When I woke up this morning, I never thought that I would have been met with the news that Sonic Mania, the 2017 game for the Nintnedo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and title that many of you will have played on steam, would have been ported to the Dreamcast. This is why I love my job; all over the world in many different time zones, Retro Gamers are working to created demakes, ports, mods, and the general type of wizardry that Gandalf would be proud of, all of which blows my mind on a regular basis.
Yes, we’ve now got a port of a game that came out in 2017 running on a console that came out in 1998, a console that, while recently looking through Metacritic, I read a comment a young gamer had written saying that ‘they didn’t know what a Dreamcast was’ which made me feel ancient.
When I told my colleague Jason over on our sister site Card Gamer about the news over text this morning, he replied, ‘The Dreamcast was so ahead of it’s time’, and I wholeheartedly agree. It was too advanced for the time with too many features that we weren’t ready for, and combined with Sega imploding from within, it never reached it’s true potential.
As you can see in this excited tweet from Sega Dreamcast SDK developer Falco Girgis, he and @SonicFreak94, aka Michael Fadely, have got the game running incredibly smoothly on the Dreamcast, using some terminology that looks like it’s come straight out of the matrix. Girgis says that the port is running thanks to ‘the latest SH-ELF-GCC14.1.0 toolchain, running on the tip of the KallistiOS SDK’s master branch, streaming in assets from the virtual filesystem over the network, capturing stdout/stderr from the DC’.
If that’s not enough techincal lingo, then how about adding in ‘an ICE with GCC14 getting [ticked] off over some stateful C++ lambda in the render path’. If you’re not sure of what Falco means by all this, then you won’t be alone. Just think about the fact that Sonic Mania actually has a Dreamcast port and how amazing it is, and we’re excited to see more from Falco and Michael have in store for us and getting this running on our own Dreamcasts sometime soon!
