Is it possible to port gamecube games to DC?

[Droid party]

Most ignorant question? Haha I guess so. I guess I was just interested to know if it was possible, I don't know anything about porting, that's all. And one of the posters got it right, am very young. Alright, bye.

Sorry mate. Kind of a jerky response on my part. Meh, Merry Christmas anyways dude.

[bobbynewmarkiii]

Come on guys -- there are no stupid questions here, so no need to put the guy down.

2nded

[nikon_62]

Most ignorant question? Haha I guess so. I guess I was just interested to know if it was possible, I don't know anything about porting, that's all. And one of the posters got it right, am very young. Alright, bye.

It's not a dumb question. I just found out a few months ago that you can run ROMs from other systems on some hardware. I didn't even know it was possible until a friend gave me a disk full of SNES games for my dreamcast. That said they all run really slow which is usually the problem with software emulation programs I have tried.

[racketboy]

You'd also have to tone down the graphics a bit.

Texture-wise, on paper the DC wins there. The GC had a combined 3MB of video memory (2MB framebuffer, 1MB texture), whereas the DC had 8MB video memory (assuming the same 2MB frame buffer, that leaves 6MB for textures).

With that said, the GC had 24MB of general purpose system RAM, compared to the DC's 16MB. Swapping textures and other graphic data back and forth from system to graphics RAM is easily done.

Throughout wise the GC claims 12 million polys per second, compared to the DC's 7 million per second. Insert usual caveat regarding statistics.

Eyeball-wise I think the GC was prettier to look at overall. I guess ultimately that's the benchmark that matters.

I dunno -- I've seen some textures and such on the Cube that I've never seen the Dreamcast (or most Wii games) get close to.
Pikmin and Wario World (Treasure) come to mind.

[marurun]

The GameCube uses a really interesting video method. I believe it's more competent than the Dreamcast in terms of texture compression and it can use more advanced T&L features than the Dreamcast. Also, the VRAM is 1T-SRAM, which is extremely high speed but expensive. The idea is that the system can shuffle information in and out of VRAM very quickly. So the system has to dynamically unload and reload textures, much like the Playstation 2 but quite a bit easier to coordinate because of a shorter, faster data path from main RAM to VRAM. Also, the GC uses faster RAM throughout the system than the Dreamcast does.

Further, the Dreamcast and the Gamecube have little in common on the CPU front, so while APIs provided by Nintendo could have made porting DC code to the GC relatively easy, there's actually very little in common between these two boxes at the hardware code level.