A question

[Elven6]

Well I heard the Dreamcast console was easy to program, but if you look at modding between the PSP and the Dreamcast the PSP wins. Most of those PSP things look pretty good aswell, and the Dreamcast has been out for 6-7 years while the PSP has only been out for 2!

So is it really easy to program or are their just to many limitations?

[Christuserloeser]

Compared to most platforms it's easy to develop for the DC, but it's still hard enough.

The PSP is new and the original games suck (in terms of mobility at least) so homebrew for it gets more attention in the biz, that's likely why there are so many new coders joined devvin for the PSP.

Anyway, there still are some things that make devvin for the Dreamcast more interesting:
1. You can release your Dreamcast game commercially - thanks to the legal KOS dev enviroment.
2. You can be sure people will appreciate your efforts in porting/coding a game or emulator.
3. The Dreamcast is much more powerful than the PSP.


There are Dreamcast homebrew games which blow away any PSP homebrew out there - take Drill or Alice Dreams as an example.

That there appearently has been next to none interest in original Dreamcast homebrew lately is caused by three factors:

1. Most people working on new original games have gone quite because they're developing these for commercial releases:
http://www.dreamcast-scene.com/index...ain/ComingSoon

2. Demos for these ambitious games won't be released. At best they're submitted for the DreamOn Contest, where the last two years the results were not made public.

3. DCEvolution.net (and this includes me) was not able to release a compilation of those homebrewn games that are available due to some agreement with MetaFox who is working on publishing the DreamOn magazine which will include the Sandman Demo Disk. The agreement was that we wouldn't release something that would have a similar content than the Sandman. - Due to the DreamOn project taking such a long time, we couldn't and still cannot release a compilation of homebrew games for Dreamcast...
This might sound like it would not be an important point, but considering that DCEvolution compilations reach a much wider audience than a single game release (10.000 vs 100 downloads) it surely is one a valid point.

Anyway, you can find a nice selection of games listed here:
http://www.dreamcast-scene.com/index.php/Main/Scene

[Elven6]

Well I hope things improve, the Dreamcast is a good console and hopefully we could see more 3D homebrew in the future.

[pibs]

also the fact that psp is portable and just thinking of a snes on the go or a genesis etc just blows peoples minds.

[Christuserloeser]

Hm, last time I checked, these emulators were still much slower than the ones for Dreamcast, where Genesis/MegaDrive emulation now has been perfected with GenesisPlusDC but SNES emulation still is at about 90% speedwise.

Well I hope things improve, the Dreamcast is a good console and hopefully we could see more 3D homebrew in the future.

3D homebrew is a rare thing, that's true. Exceptions would be DCastle, Revolver, Echo's Quest, Pacman 3D, Brkout, etc.

[SSaxdude]

The PSP is way more powerful than the Dreamcast: 333 mhz vs. 200 mhz.

[Christuserloeser]

CPU-wise. The Dreamcast's PowerVR is much more powerful than the PSPs GPU.

[quzar]

Also, the architechtures are completely different, so you can't compare them that way. I couldn't find a rating in mips for the PSP's cpu, but I did find it's flops rating. MIPS refers to Millions of Instructions per Second (different from the model name of the psp's processor which also happens to be MIPS). FLOPS stands for FLoating-point Operations Per Second.

Dreamcast's SH-4: 360 Mips 1400 MFlops
PSP's mips proc: ??? mips 20 MFlops

Now I'm sure that isn't right (it's just the only number I could find online), but either way, I doubt the psp could perform anywhere near 1.4 billion floating point operations per second.

edit: i just found an official sony pre-release statement claiming 2.6gflops for the floating point unit, but we all know how much sony exaggerates