this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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Half-Life Was 95% Ready for Dreamcast (timemachiner.io)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 68 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I downloaded an ISO of it a while ago and played through maybe third of the game. I found it to be very playable. People always mention the long load times, but it's worth mentioning that long load times were much more common back then. (Although Half-Life on DC was even longer than usual.)

Also, I hate to be nit picky, but the blog post linked here manages to be weirdly wrong about two things and it's barely one paragraph long, lol.

Half-Life is one of the most successful video games of the early 2000s.

Ahhh, 1998. One of the best years of the early 2000s.

Half-Life was everywhere... except one notable place: Sega's Dreamcast. It has been a mystery as to what happened with a game destined to have a port on every possible platform.

Half-Life was a PC exclusive until the PS2 port in November 2001, ten months after the Dreamcast was discontinued. The PC and PS2 versions are still the only official versions to this day. Half-Life is not known for being on every platform. Was the author thinking of Doom, one of the best games of the mid 70s?

[–] skullone 23 points 5 months ago

The ai doesn't bother fact checking.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Doom, one of the best games of the mid 70s?

Who else here remembers late nights slaying demons to Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge over Troubled Water?"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I mean... Bridge Over Troubled Water does kinda sound like it could be a level in Doom.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

You are correct about the release year. If one were being pedantic I suppose it would be correct to say that thanks to multiplayer and mods, Half-Life was a popular PC game/engine all throughout the early 2000s. Come to think of it, there are probably still people playing CS 1.6 today.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Come to think of it, there are probably still people playing CS 1.6 today.

Whoa, turns out to be a lot of them. 14,400 as of a few minutes ago! https://steamcharts.com/app/10

That's as many as the two most recent Battlefield games have combined right now. Battlefield 2042 currently around 8,000 and Battlefield V at 6,000. I'm sure console players would boost the Battlefield numbers quite a bit, but still. That's pretty cool.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Semi-related, but to this day I remain impressed they got Half Life 2 ported to the original Xbox.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Why? It was just a PC on the inside with a slimmed down Windows 2000 variant as the OS. Storage concerns aside, it was probably a very straightforward port, just rip out the Steam bindings, and it probably ran pretty immediately.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Right, architecturally it was probably pretty simple. But the minimum system requirements for HL:2 versus the Xbox's hardware is pretty stark:

Half-Life 2 minimum requirements for PC:

CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.00GHz
Memory: 512 MB
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 6100

Xbox System Specs:

CPU:  Intel Pentium III 733 MHz
Memory:  64 MB (shared with GPU)
Graphics:  Custom NVidia based on Geforce 3

Edit: Definitely meaning the original Xbox and not the 360. Was one of the last games I bought for the original and still have it :)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

As a point of comparison, 360 has 512MB RAM. HL2 was targeting PCs comparable to PS3/360, but somehow they got it working on an Xbox.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Makes you wonder what corners they cut to get it functional.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

So playable frame rate was the main corner cut.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/c66hfqw4SKc

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

The 00s Doom reboot shares a similar story, but for the 360!

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago

Noooo, it was not that simple. Search MVG hl2 port on YouTube and watch and see why the port is actually very impressive

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's not at all how porting a game works.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

No, this would make it much simpler. No translations, differing architectures, or OS bindings to struggle though. Asset and compilation tweaks, and controller bindings, and that's a large portion of the work.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

You have zero idea what goes on when porting a game, do you? It's ok, not everyone does. Understanding you can learn is a good thing.

Watch this before replying, here:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c66hfqw4SKc&pp=ygUHTVZHIGhsMg%3D%3D

[–] sorghum -4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Half life predates steam

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Yes, but HL2 does not.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The prototype is out there if anyone with a Dreamcast wants to check it out.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

There's a Half-Life mod that brings it to PC, along with one that ports the Decay co-op expansion.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I swear I downloaded and played Half Life for the DC back when I had the machine. I think it was Blue Shift which was originally going to be on the DC first (as an exclusive?).

It was perfectly fine to play but I guess due to hardware limitations, the areas in which you played weren't that large and loading times off the CD was quite slow.

[–] mindbleach 3 points 5 months ago

I got a finger-wag e-mail for pirating the ISO over my college network.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I felt the same way. I could've sworn I played it on Dreamcast a few years ago, but when I asked my buddy (who's a giant gamer) I was corrected that it never hit DC.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

The Blue Shift expansion definitely was released onto the internet, but the loading times put me off playing the game.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

8D hehehehe so much goodness