Redream - Dreamcast emu (damn good!!)

jetboy

Guessing others already know. However, I was optimistically doing a web search for an OS X Dreamcast emu today and found Redream (https://redream.io/).

It runs perfectly on my 2010 MBP and seems to have really good compatibility too.

For context when I lived in Japan I was teaching English for a few years. I lived on top of the English school which was an old Japanese house (pretty much like one of the ones from Shenmue but without the dojo out the back). Most nights I'd grab some dinner then hit up a store that sold 2nd hand manga and video games. Over time I collected consoles, one being my Dreamcast (a much loved console for me). Time to Crack open some of my old favourites from the garage and play around!!!

Now we just need a Saturn emu that works better than Yabause ;)

menace690

For Saturn emulation:
Mednafen, or using Retroarch and Mednafen's saturn core?

jetboy

menace690 wrote:
For Saturn emulation:
Mednafen, or using Retroarch and Mednafen's saturn core?

I had a fiddle with Retroarch a few months ago and couldn't get it to play ball (completely possible that this was my own fault however, I got it to run a few games using the Yabause engine... not the others).

Currently I'm updating SDL so that I can attempt to compile the latest Mednafen (it was also buggered a few months back when I tried but it has since been updated and a forum post suggests that somebody has patched the exact issue I was having when trying to compile it). Hopefully Mednafen works as I've heard really good things about the accuracy of its Saturn emulation.

I'll report back... noting that I'm very poor at compiling stuff (and all my dev tools + dependencies...etc are out of date and/or poorly configured) :D

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Edit: update... awesome advice as usual menace690... I swear I owe you so many coffees/beers! Compiling Mednafen worked fine this time and (to my surprise) the Saturn core is really fast on my hardware (a 2010 i7 MBP). This is notable because the scary official docs say:

Mednafen's Sega Saturn emulation is extremely CPU intensive. The minimum recommended CPU is a quad-core Intel Haswell-microarchitecture CPU with a base frequency of >= 3.3GHz and a turbo frequency of >= 3.7GHz(e.g. Xeon E3-1226 v3), but note that this recommendation does not apply to any unofficial ports or forks, which may have higher CPU requirements.

I've just had a quick play of Vampire Saviour and Nights into Dreams and both run really smoothly. SUPER impressed!!!

Question - does anybody know how to do a compile like this with all of the binaries statically linked? I could do a build for general usage but I suspect it'd throw up errors like 'you don't have SDL installed in the same location as the guy who compiled this'. For my own usage more than anything, I'm very tempted to compile this with just the Saturn emu module (to save space) and mock up a simple GUI (noting that there's a heap of Mednafen GUIs already out there already... IMO a simple Saturn-centric GUI would work well for my purposes though).

Anyhow... highly impressed by Mednafen's Saturn engine!!!

menace690

Glad to help. Wish I still had the time to go above and beyond and actually do all the testing and compiling for you.

jetboy

menace690 wrote:
Glad to help. Wish I still had the time to go above and beyond and actually do all the testing and compiling for you.

All good. FWIW I just compiled what I think is a statically linked build (for SDL at least) with all but the Saturn emulator included. I used the following configuration:

./configure --without-libsndfile --build=x86_64-apple-darwin17.7.0 --disable-apple2 --disable-gb --disable-gba --disable-lynx --disable-md --disable-nes --disable-ngp --disable-pce --disable-pce-fast --disable-pcfx --disable-psx --disable-sms --disable-snes --disable-snes-faust --disable-ssfplay --disable-vb --disable-wswan SDL_CFLAGS='-static' CFLAGS='-O3' CXXFLAGS='-O3'

GUI? Maybe another day. I just had a quick shot at it... probably not gonna happen unless I can find some kind of a GUI wizard tool If I get bored I might cobble one together using Python or something (I really struggle to get my head around Xcode for some reason - probably because I'm not a software developer).