@yuzokoshiro Always go for what you love. That way when your time comes to move on from this world, there are no regrets. Leave nothing on the table big homie.
Ancient Corp. began with development on Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Master System.
After that, from the iconic Mega Drive era all the way to the Dreamcast, I was fortunate to remain involved with Sega hardware development.
None of this would have been possible without the consoles designed by Mr. Hideki Sato.
I am deeply grateful for everything he created.
Sending my thoughts to his family and loved ones. Thank you for everything.
I've been occasionally asked about Earthion for MD/Gen lately, so here’s a quick update.
I know many of you are waiting to hear about the pre-order start date. Release plans are still on track for this year. Nothing has changed so far.
Once the ROM is finalized, there are still various verification and production preparation steps, and since the kind of production infrastructure we had back in the day is no longer available, everything simply takes longer.
In the meantime, we’re also working on platform-specific fixes and updates for the modern console versions.
Things are moving forward steadily. Thank you for your patience, and please hang in there just a little longer 🙏
JNMARTIN HAS BROUGHT US CHRISTMAS EARLY THIS YEAR!!! His port of Star Fox 64 to the Sega Dreamcast is officially complete and was just released! Here's 9+ minutes of spliced direct hardware captures, featuring footage from every mission running on an actual physical DC at 480p!
I have to say, the game feels incredibly smooth and responsive on the DC and controls extremely well. Also... as you can see, at twice the resolution with progressive scan, she looks gorgeous even with my cheap-ass HDMI cables and USB capture card.
While jnmartin had the game up and running on DC within (literally) 2 days, there was an enormous amount of time and energy invested into faithfully recreating the experience graphically, implementing various bugfixes, and hunting for performance gainz... the man has never been satisfied with anything short of amazing with his ports, and it really shows.
Like his Mario Kart 64 port, Star Fox 64 is also using my SH4ZAM library to hardware accelerate the math and linear algebra routines for DC; however, unlike last time, he's gotten so good at performance gainz that I barely did anything at all on that side, other than writing a few little inline SH4 ASM routines to cover some operations that I didn't already accelerate within the API... Suffice to say, though, that everything from the vertex TnL pipeline, to audio decoding, to gameplay-related trigonometry routines has been optimized for the SH4's FPU...
jnmartin even got to bust out the SH4's MMU to accelerate the translation of of the segmented address scheme used by the game on N64 (which was apparently some suggested memory management model in the N64 docs) into the DC's virtual address space--which previously had to be done in software... So even more gainz! Sorry, though... but pretty sure this is why the game won't work in the Flycast emulator currently... whoops! 🤣
Shout-out to @darcag3nt for contributing DREAMCAST RUMBLE PACK SUPPORT (among other things) to the release. Rumble support has historically been a pain-point within our KallistiOS homebrew DC SDK, as many 3rd party rumble packs are non-compliant and either do what they want with certain rumble commands or screw up the entire maple bus when they receive something they have decided not to fully implement... Great job getting that shit sorted out and tested with so many packs. All of my exotic (and cheapo) 3rd party rumble devices that I was able to test with seemed to work great!
Finally, lets give @SonicDcer a round of applause for being the lead dude behind the original N64 decompilation--as it was his original work that allowed for any of this to even be possible. He also continued to offer support and advice throughout the entire porting process, like a total chad.
Here's the link to the official GitHub repo with instructions for building a Dreamcast image from a StarFox N64 ROM:
https://t.co/vRfzhwVEuQ
The New Universal WebUI v2.0 for the MemCard PRO (MCP002), MemCard PRO2 and MemCard PRO GC is now live at https://t.co/ToA1q6gSsa
Make sure to update your device's firmware and follow the instructions on https://t.co/sLrvTnjPZR
It comes with a new card linking feature as well!
Seeing the replies, I realize how many people around the world miss arcade games. I feel the same. So many arcades are gone now, even here in Japan.
I grew up with arcades and have so many incredible memories.
My modest dream is to open an arcade one day, collecting games and cabinets and playing them together in a space filled with nostalgic sounds and atmosphere.
Final Update: Latest RT4K Firmware adds 'Energy Normalization' to the classic scanline system.
Now you get the best of both words: softer more "CRT-like blending" AND restoration of brightness.
Available on RT4K V1.9.9.7: https://t.co/USMIIBhGdH
Happy New Years Everyone!