Hi
I usually use Demul or nullDC as Dremcast emulator because they are the best emulators i think. But I read tha Reicast now on Retroach is quite good. Is it true? Is the compatibility list good as Demul/NullDC? And is the emulation good enough now or is it still incomplete?
thank you
I think Demul has a little bit better compatibility, but overall I think Reicast/OIT work pretty well and are worth your time/trouble to check out.
I don’t think that Reicast can play the Windows CE titles as of yet, which Demul can for sure do.
If they can, I’m not sure how. I always get a crash when I start them.
That’s correct. Twinaphex mentioned wanting to look into that soon, though, so hopefully that will change 
Reicast is actually really good now, yes! Fast, compatible, looks and sounds fantastic, plays naomi and “naomiswave”, runs with all the advantages associated with RA (low input lag, perfect vsync, shaders etc), it’s being updated all the time…
That will be awesome, Windows CE games compatibility!
Demul has more compatibility bit needs more CPU too. I prefer Reicast on RA and any new, bugfixing in this core is very welcome. Thanks all people who make possible Reicast core and their improvement.
ah ok great!
Currenlty my pc desktop has an i5 4690K overclocked to 4.2Ghz, a nVida GTX907 G1 Gaming 4GB and 8 GB ram DDR3. Is it enough to run with best performance and effects the reicast emulator on Retroarch?
I would like to buy in addition a notebook also for play emulators on my tv fullHD 46". Which are the best specs that i have to consider? For example, my brother bought a Dell Inspiron 5570 with: CPU i5 8250U, 8GB RAM DDR4 2400Mhz, and GPU AMD Radeon 530 with 4GB RAM. Is it enough or is it better I buy a more powerful pc? Probably i will buy a notebook with i7 8750 cpu, 8GB RAM DDR4 2666Mhx and probably a GTX 1050Ti or GTX 1060. Is it enough?
thank you!
Waaaay more than enough man, stop showing off 
Look I run RA Reicast on a 6 year old macbook pro (win10, i7 3615QM, 512mb GT650m). Hard sync on, crt shaders, AA, increased IR and still getting plenty of fps (I can fast forward 3x no problem). Retroarch and its cores are generally very well optimized.
Squalo! Care to share your shader config or name/s? Looks nice.
ah really!? I thought that it was necessary a really owerful pc in order to emulate Dreamcast! Very good! I will try the emulator on Retroarch on my desktop. Can ou share your settings/shaders please? It is really good!
Do you suggest to use Reicast or Reicast OIT?
thank you!
Hmm, I’ve only tested Bangai-O, but on my 2500k running 4.4GHz and a GTX 970 I got sound crackles all the time with hard sync frames 0. This is with the OIT core set to 640x480. It’s much better with hard sync frames 1, but I still get sound crackles if I fill the screen with missiles. Maybe it’s just that game, but Demul and the old Redream core run it without performance issues.
If you aren’t using the OIT core, that would explain the difference since it’s supposed to be much heavier. It fixes a lot of graphical issues though.
I’ve updated both cores today and now SFZ3 Upper gives me an error, SF3 Double Impact is also not working anymore, after choose the title only sound is working, image is a black screen. Below is the error message from SFZ3U.
Anderson: yeah there’s something wrong with the newest cores, trying to launch naomi games makes RA crash hard. I went back to an older version.
Awakened: yeah I’m using regular reicast, oit is much, much heavier. Hard sync frames are set to 1 too, much more fluid that way, and that extra frame of input lag is something I can live with.
kondorito/legolas: thanks, it actually looks much better in motion, fullscreen : )
Regarding the shaders, my configuration is highly optimized for my tastes and the limitations of my old machine, but I will try to explain. See, in my experience, RA native crt shaders don’t go well with high internal resolutions, the scanlines are displayed wrong or they simply disappear. So for cores that allow them (reicast, beetle psx hw, desmume, mupen64, ppsspp, dolphin…) I go with a mix of retroarch + reshade. Without reshade, I don’t know how to get proper scanlines at high IRs. As for the rest, crt-easymode-halation is my favourite shader for LDTV (240p and similar) content. But that’s a story for another day : )
On reshade, crt-hyllian (which was skillfully ported from RA to RS by a good man that calls himself Matsilagi) + some gaussianbloom. On retroarch, aa-shader-4.0-level2-pass2 (with a very high offset for dreamcast, around 0.75, which makes everything nice and smooth while keeping fine detail and textures alive) + image-adjustment for saturation, gamma, levels etc. Oh and linear filtering of course. At high resolutions, everything looks overly sharp and dry without it, specially 2D graphics.
Screen res is 720p (these old games don’t really need more than that, it’s a nice integer multiple of 240p and it helps keep performance high and temperatures low); internal res is 1280x960. Aspect ratio is 1.36 (4:3 being 1.33, I think a bit of a horizontal stretch goes well with many dreamcast games).
Everything looks fantastic scaled up with different combinations of reshade + retroarch shaders (which depend on the system’s original video output), from mario 64 to ffvii (and its dreaded lo-res pre-rendered backgrounds) or of course, soul calibur. Aaah, what I could do with one of those beefy computers that you guys have! : )
I’m posting soul calibur examples only because it’s what I have at hand at the moment, but if you want to see more screenshots from other games or systems, let me know. The artifacts you see in the images are due to lazy jpeg compression. They will not be there in-game (or in png captures).
And amazingly, I just checked and with these settings, soul calibur runs at 60fps with a cpu load of 5-12% @ 2295Mhz while gpu load never goes past 50% @ 580Mhz. Cool, and quiet 
It might be a bit overwhelming for the casual player, but Retroarch is the best thing that happened to emulation in general in a long time, heaven on earth for obsessive tweakers like myself. And the people developing it and the cores, a troop of angels.
Thank you Squalo for your explanation. Will try to mess with my shaders config later on. Cheers!
@Anderson @Squalo I’ve no issue with naomi games with the latest version, including Street Fighter Zero 3 Upper. Try deleting eeprom files perhaps ?
@legolas119 Currently, you need a Nvidia GPU to run Reicast OIT.
The latest (from today) is fixed. It was the previuos one that made RA crash for me. All good now though!
thank you very much for all the informations! I will try it!
I curenltu have the 1.7.3 version of Retroarch, I still have to dowload the Dreamcast cores. If I download the 2 Reicast cores now, do i download the latest fixed version released today? thanks
I just beat Shenmue, it used to crash before recent updates. Alas, Shenmue 2 currently crashes at the start of Disc 4.
That’s something you should report on github, with attached save file.
Anyone get vigilante 8 to work for OIT?
