Halo: Combat Evolved Can Now Run On The SEGA Dreamcast

It was only last week when we wrote about Halo: Combat Evolved running on the Nintendo 64; the story went crazy on Reddit, and many Halo enthusiasts took it upon themselves to bless their console with this game, physically. Now, another retro console has been blessed by the Master Chief, and that is the SEGA Dreamcast.

It really feels like Halo is taking over the "can it run Doom" trend recently, with many developers and AI-decompiling geeks trying to thumb it into any console they can these days. The Dreamcast is happily taking that thumb.

This is being developed by JiltedValkyrie and was shared on X with 20+ minutes of gameplay, and she's been "up all night working on performance" for this port as of today, trying to get it to work as flawlessly as possible. Though it's clear from the gameplay footage that this needs a lot of work, but its a good start and is somewhat playable if you don't mind lots of load time and frequent glitches/bugs. The gameplay shows the first level on the Pillar of Autumn, alongside some exploration of Halo itself.

Since this gameplay footage, there has been gained FPS during combat due to the dead enemies and Marines being despawned to free up CPU cycles, keeping skinned vertices from eating up precious computation, states Jilted Valkyrie. She also made followers aware that the Dreamcast only has 200MHz of CPU, whereas the XBOX had 733MHz and a far superior GPU, making it difficult to squeeze out silky smooth framerates when so much is going on.

You might be wondering how this works on a Dreamcast controller, and well, it doesn't it will require a controller with dual joysticks, or you can use a mouse and keyboard instead, so that's the biggest caveat right now... apart from the graphical limitations that is, but it's a good start and no doubt JV is hard at work with AI assistance to get performance as good as she can before exploring more levels.

It's also high praise to the SEGA Dreamcast itself; it's truly a remarkable console that was ahead of its time, and now enthusiasts are wanting to take full advantage of that with modern ports that change the way we see and play the games that we love. Should it be a thing? Probably not, but we're in a magical time of Frankenstein ports for us all to try, for free, if we have our copies. We'll keep an eye on this one moving forward.