AIandDesign reports nearly locked 30fps for Canyon Overdrive on Dreamcast

• Canyon Overdrive has a downloadable Dreamcast build and reportedly approaches locked 30fps; AIandDesign is still targeting 60fps.
• A playable version took about 12 hours, according to the creator, with subsequent days spent chasing performance.
• Development uses Flycast, and AIandDesign says an earlier build ran on real hardware. The newer build still awaits a reported console test.

The developer has reached SH-4 assembly in the hunt for more frames. There is also a public SNES asset toolkit generalized from earlier homebrew projects.

AIandDesign has shared the current Canyon Overdrive build, describing locked 30fps as “pretty much achieved.” The game remains a work in progress.

The creator described the development split as roughly half a day building the game and another 2.5 days optimizing it in a reply. An earlier update credited Astra with sustained development and performance work across nearly three days.

Dreamcast is a delightfully unforgiving target: AIandDesign puts its hardware budget at a 200MHz CPU, a 100MHz GPU and 16MB of system RAM. The developer says optimization has reached SH-4 assembly.

The posted canyon/corridor clipping benchmark measures individual queries in microseconds, so its speedups are separate from the game's overall frame rate.

Development is happening in Flycast, according to AIandDesign's testing update. The earlier public preview ran in RetroArch with a CRT shader.

An older, less-optimized build was tested on a physical Dreamcast by metalfox, the creator reported. That hardware result predates the near-locked 30fps update; these posts include no console test of the newer build.

AIandDesign says the $200 plan allows roughly 24 hours of Astra Ultra use on one reset, according to a reply about usage. The creator counted about four full resets already invested in the project in another update.

By the nearly four-day mark, another reset had arrived.

The creator credited @thsottiaux with supplying extra resets and said the project would not have been possible without them in an earlier exchange. The reported workflow therefore included additional allowances beyond an ordinary subscription's limits.

AIandDesign also generalized tools from Deadfall and Rotatron into a library, the creator explained. The separate pvsneslib-toolkit repository targets SNES games built with PVSnesLib.

Its quick-start examples cover three asset conversions:

• Music: mid2it.py converts MIDI into an Impulse Tracker .it module and a preview WAV for auditioning before ROM integration.
• Backgrounds: png2bg8.py produces 8bpp tiles, a tilemap and a palette, deduplicating repeated tiles, including mirrored versions.
• Fonts: ttf2font.py converts TrueType/OpenType fonts into 8×8, 2bpp glyph tiles for menus and HUDs.

The scripts are standalone, and the repository releases them into the public domain.