AIandDesign says Canyon Overdrive took 2.5 days to optimize for Dreamcast

• Canyon Overdrive took half a day to build, followed by 2.5 days of optimization, AIandDesign said.
• The latest demo runs in RetroArch; 60fps or a locked 30fps remain targets in the creator's update.
• The reported real-Dreamcast test used an older, less-optimized build, according to the creator.
• Extended sessions depended on a $200 plan and repeated quota resets.

AIandDesign is working in SH-4 assembly to squeeze frames from the Dreamcast's main processor, a gloriously specific job for a coding agent. The thread also leads to an open SNES asset toolkit for converting music, graphics and fonts into console-ready formats.

AIandDesign has been previewing Canyon Overdrive as a new Dreamcast racer and says it is still unfinished.

The creator's account puts performance tuning at five times the initial build time:

The latest preview uses RetroArch with a CRT shader. AIandDesign gives two performance targets:

• As close to 60fps as possible.
• A clean, locked 30fps as the alternative.

That update gives no measured frame rate. Flycast, named in the session screenshot, is a Dreamcast emulator available as a RetroArch core.

An older, less-optimized build “ran pretty good” on @metalfox's real Dreamcast, AIandDesign reported. The separate real-hardware example offered in the conversation was another game.

AIandDesign asked another commenter which plan they were using and priced their own access at $200. The creator called it MAX and said resets were essential, crediting @thsottiaux for supplying them.

The project also drew an argument about authorship and shared SH-4 math code.

A Reddit exchange shared by AIandDesign about hand-written SH-4 routines and reuse of publicly released code.

AIandDesign linked what they called their own game and compared AI implementation to hiring a developer: the concepts and gameplay mechanisms, they argued, were theirs.

AIandDesign also shared reusable tooling drawn from Deadfall and Rotatron, their SNES projects.

The pvsneslib-toolkit README documents:

• mid2it, mml2it, mod2it: MIDI, MML and MOD music converted to Impulse Tracker modules, with preview WAVs. MIDI and MML conversions preserve notes and timing while synthesizing chiptune instruments.
• make_it: An Impulse Tracker-writing library that can also build sound-effects banks.
• png2bg8: PNG images converted to 8bpp background tiles, tilemaps and palettes, with repeated and mirrored tiles deduplicated.
• ttf2font: TrueType/OpenType fonts rasterized into 8×8, 2bpp glyph tiles.
• macOS helpers: A PVSnesLib installer and a shim for GNU-style sed -i commands.

The converters are standalone scripts. The toolkit is released into the public domain under the Unlicense.