Working Dreamcast games

quicksilver

So after testing lr-flycast on the pi4 I can happily report that it works really well. Full speed and with no noticable graphical issues. I should note I am overclocked so I'm not sure what performance is on a stock pi 4 (I might test some games at stock settings for comparison). I would say Dreamcast works better than N64 (but even that is much improved). Every game I have tested so far has worked.

@barbudreadmon one thing I noticed is in some multiplayer games the 2nd player gets choppy like it's not running full speed but player one is full speed the whole time. Is this a setting issue? What could cause choppiness for just the 2nd player?

BJRetro

@quicksilver I can’t remember does lr-flycast have lightgun/mouse support? I feel like I tested a long time ago and the answer was no but unsure if anything had changed. It was kind of a moot point because performance for a lightgun game would not have been sufficient for pi3b+ anyhow

barbudreadmon

@quicksilver Maybe that's an issue on original hardware ? It wouldn't be the first case of performance crumbling on console with split screen, i'll try to confirm this on my dreamcast when i have some time.

@BJRetro Afaik, lightgun has been supported on the reicast/flycast libretro core since 2018, maybe 2017, though there might be some issue with "mouse as a lightgun" iirc.

quicksilver

If anyone is looking for a fun multiplayer game check out "propeller arena". Its a seemingly fully finished game that was not released because of concerns that people would reinact the 9/11 attacks in game. By the time the game would have been released the Dreamcast was already failing and the game was shelved forever. However it looks like the game was dumped at some point and is fully playable. Supports 4 player split screen action. Quite fun!

quicksilver

@barbudreadmon so I'm fairly certain it is the threaded rendering issue that is causing the problem. I've turned the setting off and the choppiness for the second player is gone.

I also realize now that threaded rendering was also causing some glitchiness with the ball in the pro pinball game.

Related to this perhaps? https://github.com/libretro/flycast/issues/598

hooperre

@quicksilver Have you tried either of the Worms games? I haven't gotten either of those to work.

quicksilver

@hooperre I'll check them out. Do you know if they worked on the pi 3?

hooperre

@quicksilver No. IIRC, they didn't boot up at all on the Pi 3 and now they get to some sort of menu or something. I can't recall. Only ones that I haven't gotten to work with lr-flycast / reicast.

ETA: Railroad Tycoon didn't boot up at all on the Pi 3, IIRC. Haven't tried with the 4.

George Spiggott

Can the Pi version of LR-Flycast run WinCE games? I know they run slowly on X86 Flycast but I think some of the less demanding games e.g. Worms Armageddon may work at a reasonable speed on a Pi4.

quicksilver

@George-Spiggott it is listed as supporting it

@hooperre however I cannot get worms to run no matter what settings I used. I'm thinking it has to do with the WCE support not working properly on the pi 4. :(

hooperre

@quicksilver Ya I thought so. Thanks for confirming.

quicksilver

@hooperre I read up on it a bit, and some of the talk on the flycast GitHub issue tracker seemed to imply that a 64bit os is needed for the WinCE games to work. Which if true, means we are plumb out of luck.

rejesterd

@quicksilver - This is also an issue for me with certain games in split-screen mode. Those would include Re-Volt and Toy Commander. I'm using reicast. If I set frame skipping to 2, the performance is pretty good (just a tad less smooth, obviously.. but no major choppiness). So I'm using that as a workaround for now.

For reference, Outtrigger works flawlessly in split-screen multiplayer mode, and I don't have to use frame skipping. Outtrigger and Toy Commander are *.gdi, and Re-Volt is *.cdi. So I can't really tell if it's rom-specific or not. At least we can confirm that there's some similarity between reicast and lr-flycast with respect to the split-screen issue.

I'm running this on a rpi4 (no overclocking).

rejesterd

@hooperre - I haven't been able to run Worms Armageddon in reicast. I haven't tried lr-flycast yet. But I get the same runcommand output as I get with other games like Quake 3 Arena:

$ less /dev/shm/runcommand.log 
Parameters: 
Executing: /opt/retropie/emulators/reicast/bin/reicast.sh alsa "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/dreamcast/WormsArm.cdi" 0 
/opt/retropie/emulators/reicast/bin/reicast.sh: line 90: 23726 Trace/breakpoint trap   "$rootdir/emulators/reicast/bin/reicast" "${params[@]}"

Haven't tracked it down yet.

quicksilver

@rejesterd if you update flycast from source then turn on threaded rendering + synchronous rendering it is better. But in the retroarch menu go to settings>video>synchronization>sync to exact content framerate ON, and this took care of the weird jittery-ness I was getting in flycast. I don't think my TV even has freesync/gsync but it works.

quicksilver

@rejesterd said in Working Dreamcast games:

@hooperre - I haven't been able to run Worms Armageddon in reicast. I haven't tried lr-flycast yet. But I get the same runcommand output as I get with other games like Quake 3 Arena:
$ less /dev/shm/runcommand.log 
Parameters: 
Executing: /opt/retropie/emulators/reicast/bin/reicast.sh alsa "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/dreamcast/WormsArm.cdi" 0 
/opt/retropie/emulators/reicast/bin/reicast.sh: line 90: 23726 Trace/breakpoint trap   "$rootdir/emulators/reicast/bin/reicast" "${params[@]}"
Haven't tracked it down yet.

You won't be able to run worms because it's a WinCE game, none of the WinCE games work on 32bit flycast and I don't think reicast has WinCE support at all. Quake 3 works fine for me with flycast on my pi 4, I can even connect to online games!

rejesterd

@quicksilver - Think I'm going to try lr-flycast then, because there's a setting in reicast called "synchronous rendering" that does improve the jitters on these games.. but the jitters are still there. So maybe flycast does a better job with this.

Edit: It seems I have to update retroarch because I don't see the video>synchronization section.

mitu

@rejesterd said in Working Dreamcast games:

Edit: It seems I have to update retroarch because I don't see the video>synchronization section.

They moved some of the settings around in the latest version. The setting should be in older versions also, but in a different place (directly under Video maybe).

quicksilver

@mitu Any idea how I can turn that setting on permanently? I am always afraid of messing up my retroarch settings so Im not sure how to make the change globally.

mitu

@quicksilver You can add:

video_hard_sync = true

to your retroarch.cfg, either the global file in /opt/retropie/configs/all or the system's in /opt/retropie/configs/dreamcast/.

EDIT: on a second look, I think the 'sync to exact framerate' might be called vrr_runloop_enable.