reicast

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reicast
Reicast.png
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 It has been superseded by Flycast, which is an actively developed fork available both standalone and for libretro.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[edit]

Windows Android Dev builds
Required Windows runtime files
Android Google Play store

Linux Linux ARM Stable and Dev builds
No longer updated
PlayStation 4 PlayStation 4 port
Pandora Pandora port
No longer updated
Dragonbox Pyra Pyra port
Based on old 0.8.1 sources
Switch Switch port

Other platforms[edit]

The developers expressed interest in the past (2013) that they want to port the emulator to the multiple platforms.[1]
here are the platforms they intended to later support that reicast hasn't been ported to yet:

x86[edit]

  • macOS
  • Android

MIPS[edit]

  • Linux
  • Android

PPC[edit]

Overview[edit]

Unemulated Features[edit]

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[edit]

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[edit]

Supported GPU features[edit]

  • 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[edit]

Supported platforms[edit]

- Supports M2-keyed games from MAME ROM sets (Has issues decrypting M1-keyed titles)
  1. [https://web.archive.org/web/20131221020415/http://reicast.com/