Dreamcast emulator question

[Big Seany]

I was considering investigating the world of DC emulation, but have noticed that on the net people sell discs that claim to contain "180 SNES games" and "150 MD games". Now apart from MAME I am not generally a massive fan of emulators, but it would be bloody handy to have a disc for the DC with SNES/SFC and possibly MD games on it - if anything for the space my consoles take up at the moment (the mighty DC is the only one that stays set up all the time). So I guess I am looking to use something like this as a backup to games I already own. Any advice or suchlike about these discs? I presume they are illegal.

Edit - just bought one of said dodgy discs off fleabay - I await it cautiously.....

[E. Randy Dupre]

You just gave somebody cash for something you could have easily compiled yourself, dude.

[Baseley09]

Sure they are illegal, and often not very good. For instance, the best Snes emu is ok, you can play games with sound (better with sound off), but to be honest its a bit screwey.

The best Nes emu is actually very good, but its about 5% too fast, making it quite anoying if you are used to the game normally.

Some of the best stuff is burning home brew/PD examples like Doom & Wolfenstein, really good on Dreamcast.

http://www.dcemulation.com/ have all you need in terms of files, and links to other DC Emu sites. Once youve learnt to use the self boot inducer program, most of its easy as pie, if frustraing at times.

[anephric]

And learnt to convert mingin' DiscJuggler images to Nero...

[Big Seany]

You just gave somebody cash for something you could have easily compiled yourself, dude.

I know I know, but, trust me - I couldn't have. Remember I had to ask how to sort out MAME? That was enough technical stuff for me. I even had to send my VMU to trickytree so he can upload some saves onto it for me. I am ****ing useless on computers. Doing something like that would probably fry my brain. I suppose it was a stupid, compulsive (and illegal) purchase really.

[mid]

And learnt to convert mingin' DiscJuggler images to Nero...

1) download cdi2nero

2) stick it somewhere on your path (or just add where you put it onto your path)

3) cdi2nero filename.cdi

[simoran1]

there are some great snes emulators out there actually, snes 9x which i use is perfect even with the sound on. dont really know much about dc emulation though.

edit: - sorry thought you meant dc emulation on a pc, not emulation on an actual dc. sorry

[Leon Retro]

I had the snes emulator for the DC and it wasn't very good. The games have serious trouble running well; though for some strange reason DonkeyKongCountry runs really well. The developers gave-up on making it 100%, but at least it ran to a degree.

I think the NES one sounds a better bet; if a DC can't run those games well I'll eat my VMU.

[Jay]

Yep, NES is about the only emulation worth investigating on the DC. There was a hacked version of Bleemcast! floating about a while back which didn't limit which games it could run. Being a hack, and obviously missing the optimations in the official packs, it was a bit hit and miss, but went some way to showing how well PSX emulation could run on a DC. Silent Bomber was nice on it, IIRC.


Jay

[Sane]

And learnt to convert mingin' DiscJuggler images to Nero...

You can also use Alcohol 120% if your burner doesn't get along with DJ.

[anephric]

1) download cdi2nero

2) stick it somewhere on your path (or just add where you put it onto your path)

3) cdi2nero filename.cdi

I know that

[randombs]

You can also use Alcohol 120% if your burner doesn't get along with DJ.

heck, i use alcohol anyway, didn't even bother trying discjuggler, cdrwin, etc on my pc. i have nero for file-based burning though

alchohol is wicked for things like this

[randombs]

yeah that bleemcast was a bit naff, being a beta and all. i wanted to get one of the official ones but never got round to it. now i'm not too bothered tbh although i may start the search again (playasia has them)

[Rock]

I tried out some single game arcade emus for DC last night - wasn't impressed, but was hardly suprised they ran badly. They run on a variant of MAME, and even my P3 500mhz from 5 years ago had trouble running MAME well.

NesterDC (Nes) and SMSPlus (Master System) are fantastic though - pretty much perfect except for a few games they have trouble with. If you're inexperienced at compiling and burning the discs, hunt down pre-made discs on your preferred filesharing program. Also not quite perfect but getting there is DCGnuboy (Gameboy/Color emu).

Also worth a check out are the Doom ports for DC (you need the original WAD files to play, or at least shareware), Rise of the Triad (again, original files needed) and I've heard good things about the ScummVM (Lucasarts adventure game interpreter) port.

Latest news in the DC scene is DCastaway, an Atari ST emu that works 100% with sound with most games, which is in beta at the moment, and HuCast - a PC Engine emulator with CD support to come. Yet to try both, but I'll get round to it when the bugs have been ironed out.

Check http://www.dcemulation.com and http://www.dcemu.co.uk for databases of DC stuff, and the latest news.

[AlonzoUK]

Quake is worth checking out as well and the DCSpeccyal'K spectrum emulator if you are into that kind of thing.

Emus for Dreamcast can be found here http://www.dcemu.co.uk/emusfordc.shtml

Worth looking at the homebrew stuff as well - Beats of Rage variants are clever and someone as released Metal Slug 32x which is looking impressive.