast recently...
Indie and Homebrew
A huge breakthrough in Dreamcast development...
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| Credit: Orc Face Games |
A few weekends ago, Ross Kilgariff, the Dundee-based maestro behind the highly anticipated Dreamcast indie HarleQuest and head of Orc Face Games, dropped the Junkyard a DM about a big breakthrough in Dreamcast development which will result in a significant performance upgrade for new games being developed for our beloved platform. Take it away, Ross...
"We (Orc Face Games) recently hired TapamN to get the HarleQuest! engine running as fast as possible. For those who don't know, he's one of the best programmers in the unofficial Dreamcast scene, with over 20 years of experience and he's helping elevate everyone's understanding of the platform.
While optimising the code, he found a critical bug in the operating system that's used as a basis for many unofficial projects including HarleQuest!, Simulant Engine, Spiral 3D and more. This operating system, KallistiOS, is a community-driven effort to provide re-usable code that makes Dreamcast development easier for everyone.
The issue is quite technical but I'll try to keep it simple. There's a special kind of memory inside the CPU called the cache. It's way faster than RAM, but also way smaller (only 16KB in the Dreamcast's case). Normally the cache works automatically and doesn't need any special programming - it just stores things you've accessed recently so it's faster to get them next time. However, the Dreamcast's CPU has a special feature called OCRAM that lets you take control of half the cache manually. This can let you get great performance, but you need to actually program it. It's not on auto-pilot anymore.
The bug is that since November last year, OCRAM mode was being enabled by default in KallistiOS. This meant every game was saying "give me manual control over half of the cache" on startup, then simply not using it - in effect being left with only 8KB of automatic cache instead of the full 16KB.
As soon as we made the KallistiOS community aware of this they got straight to it and fixed the bug within a few hours. Falco Girgis identified the cause and worked with darc and BBHoodsta to coordinate the fix. The developer responsible for the Doom 64 port (jnmartin84) verified the fix and reported that with this change along with another optimisation, the busiest areas of the game don't chug any more and play much more smoothly.
On one hand, it's unfortunate that the bug occurred in the first place, but the benefit is that all those cool 3D demos and games we've been seeing recently will be able to pull the latest version of KallistiOS and might get an automatic speed boost.
Hopefully this is one step closer to seeing more high-quality games on the platform. I have a good feeling about 2025."