Retro Emulation on a Sega Dreamcast

Did you know your Sega Dreamcast can be turned into an emulation station? It's true! Here are a bunch of different emulators you can try right now. FAQ: DreamSNES is considered superior to SNES4All. Bleemcast is designed to run three specific games, others are using an incomplete beta.

0:00 - Options for DC Emus
0:52 - Atari 2600
2:08 - Intellivision
3:12 - ColecoVision
3:48 - Atari 800 / 5200
5:14 - Nintendo NES
5:48 - MSX
6:26 - Sega Master System / Game Gear
6:52 - Gameboy / Gameboy Color
7:49 - Sega Genesis
9:02 - Super Nintendo
10:35 - PlayStation 1
12:11 - MAME
12:32 - Conclusion

Intro and outro music are existing works of Skylar Spence aka Saint Pepsi.

Background Music:
11AM - Animal Crossing GC OST
Keystone Kapers 5200 Theme
Bonafied Lovin' Outtake
Rocky Outcrop - Battle for Volcano Island GBA OST
Outrage Instrumental - Capital Lights
Masters of the Hall - Zelda: Wand of Gamelon OST
Medieval Tower - The Apprentice OST
Flower Garden - Yoshi's Island DS OST
World 1 - Fast Food OST
Renaissance Hop - Tearaway OST
Herding the Animals - RRR OST

#sega #dreamcast #emulation

[dlog]

Petition for Framerater to bring back the "Yeah, Framerater!" to the intro

[galaxygod]

You should definitely do a homebrew video! The first online multiplayer dreamcast game in 20 years just went up for pre order this week so the scene is doing well!

[AfroRyan]

A followup for emulation on the OG Xbox would be interesting. Obviously no one is going to say no to a Dreamcast Homebrew video.

[martinromocubero]

You have forgotten two of the best emulators:

NEO4ALL (Chui, Fox68k and Darkslain) - Neo Geo CD emulation, 100% speed, tiles emulated with PowerVR (as textures)
DreamSnes - Outperforms Snes4ALL in almost all aspects. No graphical glitches and 100% speed in some games, but use of the frameskip is required.

[chronossage]

I was really into Dreamcast emulation back in the day. Mostly because it was the only way to play games on my bigger tv instead of my small computer monitor. Getting some premade ISOs was also how I got my first romsets. The Dreamcast was, in retrospect, a great console for a poor kid with access to the internet. If only that Sony marketing executive managed to stop the PS2 from playing DVD so they could sell more DVD players. Maybe the Dreamcast 2 would exist.

[radiantansel]

As someone who lives in a developing country and at some point my ONLY WAY TO PLAY GAMES was a Dreamcast, and a Pentium III PC (IN LATE 2012), I must say I'm grateful for people to even bother doing these, I recall better SNES emulators existing? I don't remember that one at all, and also another mame emulator that even ran SF II.

As for bleemcast, you can actually make a "boot disc", that will flash until you open the tray and insert a PS1 disc (legit or burned), this is how I used to play a lot of PS1, and even that compatibility list is a bit wrong, saying R-Type Delta doesn't work, yet my Japanese copy works flawlessly.

bleem!cast is actually a superb way to play some "arcade style" PS1 games, stuff like Street Fighter EX2 (I recall it working nice, need to re-check), Xevious 3D/G+, the aforementioned R-Type, and so on, mostly because that boot disc completely skips L2, R2 and Select, alongside no analog movement whatsoever, and no memory card emulation at all outside of the 3 official discs (Tekken 3, Gran Turismo 2 and Metal Gear Solid), so if your game is an arcade title, it might be worth if that's what you have lying around, albeit I agree that today there is much better ways to play PS1.

Still, pretty nostalgic video, All of these are completely obsolete, but maybe a good quick solution to play on a CRT, which is still a somewhat niche and complicated way to emulate things.

Great video! I would've loved to see some other systems I recall emulators existing, such as the GBA.

[MisterSouji]

Dreamsnes is one of the best emulators on Dreamcast. I actually played through several snes games back in the day. I know it ran Super Metroid at playable speeds. Used to run beat em ups on it all the time too.

[WedgeStratos]

Happy to see this! I'm a major Dreamcast fan and actually compiled the Gens4all rompack you tried. Thanks for the heads up about Ristar - another one to double-check. Some of these emulators were designed with the GDemu ODE in mind, especially due to watchdog issues. I'm working on another revision to remedy more issues and will look into the Virtual Fighter 2 thing as well.

[almaelma]

Ah the Dreamcast~ My favorite system. When I got mine it came with a ton of CD-R emulators so my first memories of the system were emulators before I got real Dreamcast games.

Great video Frame ❤

[datassetteuser]

Dreamcast Homebrew: Yes please! Also, it would be great to see an updated version of many of the emulators you went throught. Some of them might only be a few revisions away from a very decent experience, and I'd love to have the option to play SNES on the Dreamcast without issues (just to think how awesome it is to do that on Sega hardware - take this, Big N! 😂 ). A decent Atari emulation of 2600 and 7800 would also be very awesome. Well, don't think there is a high priority of ever updating these emulators too much, as there are better options out there - and who really needs to depend on a DC for emulation these days? However, there is hope ...

[HerculesMays]

You should really check out emulation on the Commodore Amiga sometime. It's a very complicated, but interesting rabbit hole to go down. (For example, Amiga is basically the only way to emulate the extremely obscure "Emerson Arcadia 2001" console)

You have usual stuff like Atari 2600 and NES emulation, but things get really complex due to the fact that, unlike with consoles, Amiga computers can either be stock, come with different graphics chips like the AGA, or they might have a plethora of different accelerators like a 68030, 68060 Motorola chip, Pistorm, Vampire, PPC, etc. Basically, depending on what kind of accelerator you have in your Amiga, various other emulators on the Amiga will either become faster, or become capable of working at all.

If you have a top of the line Amiga with the most expensive accelerator installed, you can emulate a surprisingly large amount of stuff for a computer from 1985 such as

-Atari 2600
-Emerson Arcadia 2001
-NES
-Master System
-Genesis
-SNES
-Playstation
-Macintosh
-MSX
-MS-DOS

And I'm sure I missed some stuff. Anyways, great video Framerater!

[Nintendoofah]

I remember back in the 2000s when my brother burned a bunch of CD-Rs for the Dreamcast, a couple of them had an NES and Game Gear emulators. I spent so many hours trying out the NES and Game Gear libraries.

[BigAnalogSquirrel]

Dreamcast emulation is actually perfect for NES Zapper and SNES Super Scope games, you can emulate pretty much everything better on a pc but light gun games with actual crt light gun hardware is the best

[jorgeigp]

I used to play the nes emulator on dreamcast so much when i was a kid

[yinepuiwhite]

As a longtime viewer, seeing you boot up Duke Nukem MD in the Genesis segment gave me such a smile. It's also a great idea- on paper that title would require some pretty strong emulation accuracy to run right.

[ThexthSurvivor]

The Dreamcast is awesome. I was using many different emulators for various systems and web browsing on it back in 2000 up until 2005 or so. I still have the CDs for them too. I'm surprised you didn't cover the Neo Geo Pocket emulator. That one works very well. There's also a GBA emulator and someone even ported Super Mario 64 to the system to run natively, though not at full speed. The DC was also one of the first systems that I started modding game content for. I had my own custom soundtrack in different games and even custom textures in games like the Resident Evil series. Fun times!

[vmu]

Seems more worthwhile to talk about what can emulate the Dreamcast rather than what the Dreamcast can emulate.

[niche]

Frame, good work! I only got my Dreamcast recently (late last year), but it shot up very quickly as one of my favorite consoles thanks to how unique its games and feats were.

On your end, a homebrew video would be awesome! There's a couple ports that've been made and are, while slightly iffy on compatibility, extremely cool. Be sure to check out the Atomiswave homebrew ports if you go for it! I've heard the console has a similar architecture to those arcade boards, so you'd likely get much more success with those rather than MAME.

On dedicated indie titles, the scene is thriving as well thanks to not only the first online homebrew releasing soon, but simply a ton of indies. I won't say much myself having not played much of them, but I'm sure there'd be a lot you'd like!

[ResidentNotEvil]

If sega made mini dreamcast Emulation console including saturn would have sold atleast 20 million

[customsongmaker]

NESterDC can fit every NES game on 1 CD, it was pretty fun back in 2007 when used Dreamcasts were available anywhere for $30.

Sega Genesis games and SNES took 2 discs for the collections. The SNES disc had a ska song on the menu called Where's My Snake.

Then there was Bleemcast to emulate PS1 games. Then there was the bootdisc that would play any Video CD format movie in the Dreamcast.

Then there was Half Life for Dreamcast, and Shemue 2, but I could never get them to save.

Also of note was the Kill Bill homebrew, the audio really made it great but it was a very short game.