Sega Nerds

Cryptic Allusion talks ‘Dreamcast’ with The Escapist

Posted by Graham. Filed under G, News, Retro. Tagged with Donk, Dreamcast, Fan Sites, Fan Stuff, Homebrew.

Ok this interview was put up a good week ago, but it has only recently come to my attention, and I feel that it should be (relatively) interesting to many Dreamcast fans, and homebrew enthusiasts.

Our good friends at Cryptic Allusion, (whom we have interviewed in the past), recently spoke to The Escapist about their involvement with the homebrew scene and a little bit about working on their upcoming Dreamcast game Donk.

Here are a few excerpts from the article:

TE: So how much access to the Dreamcast hardware did this community manage to figure out? Can you guys pretty much program a game that is as technically good as the kind that commercial developers made for the system?

DP: In some ways we are more advanced than the commercial development kits, but given my limited knowledge of what they can do, I can’t answer too definitively. Someone inside Sega once told me some of the Dreamcast engineers had looked at the [KallistiOS] code and were pretty impressed with it.

I think there’s certainly enough low-level tools to do a decent game now. But it comes down to the normal bottlenecks for developers on any platform: access to resources and just using the tools to push something out.

…TE: What do you think is the biggest challenge about programming the Dreamcast?

DP: The biggest challenge these days is, oddly enough, acquiring parts. The best tools to work with are a brand-new Dreamcast and a broadband adapter. Both are nearly impossible to obtain these days. Thankfully, I have a big stack of Dreamcasts to cannibalize as pieces if others die. [The Dreamcast] was a neat little machine, but - I hate to say it - not very durable in the long run.

At one time, I had built a “Frankenstein Dreamcast” with flash ROM, an IDE interface, and hooks for an ISA network adapter, though I never quite got around to building all the logic for that. It was a really neat project, but it just got to be too much of a time sink for me to really justify it for its own sake, especially as how I doubt anyone would’ve picked it up and mass-produced it for other developers.

From a technical standpoint, it’s a pretty powerful machine with some great tools out there now, but if you’re not up to par on your debugging and other hackery, you won’t get very far.

…

TE: Could you share some advice - technical or otherwise - with others who are interested in homebrewing for the Dreamcast?

RT: Learn C++!

For the full interview, check it out at The Escapist. And for more info on Cryptic Allusion, and their products, check out their main site and forums.