"It's thinking:" a dive into Dreamcast emulation, 25 years after 9/9/99
This week, let's just follow our rainbow.
Man, 25 years.
Twenty five years since I stood in a Best Buy looking at that demo of Sonic Adventure, thinking surely this is the most incredible video game anyone has ever made. Staring into the future.
Twenty-ish years since I bought a used Dreamcast for $25 at GameStop, dropped a few more bucks on a second controller and VMU, and played Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Power Stone 2 and Jet Grind Radio and Ikaruga and so many other games on a console that had so clearly died far too soon. The best 20 bucks I ever spent in my life? (RIP to the spindle of CD-Rs I chewed through while figuring out how to properly burn Dreamcast games).
With this issue landing just hours before the Dreamcast's true birthday — forget that 1998 launch — it felt only right to sweep aside news for a couple weeks and take a look back. Let's celebrate the Dreamcast through emulation — where it's been, where it is now, and why it remains a one-of-a-kind game system worth caring about 25 years on.
Quick aside, though: Since our last issue, Taki Udon's Mister Pi boards finally launched, and sold out in just minutes. If you didn't get one, Taki indicated the next batch (with double the supply) should be available on October 6. Put it on your calendar!
Now let's dive in. 🌀
The Big Two
1. A quick tour of Dreamcast emu history, from its heyday to today
I still have a Dreamcast plugged in underneath my TV, a position it occupies so that approximately every five years I can convince a few people to play Power Stone 2 with me for an afternoon. And hell yes that's enough to earn it its place (at least until next year's Capcom Fighting Game Collection finally gives Power Stone 2 a comeback!). But Dreamcast emulation today is also incredibly robust, with the premiere emulator Redream listing 96% of the library as "playable" and a mere 15 games as broken or stuck on the menu. Unfortunately one of those games is Seaman, due to the microphone, but apparently that Dreamcast classic is playable via the older emulator Demul with some specific configurin'. (It also works on newer emulator Flycast.)
Before Redream became such an easy recommendation, Dreamcast emulation went through many years of promising and abandoned projects; even some of the emulators that are no longer in active development are/were plenty usable! If you're hankering to emulate the last '90s game console today, you should go ahead and grab one of these two:
But that's getting ahead of ourselves just a tad. Let's take a quick tour of how we got here...
Dreamer, first released in 2000, came about while the Dreamcast was still alive, but didn't actually run commercial games, and neither did DreamEmu, released in 2002. Neither dreamboat was afloat long enough to run more than homebrew or demos. That breakthrough finally came with Chankast in 2004, but it too was short-lived, puttering out in 2005.
Things got a lot more active in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Makaron ws a promising project from solo developer dknute that could run a substantial number of real games, and you can actually still read the developer's LiveJournal to go spelunking in its history. Again, its development didn't last more than a handful of years, but by that point several competing emulators were showing that Dreamcast emulation could be done and done well. The ones that really caught on, starting in 2007, were Demul, a Russian emulator that remained closed source but saw a bevvy of updates into the 2010s, and NullDC, which eventually went open source. Both saw some major improvements in 2008, making Dreamcast emulation something you'd feasibly want to play rather than just a curiosity, even if it was a long long way from perfect. While NullDC was discontinued in 2010, Demul kept getting updates into 2018.
In-progress development screenshots from Makaron circa 2009/2010
NullDC lived on in a way, though, with its code serving as the basis for Reicast, which was a standard bearer for Dreamcast emulation from 2013 up until 2021. Notably Reicast brought Dreamcast emulation to Android and even the PS4. Development ended in 2021 but that work (and NullDC's!) continues to live on in yet another fork, Flycast, which today is probably the best alternative to the widely recommended Redream. I asked Flycast developer Flyinghead about the biggest challenges in Dreamcast emulation to get some insight into why it took quite awhile, compared to many other beloved consoles, for emulator developers to really get a handle on the system.
"A very difficult thing to emulate is the Dreamcast GPU (PowerVR 2) even with modern GPUs," Flyinghead said. "On the Dreamcast, you can draw transparent triangles in any order and the GPU will properly sort them and blend them without issue. No modern GPU has such a feature so you need to write GPU code to do this and it's complex and can be slow."
While Redream is straightforward and has great compatibility, Flyinghead's emulator has some advantages of its own, like texture dumping and using custom textures, CPU overclocking, and generally just a lot more options. It also doesn't lock upscaling and extra save slots behind a paywall, which is how Redream monetizes. I've got nothing against emulator developers making money off their work, but if you prefer a totally free option Flycast is it (though you could also buy dev Flyinghead a coffee).
Flycast supports more of the broader ecosystem of Dreamcast-adjacent arcade hardware from Sega, and underappreciated added wrinkle for most Dreamcast emulators that adds challenge and complexity. Only in the very early days were devs focused on just the hardware that reached the US on 9/9/99. Flycast supports the Naomi, Naomi 2 and Atomiswave, which shared arechitecture with the Dreamcast. "On the Naomi front, most of the difficulties are due to the variety of hardware to emulate: input boards, force feedback, special sensors, hopper boards, card readers, etc." Flyinghead said. "Naomi 2 emulation was also a significant challenge, with a new custom GPU to emulate, without any documentation available. Fortunately a Naomi 2 SDK was found and publicly released. This is what triggered me to work on this and a couple of months later a first beta was available."
A lot of Naomi games had Dreamcast ports, but support for those latter two arcade boards opens up some pretty juicy compatibility, including:
- The King of Fighters XI
- Fist of the North Star
- Guilty Gear X
- Initial D Arcade Stage
- Virtua Fighter 4
You can see evidence of Flycast further embracing the corners of Dreamcast/arcade emulataion in recent updates; one released this March, for example, added Sega card reader support for the game Club Kart so arcade players could save their data and take it home with them. Last year Flycast added support for the Sega System SP arcade platform, which is a more limited Naomi, perhaps most notable for running several collectible card games including the delightfully named Love and Berry: Dress Up and Dance! (Flycast emulates the barcode scanning needed for these CCGs, too).
It's exciting to see Dreamcast emulation pushing into new frontiers, since for many years its big obstacle was support for games that ran on Windows CE, which was originally planned to be the console OS until Sega pivoted away from that option for its own simpler roll-your-own solution. At the link though you can see that something like 80 games did end up using the Windows CE SDK. "Windows CE is a challenge because of the need to emulate virtual memory," Flyinghead said. "In this mode, a memory address is virtual and must be looked up in a table to get the corresponding physical address. With very few exceptions, Windows CE games are the only ones using virtual memory. This added indirection on each memory access is a performance killer."
Impressively, Makaron was able to play some Windows CE games circa 2010; it would take Demul several years to really excel in that area, making it the top pick for compatibility through most of the 2010s. Redream notably didn't have WinCE support until 2021, so it's relatively recent that Dreamcast emulation has hit the "it just works" point for the vast majority of games.
What challenges remain out there? "On Dreamcast, I'd say it's mostly bug fixes, perf improvement, quality of life and platform-specific stuff. So nothing really exciting on the paper at least," said Flyinghead. "On the arcade front, I'm still unable to emulate most multi-screen arcade games (Sega Strike Fighter, Airline Pilot, Derby Owners Club). Only the F355 series work atm. I'm also having tons of requests for Sega Hikaru support. But Hikaru is quite different from Dreamcast/Naomi so I'm not sure it will ever happen."
Demul actually has some Hikaru support, though it's not complete. Maybe we'll just have to wait for MAME to take that one on, someday. But in the meantime, there are still some treasures on the Dreamcast itself waiting to be dug back up.
2. Birdcage of Horrors epitomizes the Dreamcast's creative spirit. What else does it still have to give?
Remember Quibi, the streaming service that spent $2 billion on bad short-form vertical video for your phone, then immediately imploded because people could just watch TikTok? Honestly, there's no reason for you to remember Quibi. Forget I brought it up. It was a complete waste of time and money, but I think it at least serves as a useful comparison for how much better — and way more innovative — Japan's Sega and ASCII Corp. were 20 years ago before Quibi when they created Birdcage of Horrors, an "iDrama" that rolled out daily for an entire year using the Dreamcast's network connection.
The Dreamcast had its own horror TV show! In 1999! And thanks to hacker Derek Pascarella and several other contributors, it's now fully available in English. I think it's likely safe to say you've never watched a show or "played" a game quite like it ever before (to be clear, it's not an FMV adventure a la Phantasmagoria; you basically just press play).
Here's how Derek revealed the translation on Twitter earlier this week:
"With what I feel is one of the most interesting English translation patches ever developed, I'm very proud and excited to announce the v1.0 release of "Birdcage of Horrors" (Grauen no Torikago / グラウエンの鳥籠) for the SEGA Dreamcast! So, what's so interesting about it? "Birdcage of Horrors" is a six-disc horror/murder mystery film series put out by SEGA in collaboration with ASCII Entertainment & Communications. That's right, a made-for-Dreamcast film series! Sound insane? Maybe a little.
This little series is over seven hours in length, and features awesome moments like the one seen below. In this scene, Nao and Tetsu must go online with a victim's Dreamcast to gather clues about her murder! But the fun doesn't stop there! "Birdcage of Horrors" is packed with top-notch B-movie characters, like Umeko here who yearns to be an enka singing sensation. I know what you must be thinking, and I hear you. That said, if you're a Dreamcast owner (or someone who can use an emulator), I urge you to give "Birdcage of Horrors" a chance!
Not only is each roughly one-minute installment of the series fully subtitled, but so are all the bonus videos, such as cast and crew interviews. Seeing these folks talk about pioneering the "iDra" (or "internet drama") genre is truly fascinating.
As a small word of caution, "Birdcage of Horrors" can get graphic. There are numerous depictions of murder victims, so if that kind of thing bothers you, perhaps avoid this one. For what it's worth, horror films scare me, but this one is so cheesy, I don't even blink!"
You can watch an English run-through of the entire thing on YouTube if you don't want to run the patch on a Dreamcast.
I'm smitten with the history behind Birdcage of Horrors: it's cool enough that Sega released this show on a sequence of discs in Japan, well ahead of the era when game consoles would become proper multimedia devices. It's so perfectly in the spirit of the Dreamcast to be trying weird, avant-garde stuff, and that definitely applies to how you watched this thing. The six discs containing 365 one-ish minute episodes (basically an hour of video per disc) were released every couple months between September 1999 and July 2000. But you couldn't watch them right away: you had to take your Dreamcast online and connect to Sega's servers to authenticate and gain access to new episodes, which became available daily. It was a year-long horror show told in minute-long bursts over a year. As creative as that delivery system was, Pascarella's hack mercifully removes the one-a-day limit and makes the whole series available to watch.
Oh yeah, and Birdcage of Horrors also kinda beat Lost to the punch, too?
"The developers used the piecemeal distribution and the growing bulletin board culture of the late 90s to their favor and marketed the game around online discussions on boards and a forum on their official website," writes user Takoyaki on Resetera. "Users could discuss theories and get drawn deeper into the world of Grauen no Torikago."
If you want to take an even deeper dive into Birdcage of Horrors, here's another video to watch. But I also wanted to take a moment to highlight several more Dreamcast translations from the last few years as we celebrate the Dreamcast's 25th:
- Rent-a-Hero No. 1 – a Yakuza-predecessor 3D adventure game with American comic book vibes, written about in ROM here
- Nakoruru: The Gift She Gave Me – a Samurai Shodown visual novel spin-off, written about in ROM here
- Cool Cool Toon – a colorful rhythm game, written about in ROM here
- Napple Tale – a platformer with a beloved soundtrack by Yoko Kanno
- Blue Submarine No. 6: Time & Tide – an adventure game based on a hit anime
Those aren't the only translations, of course, but it's already quite a cool selection of games. How many more Japan-exclusive bangers are left on the Dreamcast, though? Last year when I talked to Pascarella about Cool Cool Toon, I asked him about what the big 'uns that are missing, and didn't end up including that bit of our interview in the newsletter. So here we go! What should we be holding out hope for? Here's Pascarella:
"Of course, the holy grail for Dreamcast fans is, without a doubt, SEGAGAGA. Your readers might be surprised to learn that somebody is already in the process of doing a very, very high quality English translation patch for this game. By the hacker/translator’s own desire, there is little known about it in the public sphere. Others have tried and failed in the past, and this person would rather present a finished product to the world, rather than status updates that are sure to be met with cynical comments.
That being said, I always wanted to see the two Love Hina games for the Dreamcast translated into English, which is why I’ve already officially started the first of the two as my next project. Some other heavy hitters include Sengoku Turb, Roommania, Comic Party, Tricolore Crise, El Dorado Gate, and Vermillion Desert, just to name a few.
I have an odd taste in games sometimes, but I also really want to see the Doraemon game on Dreamcast get translated into English. I’ve actually already proof-of-concepted a font hack for it, but the game’s bizarre archive formats holding things like dialogue text still elude me. The same is true of Comic Party, except I’ve made a bit more progress there."
Of those, Eldorado Gate is the one I'd really love to play: a 7-part RPG from Capcom from just before the company started to dip out of the RPG space, but at this point was still putting out killer spritework and oh yeah Amano did designs for the game??? Anyway, the great Kimimi wrote up every single entry in the series for readin'. Translating all seven games would obviously be a major undertaking, so while I am carrying a torch, it's a very small, practical one.
"I love working on DC because for translation patches, it's underloved," Pascarella told me. "Even Saturn has more people working on it."
Let's hope the next 25 years sees even more hackers and translators giving the Dreamcast some smooches.
Patching In
Dolphin says nay to Windows 11's rounded corners – The latest Dolphin Progress Report is filled with goodies as usual, but one key detail: if you got a crash after updating to a recent version, you may need to redownload Microsoft's Visual Studio shiz. That should sort you out. Now to the fun stuff, like Dolphin's contributors noting that Windows 11 by default rounds off application windows, removing some of the pixels that are yours by rights. It now turns this "modern" OS feature off to give you your square corners back. (If you choose to re-round them with a shader in concert with a scanline filter, that's between you and god).
Make sure to click through to read the update's deep dive into improvements to Dolphin's cached interpreter — super interesting if you like getting into the technical stuff!
Cemu released a major milestone, 2.1! – The first big numbered release for Cemu in quite some time, but it doesn't signifiy a major recent addition; it's an accumulation of "all 93 experimental releases since Cemu 2.0." But going forward the emulator is dropping the separation between stable and experimental. There will now be just one release format for Cemu, with an option in the emulator settings called "Receive untested updates" to determine if you get the bleeding edge stuff. If you don't, expect to receive updates after 1-3 weeks.
Core Report
MiSTer Sega Saturn core rolls in with loads of updates – Saturn core developer Sergiy has been dropping improvements for the Saturn core every few days lately. Here's a roundup:
- Fix NBG2/3 rendering when reduction mode is enabled for NBG0/1 (Princess Crown)
- Fix the Sprite window (Idol Janshi Suchie Pai II)
- Fix IO access (Digital Monster Ver. S)
- Some fixes for accuracy (scsptest)
- Fix Shadow priority (Legend of Oasis, Princess Crown)
- Fix the Vertical Counter value (Senkutsu Katsuryu Taisen: Chaos Seed)
- Fix update User clipping coordinate (Albert Odyssey)
MAME 0.269 adds new working systems – As is common with MAME releases these days, a handful of obscure peripherals and electronic toys join the party. I know you're absolutely psyched to emulate the Jeux Nathan Mega 10.000: L'Encyclopédie Électronique, right?
Translation Station
Dang, we're eating good this week! In addition to Birdcage of Horrors, we've got a pair of RPG translations.
Slayers for PC-98 – A classical dungeon crawler with all the baggage that entails, this is nevertheless a beautiful game, with the kind of pixel art that illustrates why I sometimes just dump a lot of PC-98 screenshots at the end of this newsletter. The game also really captures the comic zaniness of the '90s anime. I can't say I know Slayers too well, but I have watched the 1996 film Slayers Return, and it's a hoot. Better than today's generic fantasy isekai crap, anyway! Here's a nice overview of the game (though not this translation) from Basement Brothers:
Maybe just watch a Let's Play, but hey, any PC-98 translation is a win.
Naruto: Path of the Avenger – Is that Boruto's dad in a video game? Huh! A couple years after this was released in Japan I played my first and last Naruto game, in the form of a demo of Ubisoft's Naruto: Rise of a Ninja on Xbox 360. It looked gorgeous but I had watched exactly zero episodes of Naruto and was not about to drop $60 on it. Actual Naruto fans must've been pretty bummed when this game's predecessor on DS, and then its sequel, were released in English, leaving this one the odd ninja out. But no longer! The patch's presentation looks great, and there's some pretty nice sprite art in there, too.
Good pixels
I'm outta time for screenshots this week, but YouTuber Free Emulator has an absolute wealth of 4K Dreamcast vids on their channel. Here's a sampling of ones that sucked me in. 💽
