Dreamcast-Talk.com

I forgot to say THANK YOU to TapamN for this great emulator. You've done what no one else could do for over two decades.

I recently pulled out my old Dreamcast when I noticed several emulators had been improved.

Gens4all 4.3 appears to be the best Genesis emulator developed in 20 years. So much thanks to the talented developers.

That being said I have some questions.

First of all, in this emulator is it possible to change the screen orientation? All games are vertically a few scanlines below where they are supposed to be on the screen.

Second, I did not see a way to adjust games that use a different horizontal resolution than most games. Is there a way to stretch the horizontal resolution on those games? Perhaps even an original release just for those games? To save memory, many Konami and Capcom games uses a narrower horizontal resolution, which was automatically stretched when outputted to a CRT television. Consequently, when you start those games in this emulator, they are too narrow and have distorted graphics (at least on an old CRT that cannot be adjusted).

Third, is there a way to select roms from the old SD Card adapter?

majestic_lizard wrote:First of all, in this emulator is it possible to change the screen orientation? All games are vertically a few scanlines below where they are supposed to be on the screen.

It's supposed to be centered, but maybe KOS's video settings have the screen a bit off center? It wouldn't be hard to add an option to adjust the Y position a bit.

majestic_lizard wrote:Second, I did not see a way to adjust games that use a different horizontal resolution than most games. Is there a way to stretch the horizontal resolution on those games? Perhaps even an original release just for those games? To save memory, many Konami and Capcom games uses a narrower horizontal resolution, which was automatically stretched when outputted to a CRT television. Consequently, when you start those games in this emulator, they are too narrow and have distorted graphics (at least on an old CRT that cannot be adjusted).

I worked a bit on this, but disabled it since it had problems. The Dreamcast doesn't have a 256 pixel wide mode, so I was rendering to a 640x240 resolution display. The PVR sometimes had issues with pixels bleeding in from from the wrong tiles when doing line scroll, and since it had non-integer X scaling, you had shimmering during horizontal scrolling. It's possible to render to a 256x224 frame, do a unfiltered upscale to 512x224, then do a bilinear upscale to 640x224, which would look better, but that's not possible on KOS's PVR driver. Also, KOS doesn't have a built-in, tested 640x240 resolution setting. I made and tested one for VGA, but I wasn't able to test on NTSC.

majestic_lizard wrote:Third, is there a way to select roms from the old SD Card adapter?

I planned to add support for this, but forgot. I tried an SD card adapter a few times, but it didn't work well for me and I haven't used it much. One time when I used it, it seemed to damage and disable my DC's serial port. Power cycling didn't help, the port seemed dead. The next day, my serial port started working again, but that put me off using the SD card adapter more.

Off hand, the games that need to be stretched horizontally include:
Street Fighter II
Super Street Fighter 2
Air Buster / Aero Blasters
Castlevania Bloodlines
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

So maybe a separate release with a more primitive graphics engine just to address that?

As far as the centering...the games are definitely off center vertically. Part of the HUD on Ghouls'N'Ghosts is cut off. It is very minor, but it is there and could be perfected