A modder has successfully managed to get online matches of Half-Life: Deathmatch & Counter-Strike working on the Sega Dreamcast, despite the games never officially being released for the classic console.
This news came to our attention recently thanks to the Dreamcast developer Falco Girgis and is reportedly the work of a Russian developer named maximqad, who is currently developing a port of the Half-Life-compatible engine Xash3D for the decades-old machine. This is a project that will reportedly open the door for a pool of games to be brought over to the Sega Dreamcast, provided the assets and other data can be made to fit into the console's available RAM.
On social media, Girgis shared some footage earlier this week of the engine running a Half-Life deathmatch, stating that it was "EXTREMELY early in the days of the port" and that there were "no DC-specific graphics optimizations or hardware accelerated math routines" implemented yet, meaning there was still further room for improvement.
Following that post, he then shared even more footage, originally uploaded online by the Dreamcast modder DreamShell, showing two players testing out a Counter-Strike map.
Girgis wrote:
"WHAT IN THE ACTUAL!? That "very special" new Half-Life compatible engine, Xash3D, which @craf7y24 just BARELY got ported to the Sega Dreamcast the other day? ...Well here's a direct hardware capture of it now bringing us back online with COUNTER STRIKE 1.6 running on the DC!
"In addition to fixing the obvious polygon jittering towards the camera's near Z-plane (which, seriously, we have no clue about yet, lmfao), he's also hoping to become the first engine to support downloading custom maps and assets from remote servers and storing them onto the DC with either the SD card or the IDE/SATA hard drive mod!"
You can find more footage of Half-Life Deathmatch and Counter-Strike running on the Dreamcast below: