Porting console games to PC?

[edward850]

I wonder how Night Dive is able to remaster so many old games.

Because Night Dive's entire business revolves around tracking down and acquiring rights and code to games whose developers are either inactive or closed. Electronic Arts is neither of these.

It's also worth noting that it's much harder than it looks. They usually get titles in groups, and stuff like Strife:VE was if anything the stars aligning. Had it not been in the Doom engine, and still mostly Doom 1.2 code, it would have taken far far longer to reverse engineer. Quasar was capable of seeing the changes by comparing it to existing code we knew.

It's also a matter of how reuseable the code is. Night Dive have access to some games that currently have no hope of ever being re-released because they are made using badly misused Windows 95 APIs with lots of undefined behaviour, making the assembly near impossible to decipher and the games themselves unrunnable in modern Windows (hey this issue sounds familiar somehow...).

I actually have more to say on the matter of old unusable code, but you'll need to wait a while before I can talk about it.

[Nevander]

So the only options are 1) EA somehow through some miracle decides to port it or remaster the game 2) play the game on its original systems as intended and or 3) use a PS2 emulator to emulate it on PC. No closer to my goal than before I even had the idea.

[Kinsie]

No closer to my goal than before I even had the idea.

It helps to have attainable goals.

[Nevander]

Well the good news here is that I believe I finally got it to run on PCSX2 without hanging. I think the speedhacks or one of them was causing it to hang. I'm able to run it at 4x the native resolution on DX11 hardware with hardly any noticeable slowdown (which looks beautiful). DX11 software for me is actually slower. Controls are all bound to my liking and I'm able to play it well now. The mouse movement is still completely terrible, but luckily the AI in BLACK doesn't have the greatest aim at long distances while you can snipe them with assault rifles.

One bug though that is pissing me off: if you walk into edges of things sticking out (like doorways or gravestones) you can get physically stuck in the object and can't move. So frustrating, especially if you're near the end of a level and can't kill yourself to revert to a checkpoint. Not sure if it's a bug present in the PS2 version itself or something brought on by the emulation.

Either way, going through on Hard now to unlock Black Ops mode. I want dat M16A2 on the emulator too, but I'm too proud to use a save from GameFAQs... plus I'm not sure they work. I know on Xbox, if you complete the game and then swap the drive into a new Xbox, it will fail to recognize the profile and will create a new one. I think the saves are bound to the original device they were made on which is super duper stupid. I'm playing it like a turtle on Hard, since there's no health packs. Can't wait for Black Ops mode. Playing through that mode when you unlock it is an amazing feeling.

Yes. I love this game a lot. Maybe too much... been trying to get into speedrunning it since it's a great game to speedrun.

[edward850]

I'm able to run it at 4x the native resolution on DX11 hardware with hardly any noticeable slowdown (which looks beautiful). DX11 software for me is actually slower.

Your CPU is not going to render things faster than your graphics card, so of course the software layer would be slower.

[MetroidJunkie]

Always a good idea to offset the rendering to the GPU wherever possible to share the labor so the CPU isn't stuck doing everything.

[Nevander]

Just beat it on Hard using PCSX2. Wasn't as hard as I thought it would be with terrible mouse movement. There might be a way to get it smoother but I'm not sure. The game's aiming code is already pretty bad even using a controller ON the native system. Now to enjoy Black Ops mode! Infinite grenade launcher makes it so easy. Dat M16A2 is going to look absolutely gorgeous in 4x native res.