A modder has successfully achieved a remarkable feat by getting Half-Life: Deathmatch and Counter-Strike to run online on the Sega Dreamcast, despite these games never being officially released for the console. This breakthrough was made possible through the ongoing development of the Xash3D engine, a fan-made engine compatible with Half-Life and its mods, which has been ported to the Dreamcast by Russian developer maximqad.
The project is still in its early stages, but it already demonstrates functional online multiplayer for both Half-Life: Deathmatch and Counter-Strike 1.6. Footage shared by Dreamcast developer Falco Girgis shows two players testing a Counter-Strike map on Dreamcast hardware, as well as a working deathmatch session. Girgis noted that no Dreamcast-specific optimizations have been implemented yet, meaning there is still room for performance improvements.
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!
— Falco Girgis (@falco_girgis) January 16, 2025
In… pic.twitter.com/HTuxqWy6ep
One of the most exciting aspects of this project is its potential to support additional features, such as downloading custom maps and assets from remote servers, which could then be stored on the Dreamcast via SD card or IDE/SATA hard drive mods. This would make it one of the first engines to enable such functionality on the console.
The achievement builds on the legacy of Half-Life’s unreleased Dreamcast port, which was canceled in 2001 despite being nearly complete. Over the years, fans have preserved and expanded upon this content, including mods like Counter-Strike, which were adapted to run on Dreamcast hardware. The recent advancements with Xash3D represent a significant leap forward in bringing these classic multiplayer experiences to life on Sega’s iconic console.
