Dream Cast?

[Heavenhawk]

Any chance u think that nintendo will start having dream cast games on the VC?

 

[hal2814]

I doubt it. Most of the games from Sega consoles that are on the VC are Sega-creaed games. The vast majority of the Sega-built games worth saving from the Dreamcast was ported to the Gamecube. That being said, I'd love to get Power Stone and Power Stone 2 on the VC.

 

[sremick]

Not without a hard-drive add-on they won't. Dreamcast games are just too big, as the media held up to 1.2GB, more than twice the Wii's total internal memory. I'm not sure the Wii has the horsepower to emulate the Dreamcast anyway... it was a very complex system.

 

[stugots]

I agree I don't think it has the horsepower

 

[Foxy]

I doubt it very much so.

There was a thread on here exploring and debunking the idea.

 

[dakuda]

deleted

 

[stugots]

The Wii has shown me little better graphics then the gamecube as of yet but I guess time will tell, I'd like to see it but as you stated space if MORE of a concern then anything

 

[sremick]

You seriously don't think that the Wii has enough processing power to run Dreamcast games?

That's not what's being debated.

Let's straighten out the technical stuff here:

1) The Wii cannot play (directly) Dreamcast games because it is not a Dreamcast. It does not have Dreamcast circuitry/firmware/etc. The same as your PC can't natively play a Dreamcast game, as it isn't a Dreamcast either. It's a PC.

However, there's emulation, which is an extra layer of code. You get an emulator (which is written for whatever platform you are on) and it in-turn then runs the native code for the foreign platform. However, the emulation layer requires a lot of extra horsepower. So you need to be a lot MORE than a Dreamcast to emulate a Dreamcast. A lot more. Which leads us to...

2) The Wii most-likely does not have a sufficient amount of extra CPU power necessary to run an emulator which can then run Dreamcast games in playable realtime.

All the current Virtual Console games are emulator+game (and yes, you're getting a game-specific tweaked emulator with each game. 10 SNES games? 10 copies of the SNES emulator). So there's the issue of lacking the speed necessary to emulate a Dreamcast, plus the lacking the storage space for the huge games, which leads to a dead end.

 

[sagema]

Actually yes. They are relaunching games at $20 in compilation for the Wii. We can expect more of this in the future. As in the Wii playing DC games, Sega has shown no signs of making an emulator for DC games. Right now we are getting stuff like Resident Evil 4 Wii edition.

It's a real shame too, because DC's have a 5-10 year life span. Eventually your DC will die, so porting the CDs to the Wii would help a ton. It's all possible, but right now not something Sega is pursuing. It is something as simple as making an emulator, which would require somewhere around a 100kb-1mb download.

 

[sremick]

Actually, the size of the emulator can't be used as an accurate gauge of the required CPU horsepower necessary to run it (and the game) at realtime speed. Ridiculously-complex code can be written in a small amount of space.

Case in-point: Chankast, the Dreamcast emulator for the PC, requires a 1.4GHz machine with 256MB of RAM. Consider that the Wii only has a 729MHz CPU and 88MB RAM.

I don't think there's enough reserve CPU and RAM in the Wii above the Dreamcast's specs to handle the emulation layer.

 

[sagema]

The Wii can handle the DC. Hello! It's playing games like House of the Dead, Super Monkey Ball. Those are ports of DC games, almost direct ports. The GC could almost handle DC. The DC is very old, it came out before the PS2.

 

[Heavenhawk]

I sure hope so, because i would love to play some marvel vs capcom again

 

[DBloke]

I sure hope so, because i would love to play some marvel vs capcom again

Oh dear

Just because a company once held the rights to the gam dosnt mean that they still do
A la Alien vs preadator arcade

 

[hal2814]

The Wii can handle the DC. Hello! It's playing games like House of the Dead, Super Monkey Ball. Those are ports of DC games, almost direct ports. The GC could almost handle DC. The DC is very old, it came out before the PS2.

Porting is a VERY different thing that straight up emulation. Recompiling for a different target gives you actual machine code for that system. Sure there may be some loss of efficiency when you port something built for one system to another system due to system calls not having exact equivalents or those equivalents not behaving the same way but more or less you get code that's about as efficient as it was on the original platform.

Emulation requires taking the machine code built for another machine and running it on your native hardware. Without any sort of fancy trickery, that drastically reduces the efficiency of the emulated software since a conversion of some sort would have to happen at each instruction.

That doesn't mean I think the Wii can't emulate the Dreamcast. The MHZ argument is bunk since the PowerPC architecture tends to run more efficiently than any non-Core Intel processor and the Wii doesn't have a bloated OS, multi-process scheduling, or abstracting out different types of hardware to worry about. But it wouldn't be easy. With multi-platform programming getting easier and easier, it makes less sense to emulate when you have the source code.

 

[Atomheart]

I doubt it. Most of the games from Sega consoles that are on the VC are Sega-creaed games. The vast majority of the Sega-built games worth saving from the Dreamcast was ported to the Gamecube. That being said, I'd love to get Power Stone and Power Stone 2 on the VC.

Or Jet Grind Radio or Shenmue (what a FANTASTIC game...should have been a Nintendo game).

Anyway, like others have said, DC games won't work on the Wii due to the limited memory space on the Wii; one game alone would likely be more than the capacity of the Wii.