SC2 system requirements? / Dreamcast portage

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SC2 system requirements? / Dreamcast portage

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Topic: SC2 system requirements? / Dreamcast portage (Read 2052 times)

Black Monk
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SC2 system requirements? / Dreamcast portage
« on: July 18, 2003, 12:16:34 am »

Ok, so I wanted to start lookin' into what it might take to get SC2 ported over to the Dreamcast. I did some searching around and found this:

http://www.dcemulation.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=30946

Where exactly is the minimum system requirement getting bumped up? Is it overhead from Windows or something? Or OGG decompression? I did a quick search here for any discussion about this and didn't find anything.

It was an interesting point that the 3DO had really ghetto hardware compared to today's consoles and PCs:

http://web.njit.edu/~asm3072/video_games/3do.html
http://www.gamesurge.com/dreamcast/technical_pages/hardware_specs.shtml
http://sc2.sourceforge.net/info.html#faq

Is the memory footprint, for example, higher due to loading a bunch of OGGs up and decompressing them in memory before feeding them to the sound output device? Would streaming CDAudio tracks cut down on that? Is the CPU requirement higher due only to the OS overhead? Is it lower on, say, the Linux or BSD ports?

Or, as the FAQ says, should this subject just wait until the 1.0 release and hope that there's been some optimization in time for that version and then work from there?

Just curious. It's not like there's any need to port now now now or anything. Waiting's fine. I'm just wondering if there are any specific parts of the game that are now the resource hogs.


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meep-eep
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Re: SC2 system requirements? / Dreamcast portage
« Reply #1 on: July 18, 2003, 02:43:34 am »

Because we have more (memory, cpu) to work with, we can afford to trade efficiency for modularity, extensibility and portability.
It's a combination of the issues you mentioned.
The 3DO version had hardware for doing certain graphics things, the PC version probably had some assembly for the graphics routines.
Some audio files are played from memory instead of streamed from disk.
Some things will be optimised in the future, and some already have since 0.1.
The most important thing to redo is the resource system. Currently many resources are never released (though nothing is loaded double).


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Black Monk
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Re: SC2 system requirements? / Dreamcast portage
« Reply #2 on: July 24, 2003, 12:51:45 am »

Ah, ok, so there's tons of stuff loaded that doesn't need to be there for what's currently going on. Hopefully it'll be streamlined enough for a DC port someday. Thanks for the info, eh!


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