Working Dreamcast games

BJRetro

Just noting this for those that stumble upon this forum for what it’s worth. I just noticed that my bartop pi which uses a fan definitely runs Dreamcast games better than my other pi. Key example: Cosmic Smash for Naomi on lr-reicast on my non-cooled pi can’t run smoothly on 640 resolution without some skips/hiccups though ran on 320 but my bartop one is doing 640 resolution just fine right now. I don’t think any other settings on overclock are different. Not sure if this makes sense from a scientific standpoint but if so, would suggest those running Mupen and Lr-reicast have overclocking and a fan and see if that helps improve performance some.

Efriim

@BJRetro
Yeah the pi throttles at I think as low as 60 degrees celcius.
Which can be changed; but without cooling, on models like the pi3b+ you will soon reach 70.

the arm core will drop down to 1.2ghz, i think the others at minimum, for 3b+

barbudreadmon

@Efriim said in Working Dreamcast games:

you will soon reach 70.

This is not a big issue with a raspberry, old models could run up to 85, i don't know about the current one, i just know they somehow decided to lower the default throttle value from 70 to 60 in a firmware update.
You can change the throttle value to the old 70 value by adding this to you config.txt :
temp_soft_limit=70

BJRetro

@Stuart2773 said in [Working Dreamcast games]

just remember that some naomi games require an additional .chd file as well as zipped roms

example Virtua Athletics / Virtua Athlete (GDS-0019)

vathlete.zip
gds-0019.chd

Stuart, where did you put the .chd by the way? Bios folder or in game directory? And when Mame games need a chd they have to go in a folder of the game name (I.e. “vathlete”). Do you have to do that with naomi on lr-reicast? Thanks!!

EDIT - I got it! Tried to delete this post but couldn’t. You put the folder named as the rom name with the chd inside in the rom folder. Now just how to get my wiimote working as a lightgun....

BJRetro

Adding that Monkeyball for Naomi seems to work great with 640 resolution no frame skipping. Rom is monkeyba.zip from .185 romset and you need the chd from the same romset. When the game starts enter the retroarch GUI, controls, and replace the first four automatically mapped analog stick values in this order:
Axis 2+
Axis 2-
Axis 1+
Axis 1-
(Credit to comments in the official Libretro YouTube video announcing that analog support had been added to this game thanks to @barbudreadmon .) Also tested Knights of Valor Seven Spirits and Demolish Fist Naomi but both seem too slow for the pi. Death Crimson OX Naomi I couldn’t get to load at all for some reason. Sega Strike Fighter you need to enter the test menu and set it to a one player cabinet in system adjustments to run - it is slow, though I may try to mess with the settings more. Confidential Mission seems like it might work but I can’t get the gun settings to work right now with my wiimote.

barbudreadmon

@BJRetro said in Working Dreamcast games:

Credit to comments in the official Libretro YouTube video announcing that analog support had been added to this game thanks to @barbudreadmon

Yeah, i did most of the initial digging/implementation of naomi in lr-reicast (support has been in there even since the project was called nullDC, but somehow no one maintained it over time, even the original author didn't know what was missing to make it work again), the later improvements were mostly done by flyinghead.

Efriim

I was having some trouble running lr-reicast.

I added the script modules /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/libretrocores/lr-reicast.sh
rp_module_flags=""
make platform=rpi3

I notice there is already a </dev/null added to the configs\dreamcast\emulators.cfg

The error log stated it was looking in ///roms/dreamcast/dc/ for the data folder

ln -s /home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS/dc /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/dreamcast/dc
Was a solution. What happened here? What should I do to file this bug?

mitu

@Efriim said in Working Dreamcast games:

Was a solution. What happened here? What should I do to file this bug?

Please open a new topic for bugs related to lr-reicast. You probably messed up your RA config file and the BIOS folder is not set - similar to https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/21031/working-dreamcast-games/242.

George Spiggott

Interesting moves on the stand alone Reicast Android app. SoulCalibur plays pretty much flawlessly on my Android phone now (Samsung A6, not massively more powerful than a Pi3B+). Hopefully this will have come crossover with the Reicast(s) available on the Pi.

barbudreadmon

@George-Spiggott said in Working Dreamcast games:

(Samsung A6, not massively more powerful than a Pi3B+)

Samsung A6 is 8 cores @ 1.6Ghz + opengles3.0 gpu @ 600Mhz
rpi3b+ is 4 cores @ 1.4Ghz + opengles2.0 gpu @ 250Mhz

They seem far apart to me.

MrLightgun

WinCE support on Reicast has now been beta released, i'd love to hear if anyone has any success on the Pi. I've heard performance is likely to be slow on Arm but it would be good to see if it works for starters, i would love to see a playable Virtua Cop 2 on the Pi :-)

quicksilver

Looks like Reicast is broken if updating from source. Launch a game and it goes right back to ES. Im using a pi 3b+ with retropie 4.4.12. Anyone else having this issue?

mitu

@quicksilver Yes, it was reported here. I'll try a bisect to narrow the offending commit, it broke sometimes after 23.03. The binary works fined though.

quicksilver

@mitu oops I must have missed that. Thank you for looking into it!

Efriim

@quicksilver
I wasn't sure that the reicast source was the problem until I assessed my system and tried to install on another sdcard. The used sdcard was discounted it was more a possibility to me.

All that I know about the source update is that it had something changed or configured that allows the game PowerStone 2 to be played, where usually I think this game blackscreens after asking for the 50hz/60hz video mode. It is possibly video mode/cable mode update, I don't know anything else, or have anything other than the compilation log.

quicksilver

@Efriim hmm I think powerstone 2 always worked for me

Efriim

@quicksilver
That was what was suggested to me, but confusingly it neither worked or was explained beyond the update of the emulator functioning in this manner.

mitu

Seems like an upstream issue, which is solved, but not yet merged - https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/issues/2700 (leading to the a bug report on the Reicast repo - https://github.com/reicast/reicast-emulator/issues/1537).

manjo

@pjft hey hi, i'm a newbie in retropie and reicast.
How do you configure the arcade joystick for playing virtua striker on DC? this game is the only reason why i build an arcade cabinet. I'm using rasperry pi 3+.
I configured the arcade controller in the reicast setup menu.
When i lunch the game virtua striker, I can navigate trough the menu, but when the game is starting the players dont move. I think this is beacuse VS use just the D-Pad.

Do you have a solutuon?

pjft

@manjo Without more details, it's hard to answer that. In my case, I'm using a Zero Delay adapter, and it has a mode toggle to which I connected a button to, so for some games like VS or Ikaruga I toggle it and can play them as intended.

Alternatively, two options might arise: either attempting to use a keyboard/input mapper like xboxdrv - I never had to use it, but it's an impressive guide by our own @mediamogul - or using a different emulator (lr-flycast I believe allows you to change that in settings, though it's slower). I'm not sure if playing with the Reicast config mapping will help as well.

Best of luck.