Not official news I guess, but something that sprang to mind when I read of the release of DirectX version 8. A while back I was reading a technical article on Microsoft's website about Windows CE and its applications and one of the things they concentrated on was how the Dreamcast implemented it.

The Dreamcast currently uses a slimmed down, streamlined version of DX7 for all its rendering/sound/etc. In the article they were saying how DX7 was, as of then, unable to address the full power and range of features of the DC rendering hardware. There was speculation that when later versions of DirectX came out that did fully support the DC hardware, even greater improvements in graphics and even funkier effects would be possible.

How do you patch the OS on a console you might ask? Well the Win CE OS and the DX libaries are burnt onto every DC cd and read from there on boot. Only the bare essentials necessary to boot the cd are actually stored in the console. In this way, whenever new libaries or an OS update is available, it can be easily integrated into the latest DC games. Old games wont be able to benefit from the newer libraries, but any new titles will have ready access to use them at will.

Whether or not this will make a noticeable different in DC games, or if even Directx 8 is the version of DirectX that has this support, I do not know, but it should be interesting times ahead nonetheless...

afaik, Sega has no plans for adopting any form of DirectX update, simply because MS aren't planning on updating the 3D media technologies for WinCE any time soon (the version for DC devel stuff is still at 2.12 afaik - can any krome guys reading confirm this?)

Besides that, it doesn't make any difference to us, since there hasn't been a single good game made with the WinCE stuff for DC. Well, okay, Sega Rally 2, but even that was dodgy and dropped half its framerate for no apparent reason in sections...

I wonder what sort of features they mean when they say "DX7 was, as of then, unable to address the full power and range of features of the DC rendering hardware."

anyone?

Yeah... the article was rather vague with respect to it. The exact phrase is "There are some features of the PowerVR chip that have no equivalent support in desktop Direct3D, like support for a modifier volume, which can be used by the hardware to alter various properties of other polygons that fall inside or outside of it. Direct3D exposes some of these in the current release and many will be in future releases."