Best dreamcast emulator in your opinion?
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Maybe this has been asked before, but with the release of retropie 4.6 and its improvements I think it's worth asking. Before updating my raspberry I used the standalone version of redream and, even though it worked well, Marvel vs Capcom 2 was laggy on the intro and during the game when more than 2 characters were displayed, and when playing shenmue, I had some sound issues and the menu and intro had some lag too, but not unplayable at all. After updating I tried flycast and in my opinion it works better. Every game I tried works flawless, and although I think I should try redream again since it's now part of emulationstation, I might stick with flycast. I want to hear from you because I figure you are more experts in this field than I am, so which one do you think is better and why?
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@Rubicai For some reason, i have seen people saying that "flycast is falling behind redream", but no one gave a proper explanation about this, so i don't know what those comments were about. My information on redream might be outdated, but from what i heard :
- no proper dsp emulation
- no mipmapping emulation
- no vulkan support
- no naomi support
- no atomiswave support
- no winCE support
- no custom texture support
- no online support
- ...
All of this exists in flycast. Is there actually anything where redream has an edge over flycast ? I thought it was maybe about speed but from looking at your post it doesn't seem to be the case either. Maybe wider/better compatibility with HLE bios then ? I'm totally in the dark about this, thanks to anyone able to enlight me, @inolen maybe ?
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It's not a competition. They are both very competent emulators. But I have had a few compatibility issues using flycast. Quake 3 split screen doesn't work right at all with flycast, pro-pinball doesn't load properly if you don't spam the start button when the studio logos appear at the beginning of the game. Also, when playing any split screen game using flycast the 2nd players screen becomes extremely choppy (not sure if this is a retroarch issue or flycast issue).
To be fair I have encountered some issues with redream as well and reported them and they were fixed pretty quickly. The issues I have had with flycast are issues I also found open on flycast issue tracker and afaik haven't been fixed yet.
Again, I truly appreciate the efforts of both emulators devs and the hard work they put in but for now redream works better for me on my raspberry pi anyway (could be a completely different experience on a pc, idk).
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@quicksilver ok, so it looks like redream has better speed indeed, maybe the mvc2 laggy intro in redream is just some kind of bug then.
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It depends on the game for me. I use Flycast if I want high res graphics ( I run Flycast in 1024x768 or higher with widescreen cheats) and I use Redream with games that require high speed. Last I checked (a while ago) Crazy taxi and Daytona run faster on Redream while Soul Reaver and Soul Calibur both run well in 768p on Flycast.
As far as I know currently Vulcan and WinCE are not an option for either emulator on the Pi yet. Vulcan would require an updated graphics driver and WinCE of Flycast required a full 64 bit environment and even then runs very slowly.
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@quicksilver yeah I know both are really good, I'm not trying to devaluate the job of any dev, but I just wanted to know your personal opinions about those or any other dreamcast emulator that works on raspberry pi. Sorry if I've been misunderstood, English is not my first language
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@barbudreadmon it could be. I'm very noob at this and maybe I don't know how to get the full potential from the emulator
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I mainly use redream because flycast fails to achieve the same speeds. Some games won't top 50fps. Games like virtual tennis go to the 30's. I just use whatever runs fullspeed. I set redream to 480p but lately I've noticed some big slowdowns that are noticeable in mvc2..
@barbudreadmon Is redream faster just because it uses its own compiled mesa drivers or is it much more? If so, is it something flycast should be doing?
Flycast does run naomi games 5-10fps faster than it does for the same dreamcast version, so I don't know what's up with that. -
@Darksavior said in Best dreamcast emulator in your opinion?:
Is redream faster just because it uses its own compiled mesa drivers or is it much more
No idea, that's the first time i hear of this. I think the difference explaining better performance might be anywhere from dynarec to renderer, but that's hard to say without knowing anything about the source code.
Edit : now that i think of it, yeah, the mesa driver would make sense, flycast has a workaround for the broken rpi4 gpu drivers, but it's certainly slowing down the rendering, if redream has no need for that workaround because it uses fixed drivers, it would make sense that it would be faster.
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redream! is the best emulator for run to most speed the dc games.
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@barbudreadmon said in Best dreamcast emulator in your opinion?:
Edit : now that i think of it, yeah, the mesa driver would make sense, flycast has a workaround for the broken rpi4 gpu drivers, but it's certainly slowing down the rendering, if redream has no need for that workaround because it uses fixed drivers, it would make sense that it would be faster.
I've seen this workaround. I was testing with it disabled on mesa 19.3.x and I couldn't see any issues from my limited testing. Do you know how to reproduce the issue it fixed? So I can test with older / newer Mesa to check.
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@BuZz i found the original report at https://github.com/libretro/flycast/issues/572 , it would be nice to learn that it was solved in the meantime, those additional instructions and tests are probably slowing down emulation.
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@barbudreadmon thanks.
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