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One of the stranger (yet not entirely unwelcome) trends of recent years has been the gradual increase in native ports of N64 titles to the Sega Dreamcast, offering people a brand new way to experience Nintendo's classics on Sega hardware.
In the past, for instance, we've seen the likes of Star Fox 64, Mario 64, and Mario Kart 64 all make the jump over to the Sega console, and it appears the Dreamcast community isn't through yet. That's because a developer named Bruce has recently been working on another port of an N64 hit: a Dreamcast version of Rare's 1997 Mario Kart rival, Diddy Kong Racing, based on the game's decompilation.
We originally became aware of this project thanks to a preview video from TheSegaGuru, published last week, where the Sega fan and retro YouTuber put an early build through its paces.
In this video, TheSegaGuru described the build as "very, very playable" but stressed that it was "not a final release," highlighting some framerate dips and stuttering audio, which he says is "always the issue" with these Dreamcast ports early on. Closing out the video, he speculated that it wouldn't take long, though, for these issues to be ironed out, stating that we'll probably "see a version with updated sound and it's just going to be bang on." And he was more or less right, with Falco Girgis, one of Bruce's main collaborators, taking to Twitter/X just two days later to share some updates made in the wake of the video's release.
In the Twitter/X post, Girgis was extremely critical of the original preview build sent to TheSegaGuru, describing it as running "like absolute shit," and explained that the discrepancy between the videos he'd been sharing on social media and the YouTube footage posted was due to the fact that his very first SH4ZAM gains had not yet been merged with the master branch. This was apparently done just two hours after the original build was sent over, with the two developers having also now merged their two WIP optimisation branches with the current master branch, which they have posted more footage of for all to see.
Speaking about this new build, Girgis said, "I tried to put the software audio mixer under as much stress as humanly possible, bumping into as many onscreen players and including as much action as I was physically able to do in-game. "The result? As you can see, we went from LOSSEZ to GAINZ, never dropping a single audio sample anymore!"
As highlighted to us, this isn't the only post Girgis has published in the aftermath of TheSegaGuru's video, either, with the developer also sharing another new look at the game yesterday, three days after his previous message went live. In this post, he spoke about his fixation with making a port that does the game "justice" on the Sega hardware, and how he spent the weekend "obsessing over every little dip" to "win back 0.1FPS at a time..." before getting a "reality check" after seeing the original game running on N64 hardware.
As he states, it's probably been half a decade since he played Diddy Kong Racing on actual N64 hardware, and because of this, he found himself "losing sight of what the basis for comparison even was from the original..." Seeing them running side by side, however, he's now satisfied that the Dreamcast outperforms the original, stating it now runs consistently "10FPS higher" than the original and "at 4x the screen resolution with progressive scan output."
It's an exciting development, and one that has us wanting to give it a spin ourselves, as soon as it releases.