Games: Dreamcast emulation, "relevant to your interests"

[mrwiseman]

I'm just letting you know that there's a new Dreamcast emulator, nullDC, that features pretty good compatibility and speed for Dreamcast emulation. You may want to grab it, as well as dump your Dreamcast BIOS and Flash memory. To play the games, you'll need special software that dumps GD-ROMs. I suppose it's legal to download images from the games you own built for this purpose (the process of downloading from the Internet vs. downloading from the Dreamcast should be very similar from a legal standpoint).

I've tested Grandia II, and it has become pretty playable. Very soon it'll be a much better option than the buggy PC version.

On my Athlon 64 3500+ I can run Grandia II at well over the normal speed (125% to 300%), and have to limit it to normal speed. These are the advantages and disadvantages of how it runs for now:

+ Running in 1280?960, that's 4 times the Dreamcast resolution.
+ Autogenerated mipmaps and 16? anisotropic filtering (textures look great at all distanes, no grainy effect when far away).
+ 4? multisampling antialiasing.
- No sound effects other than voices and menu sounds (damn!). Music plays though.
- Trees in Carbo and some objects look transparent when they shouldn't be.
- No shadows.
- I believe the game featured specular highlighting in some parts, which is not present.
- The usual synching problems with FMV playback may produce crackling noises during FMVs.

The game looks great, though it's really unfortunate how some of the missing features match exactly the bugs in the crappy PC port. The PC port features higher resolution and can use antialiasing (don't remember about mipmapping), but sound effects suck (there's no sound volume control, so all sounds sound at maximum volume and the music simply stops playing when you're near water, plus it never fades in our out, that really sucks), and shadows are bugged.

I hope these problems can be fixed soon so that we can play a better Grandia II on PC. For now, the best option is still the Dreamcast original played on a Dreamcast. Let's hope it doesn't break.

[Cataferal]

I checked this out earlier in the week. It seems to have some odd frame-rate issues, and a lack of support for gamepads, but overall it seems as, or if not more solid than Chankast.

I tried playing a little-known fighter called Project Justice: Rival Schools 2. It turned out all right; the biggest problem, as you mentioned, is in the sound. I couldnt hear anything...could it be a problem with the plugin im using?

[phaq]

you ever have something that won't allow a gamepad just use this: http://www.electracode.com/4/joy2key...%20Version.htm