It’s a shame the proprietary nature of the Dreamcast’s GD-ROMs makes it impractical for us to actually have a disc-based solution for Dreamcast support with official games.
As far as I can see, there’s no real solution to this?
It's been ages since I've looked into this, so my memory is probably bad on the details, but my understanding is that GD-ROM is very close to standard CDs in most respects, and can even be read in some PC optical drives with the right procedure (which I think involved either hacked firmware or hot-swapping between a specially crafted CD-R and the GD-ROM, to trick the drive into reading the high-density area). The main CD interface that Sega used is an off-the-shelf Oak Technology chip, but not driven by stock firmware. The high-density area was in a second session that was not linked in the first session, but rather was at a fixed offset that the firmware knew to look for. The high-density area basically worked by spinning the disc at half the speed that would normally be used for the interface chip. Since the disc was recorded the same way, the signal coming off of it looks exactly like a regular CD signal (maybe with a bit worse SNR).
I love these so much. The attention to the detail. Digging in as deep as possible - but making the content accessible. Fantastic stuff. Evokes a lot of "Captain Dissillusion" vibes to me (which is a really, really good thing).
My sweet dude, MAME can run IRIX even! For years i longed for an IRIX emulator and it was there all along. It's not oerfect of course, but MAME overall is just plain great.
This was a great read. I highly recommend that “newer” programmers (used to multi-GHz, multi-GB, multi-core) read this and really try to understand the lessons of low-resource optimization.
I think it shows how much raw computing power we have now and how much we take it for granted. “What do you mean it couldn’t rotate sprites? Why didn’t they just rotate the sprites?”
The SNES SF2 games have a similar-ish code for various things. I think the first release lets you enter a code to play the same character as both players, or disable special moves. Turbo has a special code to increase the turbo stars and you can also disable special codes.
I really love these articles.