Upping the Vram
- Thread starter Sonikusan
- Start date
So, after you spend several hours soldering extra RAM into the DC's PowerVR without destroying it, what's next? Do you expect your games to look any better? Well, they won't, because no developer would add bigger texture packs "just in case someone happens to solder extra RAM to their DCs".
You could make a kickass game with higher res textures. That only runs in your DC, that is. But I hardly doubt you'd get something with graphics on par with even the first Sonic Adventure, since noone of the freely avaliable DC dev tools I've seen so far offer fast performance access to the 3D features.
You'd gain more by trying to overclock the PVR, or the SH4. Maybe that'd lessen the slowdown in some games.
You could make a kickass game with higher res textures. That only runs in your DC, that is. But I hardly doubt you'd get something with graphics on par with even the first Sonic Adventure, since noone of the freely avaliable DC dev tools I've seen so far offer fast performance access to the 3D features.
You'd gain more by trying to overclock the PVR, or the SH4. Maybe that'd lessen the slowdown in some games.
Still, If some kind of addition pack would be done, they could be sold. The DC got an expansion port right? Still, it would require someone to create a game using it. Nah, the hardware is good enough. Its probably better to create a better Dev-Tool if you want to see better looking games...
Btw, wasnt some kind of addition for DC in planning? Perhaps it was only rumors...
They had some projects on the burner, Sega has always built things that they never release. I don't know about anything designed to add power, though.
Adding more main memory would probably be more useful for homebrew, and yes you could do it. But it'd be a monumental PITA, so practically nobody would do it even with a detailed guide. Most people don't even mod their DCs, let alone rip it apart, solder in extra memory, and modify the BIOS. So coders probably wouldn't care. Overclocking could give you a more immediate benefit for all existing software, but again not many people are going to do it.
Adding more main memory would probably be more useful for homebrew, and yes you could do it. But it'd be a monumental PITA, so practically nobody would do it even with a detailed guide. Most people don't even mod their DCs, let alone rip it apart, solder in extra memory, and modify the BIOS. So coders probably wouldn't care. Overclocking could give you a more immediate benefit for all existing software, but again not many people are going to do it.
Well look at it like this:
The basic in/out sys of a PC is designed to expand it's hardware's addresses to accomodate more memory. But it has a canopy. Then over time sometimes there are firmware upgrades that allow more to be addressed.
Without that revision it won't address the superfluous memory.
Now the hardware of a console rarely changes (unless it's an atrocity made of off-the-shelf computer parts a la Xbox), why would Sega design said in/out sys to address more memory than the console was manufactured with?
Now I'm not saying that theory is correct but it does make sense.
~Krelian
The basic in/out sys of a PC is designed to expand it's hardware's addresses to accomodate more memory. But it has a canopy. Then over time sometimes there are firmware upgrades that allow more to be addressed.
Without that revision it won't address the superfluous memory.
Now the hardware of a console rarely changes (unless it's an atrocity made of off-the-shelf computer parts a la Xbox), why would Sega design said in/out sys to address more memory than the console was manufactured with?
Now I'm not saying that theory is correct but it does make sense.
~Krelian
I'm not defending my original statement. I got it from someplace else, and it is likely that it was the misinterpretation of facts by someone else down the road. But anyway, I highly doubt the BIOS is the same that of the Naomi, even if everything else is the same but memory and source of data (which even in units with GD-ROMs isn't directly from the GD on demand... loads to cheap volatile memory on power up IIRC).
You've got the question backwards. Standard bus and memory designs are naturally compatible with expansion up to the point where the bus runs out of addresses, and the SH-4 and PVR2 have built-in RAM interfaces (designed by Hitachi and Videologic, not Sega) that are known to support more RAM than what is in Dreamcast. The question is "Why would Sega request a special set of crippled chips just for Dreamcast instead of making chips that could be used in Dreamcast, Naomi and future systems?".
And I'm saying that it doesn't make sense. When you get right down to it, the BIOS is just a program whose primary purpose is to get the hardware into a sane state and get another program loaded into RAM. Once that second program is loaded, the BIOS no longer really has any control over what happens. For its part, a chip usually doesn't care how much RAM is hooked up to it, it just does what its told, and if the RAM you told it to write to doesn't exist, well, that's your problem for telling it to do something stupid.
