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Half-Life Was 95% Ready for Dreamcast (timemachiner.io)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by macstainless@discuss.tchncs.de to c/retrogaming@lemmy.world

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[-] ptz@dubvee.org 28 points 3 months ago

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

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world 10 points 3 months ago

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.

[-] ptz@dubvee.org 36 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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 :)

[-] magic_lobster_party@kbin.run 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.

[-] mihnt@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 months ago

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

[-] altima_neo@lemmy.zip 4 points 3 months ago

https://youtu.be/c66hfqw4SKc

[-] Blackmist@feddit.uk 4 points 3 months ago

So playable frame rate was the main corner cut.

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[-] Chee_Koala@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

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

[-] TheDrunkard@lemmy.world 19 points 3 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

[-] TachyonTele@lemm.ee 4 points 3 months ago

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

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world -1 points 3 months ago

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.