Amazing work! The Dreamcast was and is my favourite console, I still have many great memories from having it all those years ago. So much so that I made this [1] when messing about with D3.js
It's mentioned in the article, but it's great that the emulation of original Xbox games has improved such that many games are now playable. I remember checking back every year to see if I could finally play Jet Set Radio Future (JSRF), and one day eventually being able to get in the game and play! It's hinted in the article but I look forward to the day when JSRF has better emulation. They've done great work to get it this far already!
It's a shame JSRF wasn't re-released on Steam like JSR... also a shame that they couldn't use the original soundtrack when re-releasing Crazy Taxi, so I still prefer to emulate on Dreamcast despite owning it on Steam.
I keep my original Xbox just to play JSRF still, but I would like to play it in HD someday. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is looking real good though as a spiritual successor if you haven't seen it yet.
Sold on the Xbox a long time ago - back when I regularly moved from flat to flat it became a hassle to take all that stuff with me! I’ll check out Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, thanks for the tip!
Also have an original Xbox but it’s a v1.6, in which MS managed to break JSRF and a few other games due to using a different video encoding chip. Very annoying (though on the plus side, no leaking clock capacitor). Thanks for pointing out BRC.
What I'd love to see is a reissue of Phantasy Star Online. I loved that game, and it was super ahead for its time. Sadly, PSO2 seems to have really strayed away from the originals formula.
I still remember getting my Dreamcast and getting Sega GT. My friends were playing Gran Turismo and I had Sega GT and boy I loved it more than Gran Turismo.
I played Sega GT and hated it. I thought the controls weren't great and the graphics bad compared to it's counterparts.
I thought the true gems were Test Drive Lemans and Ferrari 355 challenge.
Test Drive Lemans was a Great racing game with some of the best graphics on the Dreamcast. IGN did a story on it back in 2001 I believe and the Melbourne studio said they programmed it in Assembly to extract as much as they could out of the Dreamcast.
F355 was not slouch either. There are other great racing games on the Dreamcast but I can't personally say Sega GT was one of them.
Didn't they basically take the arcade version and put it on a disc? I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the arcade hardware was very similar to the Dreamcasts hardware so it took comparatively very little effort to port it over.
The arcade version ran on 3 Naomi's which powered 3 screens. Those boards also had more ram than the Dreamcast.
It was still not have been a straight forward port. The games also ran at 60fps on the Dreamcast.
Sega GT was so fun. I found an easy way to make loads of cash early on, and by the time I had to actually improve my driving skills, I was far more interested in discovering and ranking the easiest ways to drive a kei car to financial glory
I’m of the opposite opinion. I hated MSR, it’s looked cool but the all the tracks seemed to have stupid right angle bends.
I found most of the Dreamcast racers seem to fall short in significant ways. Whereas the Saturn had games with more polish. Which is weird because the Saturn was not a good console for fast 3D graphics, technically speaking. Manx TT is up there as one of the best motorcycle racers imo
I vaguely remember the right angle bends - but don't remember taking issue with them. Though - I was much younger and perhaps not as critical! Manx TT SuperBike was good
Burned media (e.g. GD-Rs) prototypes tend to show up on eBay from time to time, but there's a lot of private selling going on too in forums like https://www.obscuregamers.com/builddb/
With Dreamcast and Xbox you can also find builds on the internal HDD of the development kits from the last time they were used. That's one of the things that makes Katanas/XDKs sell for so much.
It's mentioned in the article, but it's great that the emulation of original Xbox games has improved such that many games are now playable. I remember checking back every year to see if I could finally play Jet Set Radio Future (JSRF), and one day eventually being able to get in the game and play! It's hinted in the article but I look forward to the day when JSRF has better emulation. They've done great work to get it this far already!
It's a shame JSRF wasn't re-released on Steam like JSR... also a shame that they couldn't use the original soundtrack when re-releasing Crazy Taxi, so I still prefer to emulate on Dreamcast despite owning it on Steam.
[1] https://datacrayon.com/posts/visualisation/visualisation-wit...