Post#8 » Mon Nov 16, 2020 8:49 pm
Not gonna happen, at least for now.
Naomi games:
From what I've been reading from magazine interviews, most Naomi games that were ported to the Dreamcast back in the day took some time, from 3 to 6 months of reprogramming. Things like Ikaruga or Under Defeat were probably done in less than a month, but I remember reading about Virtua Tennis 1 and 2, Virtua Striker 2, Crazy Taxi 1 and 2, and more demanding games like Ferrari F355 that took more than 6 months to port.
And we are talking about the good old Naomi board which besides having more RAM/VRAM is 99% the same hardware as the Dreamcast. They had to downgrade textures, optimize polygon count / frame rate / access transfer rate, replace entire soundtrack to redbook audio and so on. All of this because Sega wanted pristine 480p VGA native output even on the Dreamcast ports. In my opinion some of these games would've been way more easily ported with just a lower resolution. The casual user didn't care that much about extreme anti aliasing and sharp image quality.
Though to be honest, I don't think there's much to port from Naomi. Yes, it would be nice to have Monkey Ball, Jingy Storm, Jambo Safari and Wave Runner GP, and a bunch of 2D fighters (Melty Blood.. etc) and I'm probably forgetting some but I'm not missing those arcade games on the Dreamcast. It's just more of the same arcadey genres that the system already has tons of titles.
Model 3:
This is a whole different monster. Completely different hardware, and it has an extremely expensive double GPU custom chipset which had unparalleled geometry processing featuring advanced graphics effects. While its resolution may be a bit lower than Dreamcast, it still outputs an amazing image quality and more importantly its GPU features not only a high polygon count at 60fps but it has better highlight reflections from multiple light sources. Just check Scud Race or Daytona Usa 2.
IMHO, an hypothetical Scud Race port to the Dreamcast, would take a professional team going full time from the ground up to get it right. It wouldn't be a port but a whole reprogrammed game that would take at least a year with full Sega support, with a new development kit and stuff.
The same could be said for Naomi 2 games. It may be easier to port them (heavily downgraded though) because of Naomi 2 being a Naomi on steroids, it still would take a professional team work to do it.
I'm not discarding it though. I'm sure some crazy team of fans/programmers could do it, but it will be just a couple of games.
I can see Scud Race or even Virtua Fighter 4 running on the Dreamcast. Someday maybe....