While these hacks provide some benefits (such as an increased field of view), what they ultimately do is squeeze a widescreen image into a 640×480 frame, which is then stretched by your display to the applicable widescreen size.
It is generally much harder to make mods for the Dreamcast version, and I think it is safe to say we aren’t getting anything more involved than simplest model, level layout and texture edits (if at all) anytime soon. Unlike the PC version, fixing these on the Dreamcast is much more difficult for hackers/modders. When the game does run at 60 FPS, several of the problems described here will return because some aspects of the game’s logic aren’t optimized for 60 FPS. Although there are 60 FPS codes for the Dreamcast version, real hardware can’t handle it most of the time and the game will go into slow motion (you may get better results on an overclocked console). You’ll have to deal with all of the criticized aspects of the original version – 30 FPS, unskippable cutscenes, the old Chao system etc.Want to see how SA1 would approximately look on your monitor/TV? Take a 640×480 screenshot from the game and blow it up to your screen’s native resolution with bilinear scaling like this.
However, no matter what you do, the Dreamcast game’s internal resolution is still going to be 480p, and no amount of upscaling and cleaning up is going to make it look as good as native 1080p that you can get with an emulator or the PC version.
There is even a hardware mod to make the Dreamcast output a “pure” digital signal through HDMI.
The Dreamcast is capable of outputting a native 480p VGA signal, which is the “cleanest” looking signal for that generation of consoles. *When people say that, they usually compare the Dreamcast’s video output to the likes of Playstation 2, which is indeed a lot worse. Don’t be misled by people claiming that the Dreamcast looks “amazingly clean” when upscaled to 1080p/4K* – this is not the case at all, and even with the most expensive upscalers picture clarity is nowhere near as good as playing the game in actual 1080p or 4K, which you can do using an emulator or a modded PC version. If you play the game on anything other than a CRT or something with the native resolution of 640×480, it’s going to look terrible.Unless you are a big fan of the Dreamcast and play other games on it, or use it for other purposes such as homebrew, getting a Dreamcast just to play SA1 isn’t a good investment. The Dreamcast is prone to hardware problems (laser degradation, PSU) that eventually make it unable to read discs or boot at all, and the more reliable replacements (such as the GDEMU or USB-GDROM) are expensive and sometimes difficult to obtain. Obviously you need to own a functional Dreamcast and a copy of the game to be able to play it.However, using real hardware has its disadvantages: The most obvious option is playing the game on a real Dreamcast, which is perhaps the closest to the “definitive” way to play the game.
In this situation one might wonder how to get the “definitive” version of Sonic Adventure. I do recommend looking it up if you are interested in RetroArch and/or support its development.Īs discussed on this blog, SADX Gamecube, SADX PC 2004 and the Steam/nextgen console versions of the game suffer from an alarming number of downgrades in almost every area imaginable, up to the point of completely misrepresenting the original Dreamcast version.
I decided to leave the emulator drama out of this blog (we’re having enough fun with the base game as it is).