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Development => Consoles => Topic started by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 20, 2017, 07:03:19 AM

Title: Play Minecraft on your Sega Dreamcast
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 20, 2017, 07:03:19 AM
A few years ago, @Vogtinator released crafti, a 3D Minecraft clone for the TI-Nspire CX featuring many elements from the original game. Then last year, it was ported to the GCW0 by @gameblabla . However, after the GCW0, he has now ported it to the Sega Dreamcast console, which has quite a following among homebrew developers. His DC port of the game has recently received a lot of following and made the headline on various Sega Dreamcast news websites and communities:

http://www.thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk/2017/01/crafti-homebrew-minecraft-clone-for.html
http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/threads/1158397-Crafti-A-Homebrew-Minecraft-Clone-For-Dreamcast-Released
http://www.dreamcast.es/news.php?readmore=810

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdX4Z4GK_8k

As you can see in the video above, despite this game console featuring only 16 MB of RAM, crafti Dreamcast edition runs fairly smoothly. Good job to gameblabla for the port and of course Vogtinator for the original version of crafti!

Download link: https://gameblabla.nl/files/crafti-dreamcast.zip
Discussion: https://codewalr.us/index.php?topic=1354.msg51131#msg51131
Title: Re: Play Minecraft on your Sega Dreamcast
Post by: gameblabla on January 20, 2017, 07:29:15 AM
Yeah, good thing you mentioned the Dreamcast's small amount of RAM, as crafti was taking a little over 16 Mb of RAM and some of the graphics were corrupted.
I actually had to remove some of the text overlays due to RAM issues. (it's also the reason why it only has sound effects and no music)

Many thanks to @Vogtinator for the game, releasing its source code, as well as his fantasic programming skills.
Because believe me, you're a refreshing change compared to some proprietary devs... (see postal's source code as an example)
It's the reason why the GCW0 and DC ports are even possible. (porting Minetest to both consoles was out of question)

Hopefully i can find the motivation to clean up the sauce so i can get it merged upstream.
Title: Re: Play Minecraft on your Sega Dreamcast
Post by: novenary on January 22, 2017, 08:46:11 AM
While I understand that it was a tight fit, I find it funny that RAM size is the only metric used to compare the Dreamcast's performance to the Nspire. Even without the GPU, the SH-4 CPU is by design much faster clock for clock than the Nspire's arm9, which is a low power CPU. If you factor in the extra hardware features like DMA (likely used by libc for things like memcpy) and a floating point unit (not sure if crafti uses FP), the DC is clearly at an advantage here. :P

Of course they're both nothing compared to the best console ever, the GameCube. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Title: Re: Play Minecraft on your Sega Dreamcast
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 22, 2017, 10:32:36 PM
I guess low RAM constraints can impair some projects or efforts to port programs for newer platforms to lower-end platforms, but yeah we really have to take in account the lack of a GPU in calculators. This is why for example even simple scrolling games will not run at 60 FPS on a TI-84 Plus CE, despite having a CPU that is much faster than the NES and way more RAM.
Title: Re: Play Minecraft on your Sega Dreamcast
Post by: novenary on January 22, 2017, 10:45:28 PM
Indeed, though I doubt that this port uses the GPU in the DC.
DMA does help a lot with scrolling though, as long as you have something else to do while it's copying.
Title: Re: Play Minecraft on your Sega Dreamcast
Post by: Dream of Omnimaga on January 23, 2017, 05:10:47 PM
Yeah true. In any case it's awesome to see Minecraft run on old consoles. While the game has simple graphics per 2011 standards, it's actually more demanding than it seems like due to what kind of game it is. I wonder if porting it to the Wii would be easy?