For many gamers in their 30s and 40s, the timeline of video game history shifted at the turn of the millennium when Sega transitioned from a hardware maker to a third-party publisher.
The Japanese company had been Nintendo's rival since the 1980s, and attracted legions of fans thanks to its beloved home consoles and quality exclusives – but, by the time the Dreamcast arrived at the close of the '90s, Sega was struggling.
It eventually had to call time on its home console ambitions to claw itself back to profitability, and that meant many former Sega exclusives would appear on rival systems.
One such title was Virtua Fighter 4, which arrived on PS2 in 2002, a year after its arcade debut. Running on Sega's NAOMI 2 arcade system – technically a relative of the Dreamcast – the fourth entry in Yu Suzuki's one-on-one fighting game franchise was only playable in the home if you owned Sony hardware, which is something that some diehard Sega fans have struggled to come to terms with, even after almost 25 years.
However, as spotted by @falco_girgis, one fan is attempting to redress the balance. Esppiral – who recently worked his magic on the Dreamcast version of Dead Or Alive 2 – has managed to render Virtua Fighter 4's Temple stage on actual Dreamcast hardware.
Before you get too excited, this doesn't automatically mean the full game will ever be ported to Dreamcast – while Esppiral has managed to get the assets running on the system, there's no animation or physics at work here, and only a single character is shown, Akira (although it's worth noting he's rendered twice).
However, @falco_girgis, who knows his way around Sega's 128-bit console, believes such a port could happen if the right person were behind it:
"I have no doubt, tbh, that it's technically possible at this point.. it's just a matter of could it be realistically done when we have no source code and would have to reverse engineer and rework it to go from another platform to DC... might not be doable until someone does a proper decomp."
In recent years, we've seen titles like GTA 3 and GTA: Vice City get Dreamcast ports, alongside titles like Mario Kart 64, WipEout and Star Fox 64.