Blade Runner on Dreamcast

[CrashMidnick]

Hello there,

I am trying to play Blade Runner on Dreamcast but it crashes at first cut scene where the ship is going down. Here is a picture of the debug console :

IMG_2595.jpg (197.03 KiB) Viewed 11416 times

Any idea why and if yes, can it be fixed ?

Thanks.

[Praetorian]

Hello there,

I am trying to play Blade Runner on Dreamcast but it crashes at first cut scene where the ship is going down. Here is a picture of the debug console

Can you check that you've copied all the required data files properly to the game data folder?

List of required data files is here:
https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?titl ... ade_Runner

Known checksums for the data files here:
https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Blad ... data_files

The error implies that perhaps the CDFRAMES# files (or the HDFRAMES file) were not copied correctly.

[CrashMidnick]

Yes I did :

Sans titre 1.jpg (146.01 KiB) Viewed 11399 times

I tried with CDFRAMES AND HDFRAMES, same error, same place.

I tried with GOG version + ORIGINAL BACKUP = same thing happens unfortunately.

EDIT : I checked all files with a checksum tool, all are fine as per your link.

[Praetorian]

Yes I did :

Sans titre 1.jpg

I tried with CDFRAMES AND HDFRAMES, same error, same place.

I tried with GOG version + ORIGINAL BACKUP = same thing happens unfortunately.

EDIT : I checked all files with a checksum tool, all are fine as per your link.

Then for some reason Dreamcast or the Dreamcast ScummVM port specifically won't load the proper frames file (this error is for McCoy's idle animation).

Can you verify that your game folder runs ok on a Desktop PC?

[CrashMidnick]

Already done, works perfect on PC. It is like DC version is missing something.

Sans titre 1.jpg (109.07 KiB) Viewed 11383 times

When using stable release it is stuck on page 92 instead of 88 using nightly build.

[Praetorian]

Already done, works perfect on PC. It is like DC version is missing something.


Sans titre 1.jpg

When using stable release it is stuck on page 92 instead of 88 using nightly build.

Maybe it's indeed an issue with the ScummVM port for DreamCast specifically then, or possible DreamCast's constraints (memory? max number of files open) that I'm not aware about.

I am not sure who the ScummVM porter for the platform is off-hand, but they could potentially offer more clues about this.

[CrashMidnick]

Already done, works perfect on PC. It is like DC version is missing something.


Sans titre 1.jpg

When using stable release it is stuck on page 92 instead of 88 using nightly build.

Maybe it's indeed an issue with the ScummVM port for DreamCast specifically then, or possible DreamCast's constraints (memory? max number of files open) that I'm not aware about.

I am not sure who the ScummVM porter for the platform is off-hand, but they could potentially offer more clues about this.

Thanks for your replies, I hope that a developer will see this thread and help the dreamcast community.

[Praetorian]

Thanks for your replies, I hope that a developer will see this thread and help the dreamcast community.

I would suggest also that you create a ticket for the issue with the information that you have provided in this thread. That has better chance to be visible to ScummVM developers and it's the recommended approach for issues that are not trivial to resolve.

https://bugs.scummvm.org/

[tsowell]

I've been playing around with Blade Runner on my alternate Dreamcast backend, and the results are interesting if not particularly useful.

It needs more than 16MB of RAM to run, so it will not run on an unmodified Dreamcast. With 32MB of RAM it runs at least to the first screen which is all I have tested.

But it performs very poorly on Dreamcast - I would not consider it playable. I did some profiling, and I believe the bottleneck is the VQA decoding. I wonder if it would be possible to improve performance by serializing the pixel copy operations in the frame decoding.

[Wesker]

It needs more than 16MB of RAM to run, so it will not run on an unmodified Dreamcast. With 32MB of RAM it runs at least to the first screen which is all I have tested.

So the Dreamcast version of ScummVM is already taking into account the 32MB RAM upgrade? That's interesting. Since the upgrade has been out for about a week only, I thought this still had to be implemented into the Dreamcast version in order to take into account the expanded RAM. I wonder if this solves the problems of some of the games that had been suffering from memory limitations on the Dreamcast since ages ago, namely Full Throttle, The Dig and The Curse of Monkey Island.

[tsowell]

So the Dreamcast version of ScummVM is already taking into account the 32MB RAM upgrade? That's interesting. Since the upgrade has been out for about a week only, I thought this still had to be implemented into the Dreamcast version in order to take into account the expanded RAM.

My alternate Dreamcast backend supports the 32MB RAM upgrade. ScummVM was my reason for coming up with the upgrade in the first place.

I wonder if this solves the problems of some of the games that had been suffering from memory limitations on the Dreamcast since ages ago, namely Full Throttle, The Dig and The Curse of Monkey Island.

It does fix problems in The Dig and Full Throttle. On a 32MB Dreamcast I can play beyond the points where a 16MB Dreamcast runs out of memory, but I haven't tested to see if either of them are completable now. I'll try out The Curse of Monkey Island soon.

[Wesker]

You'd think a Dreamcast version of ResidualVM could benefit from the 32MB RAM upgrade too? It would be very interesting to see games like Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island running on the Dreamcast, as they are much more fitting for console gameplay than most of ScummVM games.

[tsowell]

The Curse of Monkey Island crashes very early on my backend on both 16MB and 32MB Dreamcasts, so there's another problem that will need to be fixed first before I can see if the extra RAM makes a difference.

I spent a few hours hacking on the Blade Runner engine and was able to significantly improve its performance on Dreamcast, but it's still a little sluggish. I think there's a chance that with some effort it could be made to run well.

You'd think a Dreamcast version of ResidualVM could benefit from the 32MB RAM upgrade too? It would be very interesting to see games like Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island running on the Dreamcast, as they are much more fitting for console gameplay than most of ScummVM games.

I don't know. I thought that at one point there was a Dreamcast backend for ResidualVM, but I don't see it in the source.

[Wesker]

Thank you for checking that out. I thought The Curse of Monkey Island ran well at first but slowly starts having problem when the game progresses and starts to load extensively, especially regarding sound issues. Could you try to play it without sound to see if the game runs better?

Hoping that with this upgraded and some fixes, almost all the ScummVM games can now be played and completed on Dreamcast. Who knows if this will give new life to a reworked Dreamcast version of ResidualVM, because its 3D games could fit the Dreamcast pretty well. I will probably consider doing the 32MB RAM upgrade to my Dreamcast sometime in the future since it seems that's going to open lots of possibilities, especially regarding interpreters.

[Praetorian]

I spent a few hours hacking on the Blade Runner engine and was able to significantly improve its performance on Dreamcast, but it's still a little sluggish. I think there's a chance that with some effort it could be made to run well.

Those are some great news. I am very interested to see what you have achieved, when you are ready to share the code.

I still have it as a todo task to revisit the video codec code, but it could be some time before I get round to it.