Arcade Racing Legends Review! First footage of final version.

[Ian Micheal]

Redream is a gdemu and has instant dma it does not emulate the speed of a real cdr on a gdrom drive.. infact redream or any dc emulator is much faster then a gdemu.. Also not emulating any of the real gdrom timing hence it not have the bugs of playing it on a real gdemu..

No dc emulator be it redream or the others are a good judge of what anything will run like on real hardware..

I didn't think it emulated the speed of a cdr, but for me the game plays pretty similar to the disk in Redream from what I've played, obviously bar the loading times, which actually aren't too bad in the game.

I don't own a GDEmu for my Dreamcast so the actual games or Redream (or Demul for some) are how I play. Redream is convenient way to play with out all the faffing sometimes and I think it's a decent emulator.

I have quite a few projects that dont run on it ... this more for a dev then a user it does not delay dma it's instant example dreamneo i can get fullspeed on it by doing things that dont work on hardware at all..

So for a user it be fine but if your using it to test homebrew just Know it's about 10% faster speed then normal hardware.. Just because something works on it dont mean it will on a real dreamcast i can show you this with a copy of big tournament golf which works perfect on Redream and crashes instant on hardware.. Wasted a few cdrs on that problem

[Ian Micheal]

Didn't work out well. I put read_limit = N in the GDEMU ini and it makes it so very few of my games will even boot. Immediately upon choosing a game, it resets the Dreamcast.

Did it boot this game at all? maybe the clones dont have all the settings the real one does..

[deluxux]

try -1

[livingonwheels]

-1 just reboots the Dreamcast

[livingonwheels]

= N booted the game the first time, but just to a frozen screen of random menu graphics from the game. Rebooted on second attempt.

[deluxux]

Ah, oh well worth a shot lol

[qupe75]

So for a user it be fine but if your using it to test homebrew just Know it's about 10% faster speed then normal hardware.. Just because something works on it dont mean it will on a real dreamcast i can show you this with a copy of big tournament golf which works perfect on Redream and crashes instant on hardware.. Wasted a few cdrs on that problem

Yeah I have been playing Hydra Castle Labyrinth, I gather I can't play that too well on a real dreamcast which is a shame as I'd like to burn this one to CD.

Do you think these emulators may be tweaked to improve accuracy and maintain graphic enhancements. I know inolen has recently done a lot of updates on Redream but I'm not clued up with all the behinds scenes technical stuff like you are.

Glad livingonwheels discovered the issue playing on GDEmu, hopefully your suggestions help him get it working reasonably accurately on his GDEmu.

I do own a full Pal Dreamcast set and most of the homebrew releases but don't always get to play on my Dreamcast like I can get to my PC. I know I need to get a capture card so I can record more actual DC footage rather than via Redream and maybe do some side by side comparisons.

Back to the game for a minute. How many have played it here? How would you score the game? I do like racers so think I got over hyped for this

[Ian Micheal]

I use the emulators when i proto type a port then send to the dreamcast with a coders cable there good for that best is nulldc for doing that because it has printf console output and the only emulator with that..

New dev version of redream is better then it was.. Got to know lot of these emulators just using what is in the sega docs .. Problem is real hardware is not just a bunch of docs.. One example of this is backbuffer or bump mapping it dont work at all on any emulator .. Only 3 games used it.. Other things like this only have effect on Kos opengl etc.. I some times talk to Skmp nulldc creator and reicast etc.. for features and problems..

another problem with redream is switching disks with romdisk makes it crash.. talking homebrew here..

Major problem with any is i can get hardware to do things they cant and optimizing for the sh4 chip does nothing for these emulators so you cant tell if it has made any change.. also all allow to write to bootrom or memory in ways you cant on hardware..

[livingonwheels]

I'm starting to think that adding = 1 or = N is not the source of the issues I'm having with the GDEMU. I noticed that most, if not all of my 150 games on my GDEMU SD Card is giving me the same issues ( loss of sound/music, freezing, rebooting).
This all began yesterday while playing Arcade Racing Legends via GDEMU. The sound suddenly began to either, loop or stutter. All was fine until this happened with Arcade Racing Legends. I reripped the game, replaced my GDEMU ini but no change. Every game is giving me issues now. I think Arcade Racing Legends might have destroyed my GDEMU shockingly. On the plus side, I had ordered a Dreamcast Terraonion MODE a few days ago and will test Arcade Racing Legends on it when it arrives.
I could try reformatting my card, but I hate to start over adding all the games again. But if you think it might help, I'll do it.
EDIT: Actually it shouldn't be too hard. I'll copy my entire card over to the desktop first and just drag and drop them back on the card after a full format.

[Ian Micheal]

Might want to try a new sd card if your having that much trouble ..