Author Archives: Multimedia Mike

RoQ on Dreamcast

I have been working on that challenge to play back video on the Sega Dreamcast. To review, I asserted that the RoQ format would be a good fit for the Sega Dreamcast hardware. The goal was to play 640×480 video at 30 frames/second. Short version: I have determined that it is possible to decode such video in real time. However, I ran into certain data rate caveats.

First off: Have you ever wondered if the Dreamcast can read an 80mm optical disc? It can! I discovered this when I only had 60 MB of RoQ samples to burn on a disc and a spindle full of these 210MB-capacity 80mm CD-Rs that I never have occasion to use.



New RoQ Library
There are open source RoQ decoders out there but I decided to write a new one. A few reasons: 1) RoQ is so simple that I didn’t think it would take too long; 2) it would be nice to have a RoQ library that is license-compatible (BSD-like) with the rest of the KallistiOS distribution; 3) the idroq.tar.gz distribution, while license-compatible, has enough issues that I didn’t want to correct it.

Thankfully, I was correct about the task not being too difficult: I put together a new RoQ decoder in short order. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that the part I had the most trouble with was properly converting YUV -> RGB.
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Playing Video on a Sega Dreamcast

Here’s an honest engineering question: If you were tasked to make compressed video play back on a Sega Dreamcast video game console, what video format would you choose? Personally, I would choose RoQ, the format invented for The 11th Hour computer game and later used in Quake III and other games derived from the same engine. This post explains my reasoning.

Video Background
One of the things I wanted to do when I procured a used Sega Dreamcast back in 2001 was turn it into a set-top video playback unit. This is something that a lot of people tried to do, apparently, to varying degrees of success. Interest would wane in a few years as it became easier and easier to crack an Xbox and install XBMC. The Xbox was much better suited to playing codecs that were getting big at the time, most notably MPEG-4 part 2 video (DivX/XviD).

The Dreamcast, while quite capable when it was released in 1999, was not very well-equipped to deal with an MPEG-type codec. I have recently learned that there are other hackers out there on the internet who are still trying to get the most out of this system. I was contacted for advice about how to make Theora perform better on the Dreamcast.
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Tele-Arena Lives On

Readers know I have a peculiar interest in taking apart video games and that I would rather study a game’s inner workings than actually play it. I take an interest on others’ efforts in this same area. It’s still in my backlog to take a closer look at Clone2727’s body of work. But I wanted to highlight my friend’s work on re-implementing a game called Tele-Arena.



Back In The Day
As some of you are likely aware, there was a dark age of online communication that predated the era of widespread internet access. This was known as “The BBS Age”. People dialed into these BBSes using modems that operated at abysmal transfer speeds and would communicate with other users, upload and download files, and play an occasional game.

BBS software evolved and perhaps the ultimate (and final) evolution was Galacticomm’s MajorBBS (MBBS). There were assorted games that plugged into the MBBS, all rendered in glorious color ANSI graphics. One of the most famous of these games was Tele-Arena (TA). TA was a multiplayer fantasy-themed text adventure game. Perhaps you could think of it as World of Warcraft, only rendered as interactive fiction instead of a rich 3D landscape. (Disclaimer: I might not be qualified to make that comparison since I have never experienced WoW firsthand, though I did play TA on and off about 17 years ago).

TA was often compared to multi-user dungeons — or MUDs — that were played by telneting into internet servers hosting games. Such comparisons were usually unfavorable as people who had experience with both TA and MUDs were sniffy elitists with internet access who thought they were sooooo much better than those filthy, BBS-dialing serfs.

Sorry, didn’t mean to open old wounds.

Modern Retelling of A Classic Tale
Anyway, my friend Ron Kinney is perhaps the world’s biggest fan of TA. So much so that he has re-implemented the engine in Java under the project name Ether. He’s in a similar situation as the ScummVM project in that, while the independent, open source engine is fair game for redistribution, it would be questionable to redistribute the original data files. That’s why he created an AreaBuilder application that generates independent game data files.

Ironically, you can also telnet into a server on which Ron hosts an instance of Tele-Arena (ironic in the sense that the internet/BBS conflict gets a little blurry).

I hope that one day Ron will regale us with the strangest tales from the classic TA days. My personal favorite was “Wrath of a Sysop.”