Reicast

reicast

Developer(s)	reicast Team
Last version	r20.04 [+]
Active	No
Platform(s)	Windows Linux Android Nintendo Switch PS4 Pyra Pandora
Emulates	Dreamcast
Website	reicast.com
Support ($)	Patreon
Source code	GitHub

reicast is an open-source Dreamcast emulator produced currently for Android, Linux, Windows, Switch and PlayStation 4. It is based on the source code of nullDC and nullDCe, existing Dreamcast emulators for Windows and Android, respectively. It has been superseded by Flycast, which is an actively developed fork available both standalone and for libretro.

Downloads

	Dev builds Required Windows runtime files
	Google Play store
	Stable and Dev builds No longer updated
	PlayStation 4 port
	Pandora port No longer updated
	Pyra port Based on old 0.8.1 sources
	Switch port

Other platforms

The developers expressed interest in the past (2013) that they want to port the emulator to the multiple platforms.
here are the platforms they intended to later support that reicast hasn't been ported to yet:

x86

• macOS
• Android

MIPS

• Linux
• Android

PPC

• Wii
• PS3
• Xbox 360

Overview

Unemulated Features

Regarding games with WinCE operating system functions and arcade games on the NAOMI 2 machine (One of the latter variants of original NAOMI), someone commented in a compatibility list page at reicast's GitHub repository in early October, 2018 (With edits):

"WinCE requires SH4 MMU emulation, which is unlikely to happen in reicast as it will require a major rewrite of JIT/recompiler; plus few more hardware features, unused in DC/NAOMI games - Maple at Vblank activation mode, Sort-DMA and maybe something else I forgot.

NAOMI 2 will require ELAN T&L chip emulation. In NAOMI 2, display lists is input to ELAN as matherials, light sources, models, transformation matrices, etc; so, not like Dreamcast Tile Accelerator format. You may open DEmul's gpuDX11.dll using some PE resource editor, find there the PVR2_VSH (vertex shader file) which is mostly consisted of ELAN simulation."

Libretro core

Two reicast cores on libretro called reicast OIT and reicast regular were introduced in June 2018 that replace the original core. These cores backport changes from flyinghead's fork that rework the rendering system. The regular core is compliant with OpenGL 3 and GLSL 1.30 in order to support mobile devices and mid-tier PCs. The OIT core supports a graphics feature of the Dreamcast called Order-Independent Transparency that can only be properly emulated using OpenGL 4.3 and later, so it's only available for Windows and Linux at the moment. The two reicast cores have been merged in one reicast libretro core in October 2018. In 2019 the core was first renamed to Beetle DC and a short while later Flycast, for licensing reasons.

Availability of versions

• Windows and Linux (32bit and 64bit)
• Mobile devices (Android OS and ARM hardware. NAOMI arcade hardware also supported.)

Supported GPU features

• Tile clipping support
• Fogging support
• Volume modifier shadow support
• Multipass rendering (enabled by default for non-OIT)
• Render to texture buffer
• Log 2 depth buffer
• Order independent transparency (OIT only)
• Two-volume mode support (OIT only)
• Accumulation Pixel Buffer Size core option (OIT only. Can be set to 512MB, 1GB or 2GB, depending on how much VRAM your video card has. May help with correct output at higher resolutions.)
• 64-bit dynarec (Fixes Shenmue 1/2, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Heavy Metal Geomatrix)
• Flat shading and bump-mapping
• Trilinear filtering (Video)
• Improved palette/YUV texture quality (Converts to 32-bit colors instead of RGB565; i.e. lossless quality of background textures in Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare and is equal to DEmul and redream.)
• Display VMU screens in-game (Positioning, opacity levels and sizing available. Can also show all 4 attached VMU screens at once.)
• Extra Depth Scaling (Fixes graphics in Samurai Shodown VI (NAOMI).)

Misc features and enhancements

• Analog trigger and digital trigger simulations (Analog controls also work on NAOMI)
• Fast GD-ROM Loading (Cuts down virtually all loading times in games)
• Improved ADPCM decoding (Audio)
• Floating point maths accuracy improvements (Fixed broken enemy AI in Soldier of Fortune)
• EEPROM saving/loading implemented (NAOMI)
• xBRZ texture upscaling
• Render to texture upscaling (Lets you set the upscaling factor to output whole screen at multiples of native resolution. Only affects games which render the screen to a texture, e.g. Dead or Alive 2 or Crazy Taxi. Results look amazing, ala what the xBRZ filter does to emulators for 2D-graphics consoles, e.g. SNES, GBA and etc.)

Supported platforms

• Sega Dreamcast Compatibility list
• Sega NAOMI and Atomiswave arcades (NAOMI compatibility list [OIT])

- Supports M2-keyed games from MAME ROM sets (Has issues decrypting M1-keyed titles)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20131221020415/http://reicast.com/