*Some corrections and notes!* -You can control with a DC Keyboard and Mouse, it seems it would be better but I don't have one. I still think the controller set up would be more common if the game actually released. -The video issues turned out to be something wrong with my Dreamcast and/or cables, I've since tried the game on a different setup that improved the clarity a lot. Thanks!
To clarify the save file issue, it's because of a memory leak issue. This memory leak issue was one of the reasons they kept delaying the game, and the options at the point they cancelled it were to either delay it again to try and fix the issue or to cancel it. They chose to cancel it since the Dreamcast had already been discontinued at that point, as it made no financial sense to delay it yet another time. They decided that instead of fixing the issues on Dreamcast, they would instead focus all their work on a new port for PS2 where these issues wouldn't exist.
@@THEnicholasvancosky All programs need to put things into memory (RAM) to use that information, and they are supposed to stop using that space in memory when they are done with it, so other programs, and crucially itself, can ask to use that space again. If the program keeps asking for more space but doesnt remember to give back the space it stopped using, it will "leak" and fill up all memory and halt the computer.
It would be so amazing if they had finished this version and polished it more. Who knows, it might even have online crossplay with the PC like Quake 3 does.
Was Valve actually working on the DC port? Because the PS2 version was handled by Gearbox in their earlier days if I’m not mistaken. To the best of my knowledge, Valve has only worked on the Xbox and PS3/Xbox 360 ports of their games (with the former taking a particularly large amount of engine rewrites to get working)
This game with the Dreamcast Keyboard and Mouse is actually really fantastic. I never got to use the KB&M until like... 20 years+ later, and going back, its nuts what the DC was able to pull off.
This was how I first played Half Life when I was 9 or 10! My dad pirated tons of games off usenet groups and stuff in the 90s/2000s, and so we had these binders full of Dreamcast games. This was one of them, and it was my introduction to Half Life as a kid. I remember how terrifying this game was to me when I first played it. That's an interesting point about the game being a lot darker than on other systems - perhaps this played into how eerie it was for me. But yeah, I didn't even learn that it wasn't an official release until many years later. Definitely an interesting introduction to HL!
i mean. it was *to be* an official release, the guy in the video was wrong about that, not sure what he meant when he said it’s not an official product
The save system isn’t as bad as Toy Story 2, which is completely incapable of overwriting its own save file, requiring you to (in a separate menu) manually delete your save to make space even though it’s the same size. (Also, the load times won’t be reflective of a pressed copy, MIL-CDs have a lower data density and burned CDs are lower quality, requiring a further slower data rate)
since this game was never officially released, the rom was never optimized for retail. also there was an unreleased zip disc add on i believe gave the dreamcast a little more ram and you could download dlc and I believe they were working on compatibility with half life and "blue shift" in particular.
5:51 i have a dreamcast keyboard and mouse (i bought it when DC was still actively supported), i mainly bought it for Q3A, unreal tournament , 4x4 evo and a few other games, as well as web browsing (i didn't have a PC capable of browsing the internet), and then i bought PSO. Pretty much everyone i knew with a dreamcast also had the keyboard and mouse (mainly for web browsing).
@@thecamobot It's hard to believe, lol. I have a Dreamcast keyboard & mouse myself, although I didn't get them while the console was hot & I had them imported from Japan about a year ago now. If you go to the subreddit or any community online for the console, most the people there will likely have a set. On top of that, if you had paid for SegaNet, you could receive a free keyboard shipped to you back in the day. They offered a heap of games that supported the keyboard, & while the mouse wasn't nearly as successful (mostly because it released just a few months before discontinuation of the DC) it still got notable titles. With how popular Q3A & a handful of other FPS games were on Dreamcast, it's safe to say many other people had the same thought to get a keyboard & mouse for better controls. Also, there were a decent amount of people actually using the Dreamcast for internet purposes, which made the keyboard & mouse must-have items.
@@thecamobot it's a thing people had who played games that supported it when it was a relevant console, most of which were online. Obviously almost no one playing the DC these days has one because who on earth is playing Quake III and UT on the dreamcast
Very nice comparison! I remember when Dreamcast first came out, I was a teenager & I saw It displayed in the mall's electronics store. I was so amazed!
I got the Guide Book of Half-Life for Dreamcast month before they caned it and years later found the game and played it from start to end and even use my Dreamcast Mouse and Keyboard.
24:28 I couldn't wait for this game to come out. I was seeing screenshots everywhere, and was devastated when it got canceled. Then it leaked, and I downloaded it pretty much immediately. The load times were just too atrocious to get through though, I don't think I made it much farther than the start of Office Complex, so I understood why it was canceled at that point. I got a new dreamcast recently with a GDEMU, and I have it on there, but haven't even thought to attempt to play it again. Kudos to you for getting through it. And PS, I had the dreamcast keyboard back in the day, but I didn't have the mouse. I got it for Typing of the Dead though, not PSO.
I did not expect the first American to ever work on Sonic to appear in this video, I thought I'd seen the last of him after that Hbomb video! Great video! Very well-presented. You've got a real talent.
I never had freezing issues with Half-Life DC. The frame rate was sporadic but you get used to it. There was a dummy file version that was meant to fill the disc and push the data to the outer edge and speed up load times but I can't remember if you had to patch the ISO itself or if it was a standalone ISO. Never had save issues either. The saves were large and I remember dedicating a VMU to Half-Life. Also, the mouse and keyboard were abundant. Most people i know had them and used versions were flooding second hand game stores.
Back in the day, i had the Keyboard and Mouse to play Unreal Tournament and Quake 3. I played PSO as well but i also used my dreamcast as a web browser back then. The Keyboard and mouse was very cheap to get for a kit mowing lawns back then, trust me, i was there, did it, mowed the lawns and bought the Keyboard and Mouse. I learned how to type with Typing of the Dead on that console lol EDIT: yes, the controlls were pretty much standard on all Dreamcast FPSes. Where i had came from the N64 before that and I used the C buttons to go forward and back strafe left and right and the stick was turning/aiming like you would normally do. I'm also an inverted look person because of how games back then programmed me lol. Also, the burned CDR can actually load slower than a normal GD-ROM and the age of our consoles may be getting to it too.
2:54 that's Tommy Tallarico on the left side of the screen, bit of an odd thing i noticed because I saw a really good in depth video essay by HBommerguy on how that guy is a fraud and i would really recommend it. (Edit) 7:30 HIM AGAIN.
I wonder how much Valve could have polished up in those final months. I think they probably could have gotten the controls sorted and some of the frame rate stuff. Walking with the buttons and aiming with the stick probably would have made things easier after you got over the learning curve. Turok 64 style controls. 30 seconds loading is actually surprisingly good for that game and a burned CD. The GD Rom press probably would have put the data out at the end of the disk so its spinning past the laser faster.
@@thecamobot It would be cool if in 10 years AI can just automate 99% of conversion from C to faster C++, and id imagine you could get more optimization than doing just that.
@@remasteredretropcgames3312 C++ isn't faster than C, in most cases if it's done the "proper way of the language" C++ will be slower. Something like recompiling with modern SH GCC would probably be better
@@attilavs2 Do you write everything in assembly? You're right, John Carmack was silly to port id tech 3 to id tech 4s primary language. He should have done it in pure assembly while maintaining GPUs every launch as a tradition.
The framerate is still trash, but with a GDEMU the horrendous loading times are mitigated, making the whole thing a lot more bearable. Anyways - great video! Glad the algorithm decided to send it to all of us DC nerds 💖
Well you don't exactly need to destroy your Dreamcast to get better load times. If your that desperate, you could get a Dreamcast GD-Rom emulator on PC.
@@koolaid33 ...so you just don't know what a GDEMU is or...? A GD-Rom Emulator is an SD card reader that is installed as a drop-in replacement that goes into the port that the GD-Rom reader uses in order to play Dreamcast games from files rather than discs. The GD-Rom reader pops out and neither it nor the Dreamcast are in any way "destroyed" in the process. You can just take the GDEMU back out and pop the reader back in any time you want. Dreamcast emulators are imperfect and you can't use the VMU with/in compliment to your games when emulating, while a GDEMU lets you use actual dreamcast hardware without the many issues that come with disc based media. One day *in the near future* disc drives that actually function in consoles from this era will be extremely rare, as every disc drive will eventually fail, and optical drive emulators like the GDEMU will be the *only way* to play games on Dreamcast hardware.
Great video. I’ve played pretty much every fps released on the dreamcast including this half life port, I’ve finished both the original game and blue shift on Dreamcast and I still play quake 3 quite regularly online on the Dreamcast as its servers have been revived, so I’ve played a fair amount of fps on dc. Really enjoyed your video but I think you 100% made a mistake swapping the aiming to the face buttons. While I get at first it seems strange to aim with the left side of a controller and move with the right, you get used to it quickly and losing out on analog aiming is probably the reason for about 50% of your issues with the game. The face buttons would just emulate the WASD buttons that was used on pc but analog aiming is definitely needed here. I feel like if you stuck with the face buttons to move and didn’t change it, you definitely would have a better time, the port is still pretty rough but the face buttons for aiming is pretty horrendous. Nevertheless good video👍🏻
The performance of the Dreamcast version reminds me of how I originally played the PC version back in the day. My PC was barely strong enough to play Half-Life, so it had a terrible frame rate, and every loading screen was like a minute long.
The only way to play any FPS game (or any game that involves strafing) on Dreamcast is to use the face buttons for movement and the analog stick for look/turn. WASD with your right thumb. It's a challenge to get used to, but it's what I had to do for Quake III back in the day and it because second nature really quick. Made Half-Life a breeze. Ladders still sucked though. Also not sure what's going on with your brightness issue. I've played through this game once on my old CRT TV back in 2005 and more recently on a 46" LCD TV in 2016 and never had that problem. As far as the loading times, I have a theory that they were going to make this a 2-disc set instead of putting Blue Shift on the same disc. Back in the early 2010's, I played a bit of a "cleaned up" version someone posted on the ISOzone (RIP) where they reorganized data on the disc so that the laser could do less work to access it all and it improved loading times by like 50%. I wish I still had that and if anyone can find it, let me know. I remember it also improved the save glitch as well, but didn't completely solve it.
In an interview from back then, a dev said they had not finished optimizing the code and geometry. Who knows 🤷♀️ I wish it could get completed by a homebrewer.
Awesome video overall, but one objectively incorrect point is that, "If Half-Life actually did come out on Dreamcast, nobody would be playing it on a keyboard and mouse." Sega and third-parties pushed a LOT of keyboards and mice back in the day to lots of system owners, and for good reason: many people used the console for web browsing in addition to gaming. The support list for kbm was pretty extensive, and the peripherals were cheap, easy to find in-store (even Walmart carried them), and readily available online. As a massive sample group of one, I can testify that I didn't know a single Dreamcast owner who didn't also have a keyboard and mouse for things like Web Browser 2.0, Unreal, Quake III, etc., including myself. So if the game had come out, you better believe that a large number - if not the majority - of folk would have in fact been playing this game with kbm on release day.
It's so interesting to me to watch Half Life related videos years after the fact that I'm now a high end PC gamer.. I only ever played HL1 on the Dreamcast. To this day. Similarly I only ever played HL2 (and Portal) on the PS3. I've never played any Valve game on the PC. Lol
Great video! I was so disappointed when this was canceled. I had it pre-ordered as my family only had a Mac computer at the time, which it didn't come out on. I was counting on this port. I was so disappointed when I got my $5 back from EBGames for my pre-order. They did have the Prima guide for sale for 5 cents. 😅 However, with only a Mac and a Dreamcast, Half-Life was out of my reach for some time. 😢 I played through this version eventually. Not great but playable. Hell, I played through Soldier of Fortune so I could endure any long loading times. I did have a keyboard and mouse that I played all the FPS games with; Quake, Unreal, Outtrigger, Rogue Spear, and the most ridiculous load times game ever, Soldier of Fortune.
I actually owned (it's still somewhere in my old apartment in Ukraine) an actual illegally printed out and sold copy of Half-Life for my Dreamcast, bought it in 2001 or 2002 I think, the market in Ukraine was exclusivelly illegal when it came to videogames for Dreamcast and playstation 1 or 2, all consoles came with modchips preinstalled. So Half-Life had a jewel case, with "proper" lables, screenshots poorly translated text and all, same as any other game illegally produced and sold, I had no idea what is "piracy" at the time, and one licenced game could be as much as half your monthly wages. I've also bought aftermarket memory stick just to keep saves for half life, good old times.
PSA: Unless you are using two whole VMUs dedicated to Half-Life, DO NOT SAVE DURING THE APPREHENSION CHAPTER!!! (Aka the chapter where a security guard gets assassinated while trying to give you a message) It will corrupt when you try to save there and if all of your saves are during that chapter, you'll have to start the whole game over. With that out of the way, about the controls. I've had an idea for something that I believe Sega themselves should have released not just for Dreamcast controller but also even the Sega Saturn's 3D controller. Since they share a similar shape. This attachment is a stick module that goes over the A,B,X, and Y buttons. It attatches via a vice tightening screw with two rubber cushions that clamp down onto the controller around the buttons. On top is a stick that presses ABXY depending on what direction you move it. Which would emulate having a second stick. This would be great for third person shooters like MDK and Slave Zero or first person shooters like Half-Life. If this came out during the Saturn era, it most likely would've at least helped the Saturn compete with Playstation's dual stick controllers. I've thought about actually making one myself but I don't have a 3D printer nor the know-how to make models.
If you use an adapter like the brook wingman SD, you can hook a 360 controller up and map it functionally like you’ve described. Right stick emulating face buttons It’s pretty decent, and makes the game way more playable.
@@AstraLeeYT Good call. I've been actually doing the opposite. I play on Retroarch on Xbox and you can hook up a Sega Saturn 3D controller to it. By combining a wingman XB2 adapter with a Mayflash Sega Saturn to USB adapter. It does work in retail mode but I'm too afraid to play online games with it in fear of getting banned because they think I'm hacking. Despite the clear disadvantage. Imagine how gigachad it would be to kick someone's ass in a modern game with a Sega Saturn controller. I love playing mad scientist with adapters. I recently ordered a universal DB9 controller to usb adapter from a site called Tindy that supposedly accepts Sega Genesis, 3DO, FM Towns Marty, Amiga, and many other DB9 controllers. Fingers crossed that it works.
I never had any of these issues back in the day we used Dreamcast factory to burn the game and black cdr at the lowest speeds with over burn an it ran amazing when we used Nero an high speeds yes you had frame issues but for some reason the black media cds worked on all the games idk why
Fun facts: 1.) The Sega Dreamcast is one word, not 'dream cast'. 2.) The Dreamcast had already been discontinued months prior, all the way at the end of March. The fact development even continued to June is a miracle, as most games not already near completion or out by the console's death, even Sega's own first-party games, were cancelled. 3.) I think you meant "blows me away" rather than just "blows me" because that sounds much worse.
I remember having a DoA 2 burned cd copy, loadings took waaaay longer beetween 2 stages than the original GD-rom version which i also had. I don't know for other games, maybe half life is also affected.
Not sure if anyone else has pointed this out, but I have seen the wall glitch at 13:59 in the Steam release of the game, so I don't think it's exclusive to the Dreamcast version.
22:40 - Those aren't missing models. Seems to me the "genius" creating the port decided to use HL1 scientists instead of OP4 ones. Which means all the OP4 specific animations are missing.
The fact this was never released saddens me. Although, I am pretty sure they scrapped the release because the plethera of loading between level sections, frame rate issues, and controls. Like stated in the video, M&K would alleviate onr these issues, but no one had that. This was a console game. It is shame it was never reworked for the more powerful OG Xbox and only had a PS2 port considering the partnership betweed SEGA and Microsoft. The Xbox controller is far superior to the Dreamcast one. I believe this game would have thrived on the Xbox and would have been nice competition for Halo. Oh well, at least we could still play it, and despite all the flaws, I had a lot of fun playing this on Dreamcast. Great video man.
I remember playing this with KB and Mouse on my DreamCast. I bought a copy at the flea market in Moscow and it came with Blue Shift AND Opposing Force. Had a fat ass plastic case with multiple discs inside, I think the OG game came on 2 discs and than BS and OF had each a disc of their own. I have no clue what kind of black voodoo magic those pirates did, but I remember having very few of the issues you've described. I don't recall it being supper dark as yours. I never had a load screen more than 15 seconds. I can confirm stuttering in chapters with large number of NPCs and whenever there was an unscripted explosion (as you've pointed out underslung grenade launcher made the game stutter 100% of the time, I can still hear the repeated sound effects: "chuck" game freezes "thunk-thunk-thunk" actually lunches a grenade, grenade impacts and game freezes again "boom-boom-boom"). Can't say anything about controls, because what kind of masochist would use a controller for an FPS when there's a KB&M as an option? Don't know about the save file size, but I used an off-brand memory card that had something like 5x the memory size of standard memory card that came with the console. I also remember that there was a good chunk of the game missing, but it was like half of Zen (Interloper was missing), so I call that an overall improvement. BS and OF did not have any major bugs as what you've shown. No missing models, no scripting errors, no janky movements. I am gonna be honest, I have thought all the way up to 2015ish that HalfLife WAS actually released on DreamCast, and what I was playing was just a standard copy of a legit game disc ripped and copied one-to-one by enterprising people of my local flea market. Only when I got hit by nostalgia and went looking for an emulator and ISOs (I sold my DC, games and all, when I moved from Russia to US) did I find out that there was no official release of HL on DreamCast.
Не ожидал увидеть здесь человека из СНГ, насчет дримки, насколько редко встречалась в окружение ? я увы не застал уже, но помню, что 2 плойка была только у одного знакомого, тогда уже компы поперли и было не до консолей...
Overall a decent video, has some poor takes though. The DC keyboard and mouse were common, easily available and worked with way more than just PSO. Tons of people used the KB and mouse for Typing of the Dead, Dreamweb Browsers, Unreal Tournament, Quake III Arena and other FPS games. The standard controller having a poor default layout misses the fact that it matched every other DC shooter of the time. It is more correct to say the standard layout is just simply dated. Half-Life for Dreamcast is in fact an official port, it just wasn't released. Being released or not doesn't make it any less official. It was programmed by Gearbox Software for Valve, it's official.
I remember playing it on dreamcast. Seens most of the games were pirate editions anyway, didn't know that the game wasn't actually released. Controls were a bit hard, but it was fun, next year i finished the game on a friends pc.
2:47 It is most likely because the game wasn't packed for release, this is similar to crash bandicoot for the ps1, A method used by developers for the time, the final print of the game was packet in a smart way for streaming data off the disc, as you'd progress through the game data most needed for what would be coming next was placed on the disc next in line, reducing seek times to get the data, because the game wasn't released it's very likely the unreleased builds aren't organsised meaning each level and parts of levels are skattered all over the disc image meaning the lasers goes back and forward all the time as data is streamed to the console. I remember my burnt disc when I tried half life on my dreamcast would make nasty seek reads all the time when playing the game and most seriously when reaching loading screens in the game. if released I suspect this would've been reduced most likely also in ways as well to help improve framerate (not related to loading seek times) which also helps in load speeds due to smaller file sizes because of optimatisation.
I have the copy of this game in russian language and dub, ive used to play with original controls and ive completed it, it is not that bad if you get used to it. Also i dont actually remember being it THAT laggy, it was a fine experience for me, maybe russian dubbers made it optimised idk
The scrambled tracks for the boot_ip hack to function probably made load sequences involve non ideal seeks. I wonder if the retail version would have been better in this regard. A gd emu might paint a more realistic picture.
I mean, can you really say it's official if it wasn't released? I get what you're saying, I just don't feel like it's right to say a game is official if it never "officially" came out.
It would be so amazing if they had finished this version and polished it more. Who knows, it might even have online crossplay with the PC like Quake 3: Arena does.
I have no idea why your visuals are so dark. That was not my experience playing through the DC version of the game. I’ve played it using VGA to a CRT and also using an Akura HDMI box to a modern HDTV.
Cool video curious if the loading screens are quicker from an sd card. Dc controller definitely socks for fps games i found the same issue with unreal tournament recently. Kudos for enduring and beating the game.
I've seen a lot of Half Life 2 ports even more than the first one. I only have played the HD version of Half Life on PC, a damn good game. Honestly I would love to see a brand new port of Half Life 1 on Xbox and Playstation current consoles. With the re-release of many classic shooters like Goldeneye, Quake, Doom and Turok, I really think there should be another port for Half Life for new players to experience the game, without the shortcomings of the Dreamcast port.
The first Half-Life only ever had two official ports: Dreamcast & PS2. It was never ported ever again, & the Dreamcast port obviously never released. It sucks, but Valve is primarily a PC gaming company, & their stingy with home console releases with all their games.
The moment I looked at the Dreamcast I realised that It would be a Pain in the Ass to Aim and Shot because there is only 1 Analog Stick The only thing I can think of is have the Dpad for Move and the Analog Stick for Aimming and Looking
About the darkness... TV accepts Luma range 16-235 and Chroma range 16-240, which is called "Limited rage". And PC outputs them as 0-255, which is called "Full range". At the era only a few games cared about this range difference, and they design their textures/colors directly target to designated platform instead of properly managing color through game engine. So if a PC game ported to console, it often gets too vibrant colors, and way too high contrast and got clipped black and white, like Half-life in this video. And vice versa, if a console game ported to PC, it often gets washed-out colors, like GTA3. I think this kind of color management become common sense only after 7th gen game consoles released. (Xbox 360 and PS3 etc.)
10:22 lmao the bug that was in the original and was fixed last month is not present in this version (on pc there was a delay between the scientist's animation and the monster's)
They should be able to patch it and also add dreamcast keyboard and mouse support. Yes Sega officially release them for the game Phantasy star online. The homebrew community shouldbe able to have dreamcast keyboard and mouse support.
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*Some corrections and notes!*
-You can control with a DC Keyboard and Mouse, it seems it would be better but I don't have one. I still think the controller set up would be more common if the game actually released.
-The video issues turned out to be something wrong with my Dreamcast and/or cables, I've since tried the game on a different setup that improved the clarity a lot.
Thanks!
To clarify the save file issue, it's because of a memory leak issue. This memory leak issue was one of the reasons they kept delaying the game, and the options at the point they cancelled it were to either delay it again to try and fix the issue or to cancel it. They chose to cancel it since the Dreamcast had already been discontinued at that point, as it made no financial sense to delay it yet another time. They decided that instead of fixing the issues on Dreamcast, they would instead focus all their work on a new port for PS2 where these issues wouldn't exist.
My first thought was that the save data was being used for additional debug information, but this makes perfect sense.
What is memory leaking?
@@THEnicholasvancosky All programs need to put things into memory (RAM) to use that information, and they are supposed to stop using that space in memory when they are done with it, so other programs, and crucially itself, can ask to use that space again. If the program keeps asking for more space but doesnt remember to give back the space it stopped using, it will "leak" and fill up all memory and halt the computer.
It would be so amazing if they had finished this version and polished it more.
Who knows, it might even have online crossplay with the PC like Quake 3 does.
Was Valve actually working on the DC port? Because the PS2 version was handled by Gearbox in their earlier days if I’m not mistaken.
To the best of my knowledge, Valve has only worked on the Xbox and PS3/Xbox 360 ports of their games (with the former taking a particularly large amount of engine rewrites to get working)
I would like to thank tommy Tallarico for making the half-life dreamcast version
His mother wasn't even on Cribs.
his mother is very proud
Just got it off the launching pad
I understood that reference
This game with the Dreamcast Keyboard and Mouse is actually really fantastic. I never got to use the KB&M until like... 20 years+ later, and going back, its nuts what the DC was able to pull off.
This was how I first played Half Life when I was 9 or 10! My dad pirated tons of games off usenet groups and stuff in the 90s/2000s, and so we had these binders full of Dreamcast games. This was one of them, and it was my introduction to Half Life as a kid. I remember how terrifying this game was to me when I first played it. That's an interesting point about the game being a lot darker than on other systems - perhaps this played into how eerie it was for me.
But yeah, I didn't even learn that it wasn't an official release until many years later. Definitely an interesting introduction to HL!
i mean. it was *to be* an official release, the guy in the video was wrong about that, not sure what he meant when he said it’s not an official product
This was the most sincere review of the DC version of the game! The other reviews fail to mention the kinds of problems people might face playing it.
The save system isn’t as bad as Toy Story 2, which is completely incapable of overwriting its own save file, requiring you to (in a separate menu) manually delete your save to make space even though it’s the same size. (Also, the load times won’t be reflective of a pressed copy, MIL-CDs have a lower data density and burned CDs are lower quality, requiring a further slower data rate)
2:55 Hey! It's Tommy! I bet that his mom is very proud that he made that video for you. :)
I'm sure he stole that joke
since this game was never officially released, the rom was never optimized for retail. also there was an unreleased zip disc add on i believe gave the dreamcast a little more ram and you could download dlc and I believe they were working on compatibility with half life and "blue shift" in particular.
2:17 Gordan Freemon an exclusive protagonist for the Dreamcast version
Fun to see the Dreamcast version in action - I've only heard about it a few times. Also, I like the pacing of this video.
5:51 i have a dreamcast keyboard and mouse (i bought it when DC was still actively supported), i mainly bought it for Q3A, unreal tournament , 4x4 evo and a few other games, as well as web browsing (i didn't have a PC capable of browsing the internet), and then i bought PSO. Pretty much everyone i knew with a dreamcast also had the keyboard and mouse (mainly for web browsing).
Im honestly shocked from all the folks who've commented with a keyboard, cause nearly nobody I know with a DC has the keyboard and mouse haha
@@thecamobotPeople would get them for Phantasy Star Online and that was a top 20 DC seller
@@thecamobot It's hard to believe, lol. I have a Dreamcast keyboard & mouse myself, although I didn't get them while the console was hot & I had them imported from Japan about a year ago now. If you go to the subreddit or any community online for the console, most the people there will likely have a set. On top of that, if you had paid for SegaNet, you could receive a free keyboard shipped to you back in the day. They offered a heap of games that supported the keyboard, & while the mouse wasn't nearly as successful (mostly because it released just a few months before discontinuation of the DC) it still got notable titles. With how popular Q3A & a handful of other FPS games were on Dreamcast, it's safe to say many other people had the same thought to get a keyboard & mouse for better controls. Also, there were a decent amount of people actually using the Dreamcast for internet purposes, which made the keyboard & mouse must-have items.
DC KB+M user here; these were really essential peripherals at the time and fleshed-out the online gaming experience on Dreamcast.
@@thecamobot it's a thing people had who played games that supported it when it was a relevant console, most of which were online. Obviously almost no one playing the DC these days has one because who on earth is playing Quake III and UT on the dreamcast
This video is really well made, even though I knew most of this stuff I still watched the whole thing. Love it
Very nice comparison! I remember when Dreamcast first came out, I was a teenager & I saw It displayed in the mall's electronics store. I was so amazed!
It was largely before my time, but I'm saddened by its failure. It was a really advanced console for its time
Great video, thanks for the coverage.
Underrated channel.
The loading screens on PC were super long back in the day.
I actually really like the controls on the Dreamcast. It ended up working out really well for me.
I got the Guide Book of Half-Life for Dreamcast month before they caned it and years later found the game and played it from start to end and even use my Dreamcast Mouse and Keyboard.
24:28 I couldn't wait for this game to come out. I was seeing screenshots everywhere, and was devastated when it got canceled. Then it leaked, and I downloaded it pretty much immediately. The load times were just too atrocious to get through though, I don't think I made it much farther than the start of Office Complex, so I understood why it was canceled at that point. I got a new dreamcast recently with a GDEMU, and I have it on there, but haven't even thought to attempt to play it again. Kudos to you for getting through it.
And PS, I had the dreamcast keyboard back in the day, but I didn't have the mouse. I got it for Typing of the Dead though, not PSO.
Excellent video, you put a lot of work into this one. 🙏 Happy new year and wishing you more and more subscribers. 🎉
I did not expect the first American to ever work on Sonic to appear in this video, I thought I'd seen the last of him after that Hbomb video!
Great video! Very well-presented. You've got a real talent.
I never had freezing issues with Half-Life DC. The frame rate was sporadic but you get used to it. There was a dummy file version that was meant to fill the disc and push the data to the outer edge and speed up load times but I can't remember if you had to patch the ISO itself or if it was a standalone ISO. Never had save issues either. The saves were large and I remember dedicating a VMU to Half-Life. Also, the mouse and keyboard were abundant. Most people i know had them and used versions were flooding second hand game stores.
Found the Sega plant 😂
@@INFILTR8US ?
Back in the day, i had the Keyboard and Mouse to play Unreal Tournament and Quake 3.
I played PSO as well but i also used my dreamcast as a web browser back then.
The Keyboard and mouse was very cheap to get for a kit mowing lawns back then, trust me, i was there, did it, mowed the lawns and bought the Keyboard and Mouse. I learned how to type with Typing of the Dead on that console lol
EDIT: yes, the controlls were pretty much standard on all Dreamcast FPSes. Where i had came from the N64 before that and I used the C buttons to go forward and back strafe left and right and the stick was turning/aiming like you would normally do. I'm also an inverted look person because of how games back then programmed me lol.
Also, the burned CDR can actually load slower than a normal GD-ROM and the age of our consoles may be getting to it too.
the algorithm has blessed me with a small creator and I couldn't be happier. keep making awesome stuff!!
I was excited for the game at the time, really sad when Dreamcast died but it still enjoyed it on PS2 and then later on, PC.
Great video!
2:54 that's Tommy Tallarico on the left side of the screen, bit of an odd thing i noticed because I saw a really good in depth video essay by HBommerguy on how that guy is a fraud and i would really recommend it. (Edit) 7:30 HIM AGAIN.
how does this channel only have 700 subs? your content is very high effort, keep it up
I wonder how much Valve could have polished up in those final months. I think they probably could have gotten the controls sorted and some of the frame rate stuff. Walking with the buttons and aiming with the stick probably would have made things easier after you got over the learning curve. Turok 64 style controls.
30 seconds loading is actually surprisingly good for that game and a burned CD. The GD Rom press probably would have put the data out at the end of the disk so its spinning past the laser faster.
I actually forgot about turoks controls, used to play that all the time on 64
@@thecamobot
It would be cool if in 10 years AI can just automate 99% of conversion from C to faster C++, and id imagine you could get more optimization than doing just that.
@@remasteredretropcgames3312 C++ isn't faster than C, in most cases if it's done the "proper way of the language" C++ will be slower. Something like recompiling with modern SH GCC would probably be better
@@attilavs2
Video Games are most cases?
@@attilavs2
Do you write everything in assembly? You're right, John Carmack was silly to port id tech 3 to id tech 4s primary language. He should have done it in pure assembly while maintaining GPUs every launch as a tradition.
i cant believe there was a tommy tallarico jumpscare at 8:45 in this video lmao
underrated channel u deserve more recognition
Thanks for the comment!
really nice man, i loved this. HL is my fav game of all time . U did a really good job, you deseve more subs !!
Gordan Freemon, my favorite character in gaming.
Is that Tommy tellarico? 😂 @ 7:45
3:27 This was due to the Steam version of Half-Life changing the default brightness and gamma settings.
Goldeneye sort of set the standard back then for face-button/move and analog stick/aim, so it wasn't quite so strange at the time.
The framerate is still trash, but with a GDEMU the horrendous loading times are mitigated, making the whole thing a lot more bearable.
Anyways - great video! Glad the algorithm decided to send it to all of us DC nerds 💖
Well you don't exactly need to destroy your Dreamcast to get better load times. If your that desperate, you could get a Dreamcast GD-Rom emulator on PC.
@@koolaid33 ...so you just don't know what a GDEMU is or...? A GD-Rom Emulator is an SD card reader that is installed as a drop-in replacement that goes into the port that the GD-Rom reader uses in order to play Dreamcast games from files rather than discs. The GD-Rom reader pops out and neither it nor the Dreamcast are in any way "destroyed" in the process. You can just take the GDEMU back out and pop the reader back in any time you want. Dreamcast emulators are imperfect and you can't use the VMU with/in compliment to your games when emulating, while a GDEMU lets you use actual dreamcast hardware without the many issues that come with disc based media. One day *in the near future* disc drives that actually function in consoles from this era will be extremely rare, as every disc drive will eventually fail, and optical drive emulators like the GDEMU will be the *only way* to play games on Dreamcast hardware.
incredible video quality, subscribed
love the tommy tallarico cameo lol.
Superb video man, keep it up
Great video. I’ve played pretty much every fps released on the dreamcast including this half life port, I’ve finished both the original game and blue shift on Dreamcast and I still play quake 3 quite regularly online on the Dreamcast as its servers have been revived, so I’ve played a fair amount of fps on dc. Really enjoyed your video but I think you 100% made a mistake swapping the aiming to the face buttons. While I get at first it seems strange to aim with the left side of a controller and move with the right, you get used to it quickly and losing out on analog aiming is probably the reason for about 50% of your issues with the game. The face buttons would just emulate the WASD buttons that was used on pc but analog aiming is definitely needed here. I feel like if you stuck with the face buttons to move and didn’t change it, you definitely would have a better time, the port is still pretty rough but the face buttons for aiming is pretty horrendous. Nevertheless good video👍🏻
Dude your video is awesome. I hope it gets picked up by RUclips's algorithm.
I was always curious how fps were played on a Dreamcast controller and couldn’t find any to demonstrate it like this so thank you
tommy tallarico jumpscare 😭😭
Amazing video for such a small channel!! I can't wait to see more of your content if this is only your 8th video!
The performance of the Dreamcast version reminds me of how I originally played the PC version back in the day. My PC was barely strong enough to play Half-Life, so it had a terrible frame rate, and every loading screen was like a minute long.
The only way to play any FPS game (or any game that involves strafing) on Dreamcast is to use the face buttons for movement and the analog stick for look/turn. WASD with your right thumb. It's a challenge to get used to, but it's what I had to do for Quake III back in the day and it because second nature really quick. Made Half-Life a breeze. Ladders still sucked though. Also not sure what's going on with your brightness issue. I've played through this game once on my old CRT TV back in 2005 and more recently on a 46" LCD TV in 2016 and never had that problem.
As far as the loading times, I have a theory that they were going to make this a 2-disc set instead of putting Blue Shift on the same disc. Back in the early 2010's, I played a bit of a "cleaned up" version someone posted on the ISOzone (RIP) where they reorganized data on the disc so that the laser could do less work to access it all and it improved loading times by like 50%. I wish I still had that and if anyone can find it, let me know. I remember it also improved the save glitch as well, but didn't completely solve it.
Mouse and keyboard, you unwashed savage!
In an interview from back then, a dev said they had not finished optimizing the code and geometry. Who knows 🤷♀️
I wish it could get completed by a homebrewer.
Awesome video overall, but one objectively incorrect point is that, "If Half-Life actually did come out on Dreamcast, nobody would be playing it on a keyboard and mouse." Sega and third-parties pushed a LOT of keyboards and mice back in the day to lots of system owners, and for good reason: many people used the console for web browsing in addition to gaming. The support list for kbm was pretty extensive, and the peripherals were cheap, easy to find in-store (even Walmart carried them), and readily available online. As a massive sample group of one, I can testify that I didn't know a single Dreamcast owner who didn't also have a keyboard and mouse for things like Web Browser 2.0, Unreal, Quake III, etc., including myself. So if the game had come out, you better believe that a large number - if not the majority - of folk would have in fact been playing this game with kbm on release day.
It's so interesting to me to watch Half Life related videos years after the fact that I'm now a high end PC gamer.. I only ever played HL1 on the Dreamcast. To this day. Similarly I only ever played HL2 (and Portal) on the PS3. I've never played any Valve game on the PC. Lol
Fun fact there is a half life mod (that I don’t remember the name of) that was for some reason only put on the Dreamcast version of half life
Paranoia?
It got a PC release a few years later.
@@hipsterelephant2660I don’t think it was paranoia, though I’m not sure
Great video! I was so disappointed when this was canceled. I had it pre-ordered as my family only had a Mac computer at the time, which it didn't come out on. I was counting on this port. I was so disappointed when I got my $5 back from EBGames for my pre-order. They did have the Prima guide for sale for 5 cents. 😅 However, with only a Mac and a Dreamcast, Half-Life was out of my reach for some time. 😢
I played through this version eventually. Not great but playable. Hell, I played through Soldier of Fortune so I could endure any long loading times.
I did have a keyboard and mouse that I played all the FPS games with; Quake, Unreal, Outtrigger, Rogue Spear, and the most ridiculous load times game ever, Soldier of Fortune.
Great review. Love the babymetal poster.
I was looking someone mentioning this :)
hell yeah new video
Subscribing because of the sincer well made video on the unreleased version of Half Life for the dreamcast and what could've been.
Incredible video, and an cameo appearance by Tommy Tallarico!? Your mothers must both be very proud!
Wasn't expecting to see Tommy tallarico three times in this video. I hope his mother is proud.
I actually owned (it's still somewhere in my old apartment in Ukraine) an actual illegally printed out and sold copy of Half-Life for my Dreamcast, bought it in 2001 or 2002 I think, the market in Ukraine was exclusivelly illegal when it came to videogames for Dreamcast and playstation 1 or 2, all consoles came with modchips preinstalled. So Half-Life had a jewel case, with "proper" lables, screenshots poorly translated text and all, same as any other game illegally produced and sold, I had no idea what is "piracy" at the time, and one licenced game could be as much as half your monthly wages. I've also bought aftermarket memory stick just to keep saves for half life, good old times.
Cool!
Very nice video, my friend. Very informative.
this was actually the first version of Half Life I ever finished. and even tho I played PSO I had the keyboard and mouse for Quake 3 Arena lol
PSA: Unless you are using two whole VMUs dedicated to Half-Life, DO NOT SAVE DURING THE APPREHENSION CHAPTER!!! (Aka the chapter where a security guard gets assassinated while trying to give you a message) It will corrupt when you try to save there and if all of your saves are during that chapter, you'll have to start the whole game over.
With that out of the way, about the controls. I've had an idea for something that I believe Sega themselves should have released not just for Dreamcast controller but also even the Sega Saturn's 3D controller. Since they share a similar shape. This attachment is a stick module that goes over the A,B,X, and Y buttons. It attatches via a vice tightening screw with two rubber cushions that clamp down onto the controller around the buttons. On top is a stick that presses ABXY depending on what direction you move it. Which would emulate having a second stick. This would be great for third person shooters like MDK and Slave Zero or first person shooters like Half-Life. If this came out during the Saturn era, it most likely would've at least helped the Saturn compete with Playstation's dual stick controllers. I've thought about actually making one myself but I don't have a 3D printer nor the know-how to make models.
If you use an adapter like the brook wingman SD, you can hook a 360 controller up and map it functionally like you’ve described.
Right stick emulating face buttons
It’s pretty decent, and makes the game way more playable.
@@AstraLeeYT Good call. I've been actually doing the opposite. I play on Retroarch on Xbox and you can hook up a Sega Saturn 3D controller to it. By combining a wingman XB2 adapter with a Mayflash Sega Saturn to USB adapter.
It does work in retail mode but I'm too afraid to play online games with it in fear of getting banned because they think I'm hacking. Despite the clear disadvantage. Imagine how gigachad it would be to kick someone's ass in a modern game with a Sega Saturn controller. I love playing mad scientist with adapters.
I recently ordered a universal DB9 controller to usb adapter from a site called Tindy that supposedly accepts Sega Genesis, 3DO, FM Towns Marty, Amiga, and many other DB9 controllers. Fingers crossed that it works.
I never had any of these issues back in the day we used Dreamcast factory to burn the game and black cdr at the lowest speeds with over burn an it ran amazing when we used Nero an high speeds yes you had frame issues but for some reason the black media cds worked on all the games idk why
There is a mod/port of this game for PC for Steam it uses your existing HL1 copy on Steam, The loading and fps is better on more advanced hardware.
I never even realize that there was a dream cast port! The fact that the dream cast was pretty much on the verge of being discontinued blows me
Fun facts:
1.) The Sega Dreamcast is one word, not 'dream cast'.
2.) The Dreamcast had already been discontinued months prior, all the way at the end of March. The fact development even continued to June is a miracle, as most games not already near completion or out by the console's death, even Sega's own first-party games, were cancelled.
3.) I think you meant "blows me away" rather than just "blows me" because that sounds much worse.
I remember having a DoA 2 burned cd copy, loadings took waaaay longer beetween 2 stages than the original GD-rom version which i also had. I don't know for other games, maybe half life is also affected.
I like your style man.
Not sure if anyone else has pointed this out, but I have seen the wall glitch at 13:59 in the Steam release of the game, so I don't think it's exclusive to the Dreamcast version.
Apparently it's also in the PC version but I just had never noticed
My Dreamcast Panther controller had a page in the instruction booklet with the controls for Half Life... a sad memory of what never was 😢
22:40 - Those aren't missing models.
Seems to me the "genius" creating the port decided to use HL1 scientists instead of OP4 ones. Which means all the OP4 specific animations are missing.
Damn the whole game with those controls? My hat is off to you sir
The fact this was never released saddens me. Although, I am pretty sure they scrapped the release because the plethera of loading between level sections, frame rate issues, and controls. Like stated in the video, M&K would alleviate onr these issues, but no one had that. This was a console game. It is shame it was never reworked for the more powerful OG Xbox and only had a PS2 port considering the partnership betweed SEGA and Microsoft. The Xbox controller is far superior to the Dreamcast one. I believe this game would have thrived on the Xbox and would have been nice competition for Halo. Oh well, at least we could still play it, and despite all the flaws, I had a lot of fun playing this on Dreamcast. Great video man.
I remember playing this with KB and Mouse on my DreamCast. I bought a copy at the flea market in Moscow and it came with Blue Shift AND Opposing Force. Had a fat ass plastic case with multiple discs inside, I think the OG game came on 2 discs and than BS and OF had each a disc of their own. I have no clue what kind of black voodoo magic those pirates did, but I remember having very few of the issues you've described.
I don't recall it being supper dark as yours. I never had a load screen more than 15 seconds. I can confirm stuttering in chapters with large number of NPCs and whenever there was an unscripted explosion (as you've pointed out underslung grenade launcher made the game stutter 100% of the time, I can still hear the repeated sound effects: "chuck" game freezes "thunk-thunk-thunk" actually lunches a grenade, grenade impacts and game freezes again "boom-boom-boom"). Can't say anything about controls, because what kind of masochist would use a controller for an FPS when there's a KB&M as an option? Don't know about the save file size, but I used an off-brand memory card that had something like 5x the memory size of standard memory card that came with the console. I also remember that there was a good chunk of the game missing, but it was like half of Zen (Interloper was missing), so I call that an overall improvement. BS and OF did not have any major bugs as what you've shown. No missing models, no scripting errors, no janky movements.
I am gonna be honest, I have thought all the way up to 2015ish that HalfLife WAS actually released on DreamCast, and what I was playing was just a standard copy of a legit game disc ripped and copied one-to-one by enterprising people of my local flea market. Only when I got hit by nostalgia and went looking for an emulator and ISOs (I sold my DC, games and all, when I moved from Russia to US) did I find out that there was no official release of HL on DreamCast.
Не ожидал увидеть здесь человека из СНГ,
насчет дримки, насколько редко встречалась в окружение ?
я увы не застал уже, но помню, что 2 плойка была только у одного знакомого,
тогда уже компы поперли и было не до консолей...
Overall a decent video, has some poor takes though.
The DC keyboard and mouse were common, easily available and worked with way more than just PSO. Tons of people used the KB and mouse for Typing of the Dead, Dreamweb Browsers, Unreal Tournament, Quake III Arena and other FPS games.
The standard controller having a poor default layout misses the fact that it matched every other DC shooter of the time. It is more correct to say the standard layout is just simply dated.
Half-Life for Dreamcast is in fact an official port, it just wasn't released. Being released or not doesn't make it any less official. It was programmed by Gearbox Software for Valve, it's official.
This is why I'm so glad I mastered solitaire controls on Goldeneye 64 😅
I remember playing it on dreamcast. Seens most of the games were pirate editions anyway, didn't know that the game wasn't actually released. Controls were a bit hard, but it was fun, next year i finished the game on a friends pc.
Good video! You should have more subs!
2:47 It is most likely because the game wasn't packed for release, this is similar to crash bandicoot for the ps1, A method used by developers for the time, the final print of the game was packet in a smart way for streaming data off the disc, as you'd progress through the game data most needed for what would be coming next was placed on the disc next in line, reducing seek times to get the data, because the game wasn't released it's very likely the unreleased builds aren't organsised meaning each level and parts of levels are skattered all over the disc image meaning the lasers goes back and forward all the time as data is streamed to the console. I remember my burnt disc when I tried half life on my dreamcast would make nasty seek reads all the time when playing the game and most seriously when reaching loading screens in the game. if released I suspect this would've been reduced most likely also in ways as well to help improve framerate (not related to loading seek times) which also helps in load speeds due to smaller file sizes because of optimatisation.
02:55 That was the Tommy Tallarico? the creator of video games? her mother will be very proud of him appearing in this video
In terms of not having enough buttons, there were plenty of 6 button dc gamepads out there
I have the copy of this game in russian language and dub, ive used to play with original controls and ive completed it, it is not that bad if you get used to it. Also i dont actually remember being it THAT laggy, it was a fine experience for me, maybe russian dubbers made it optimised idk
The guy mega capin saying “I played it on Dreamcast where is it”
The scrambled tracks for the boot_ip hack to function probably made load sequences involve non ideal seeks. I wonder if the retail version would have been better in this regard. A gd emu might paint a more realistic picture.
Really interesting. I didn't even know this was ever a thing.
0:55 It is an official port. It's just not a released official port.
I mean, can you really say it's official if it wasn't released? I get what you're saying, I just don't feel like it's right to say a game is official if it never "officially" came out.
The dreamcast was so cool at the time. And yet, i didn't know anyone who had it. And actually, i have never seen even one
tommy tallarico jumpscare
It would be so amazing if they had finished this version and polished it more.
Who knows, it might even have online crossplay with the PC like Quake 3: Arena does.
alot of us had the Mouse and Keyboard btw.
played loads of Quake 3, also used my keyboard tons for Phantasy Star Online ^_____^
I for one, think the Dreamcast is a horribly overestimated console. Their entire FPS catalogue just look absolutely ancient.
I have no idea why your visuals are so dark. That was not my experience playing through the DC version of the game. I’ve played it using VGA to a CRT and also using an Akura HDMI box to a modern HDTV.
Maybe the vga would help, I was just using standard cables
Cool video curious if the loading screens are quicker from an sd card. Dc controller definitely socks for fps games i found the same issue with unreal tournament recently. Kudos for enduring and beating the game.
Imagine getting counterstrike, team fortress, day of defeat on dc
the glitch in the wall at 14:00 is in the pc version too i noticed it while i was playing
I've seen a lot of Half Life 2 ports even more than the first one. I only have played the HD version of Half Life on PC, a damn good game. Honestly I would love to see a brand new port of Half Life 1 on Xbox and Playstation current consoles. With the re-release of many classic shooters like Goldeneye, Quake, Doom and Turok, I really think there should be another port for Half Life for new players to experience the game, without the shortcomings of the Dreamcast port.
The first Half-Life only ever had two official ports: Dreamcast & PS2. It was never ported ever again, & the Dreamcast port obviously never released. It sucks, but Valve is primarily a PC gaming company, & their stingy with home console releases with all their games.
@@koolaid33 damn, sometimes companies make life suck hard.
The moment I looked at the Dreamcast I realised that It would be a Pain in the Ass to Aim and Shot because there is only 1 Analog Stick
The only thing I can think of is have the Dpad for Move and the Analog Stick for Aimming and Looking
About the darkness...
TV accepts Luma range 16-235 and Chroma range 16-240, which is called "Limited rage".
And PC outputs them as 0-255, which is called "Full range".
At the era only a few games cared about this range difference, and they design their textures/colors directly target to designated platform instead of properly managing color through game engine.
So if a PC game ported to console, it often gets too vibrant colors, and way too high contrast and got clipped black and white, like Half-life in this video.
And vice versa, if a console game ported to PC, it often gets washed-out colors, like GTA3.
I think this kind of color management become common sense only after 7th gen game consoles released. (Xbox 360 and PS3 etc.)
nice video mate!
i think you should make about PS2 port too
Going to assume the fox god brought me here.
10:22 lmao the bug that was in the original and was fixed last month is not present in this version (on pc there was a delay between the scientist's animation and the monster's)
Fuckin Tommy Tallarico...
Oof
They should be able to patch it and also add dreamcast keyboard and mouse support. Yes Sega officially release them for the game Phantasy star online. The homebrew community shouldbe able to have dreamcast keyboard and mouse support.