Back around 2001, this was THE biggest argument in video games. The PS2 came out with GTA3 and completely stomped the Dreamcast, it was an example of a kind of game the Dreamcast supposedly couldn't run, which is why it couldn't compete for the rest of the generation. For decades, conventional wisdom was that a game like GTA3 was too complex for the hardware. Recently, however, Rockstar, the people who made GTA3, said the game actually began life on the Dreamcast to begin with, and only really died on the console because Sega exited the hardware market before they could finish.
So with that in mind, a few of my friends and I have been porting Grand Theft Auto 3 to the Dreamcast in our spare time. Our goal is not only to fully port the game, but have it run better on the Dreamcast than it does on the Playstation 2. For example, the Dreamcast has much more RAM than the PS2 does, and that allows us to port over the PC version's draw distance instead of the PS2 version's shorter distance. More RAM also means more NPCs on the scene. Additionally, the Dreamcast has graphics features that the PS2 hardware does not, such as built in hardware accelerated normal maps. For this reason, the road in the Dreamcast version of GTA3 features bump mapping, completely abscent on the PS2 version. The SD Card slot on the serial port of the back of the dreamcast and network adapter also opens options not on the PS2 version, such as custom soundtrack support.
Many of the group working on this are porting masters for the Dreamcast. Myself, I ported Doom to the Dreamcast, and other members have ported things such as Mario 64, Quake, and Wipeout to the Dreamcast. We've been banging on this for a while now, and we've gotten to a point where the game runs well enough to demonstrate:
The Dreamcast is the best video game system ever made, and doing shit like this is so much fun. I love seeing how far this hardware can go. The other side of this equation is that our community tools, known as KOS, which we've all collectively been working on for about 25 years now, has finally matured to the point where it's suitable for professional, of-the-era development. Previously, it was assumed the homebrew SDK was far behind the official SDK from 1999, known as Ninja. Over the past 2 and a half decades, we've slowly added features to the SDK to bring it in line with those offered by Sega and Microsoft back in the day, like being able to generate gprof compliant profiling charts, and the creation of a SIMD-enhanced Sh4 fastmath ABI. These improvements have inched us far enough where stuff like this is finally possible.
Keep an eye out soon for a full release of this, as progress is speeding up drastically now.