Why are there no Dreamcast emulators?

[zak_swan]

and why do hardly any N64 ones work properly?

[yoda313]

What about BLEEM??? Wasn't that one?

[Supreme2k]

The N64 ones work great. Try Project64 or nemu.

I have a PC set up for my old emulators (and some old PC games). PIII 1.2G, 512M, 20G HD, Voodoo 5, WinME. Many of the best emulators and emerging 3d games were written specifically for 3DFX, so this system is best for them.


BLEEM was a PS1 emulator for PC, and BleemCast was a PS1 emu for Dreamcast. There's no real DC emus for the PC, though one is being developed.

It's better to get a real DC (10-30 bucks), and you can get games at the swap meet/flea market for about 1-2 dollars each (sometimes retail has them that cheap). Great system that died before its time. Some of the games still look and play as well as current XBox.

[zak_swan]

Thanks Supreme 2k, i was using 1964 emulator and it was crap.
now using project 64 it works great.
DC is my all time favourite console, it did die too early.

[Faustus]

Heck Dreamcast? Try a PS1 emulator that works well. Even bleem sucked. Try playing FF7 and FF8 on any of the PS1 emulators? Its painful.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

ChanKast is an excellent Dreamcast emu that works very well
and I have 2 N64 emulators that work flawlessly.
ePSX is a fantastic PS1 emulator that works perfectly.
the problems that most people have when running emulators is that their PC simply doesn't have enough processing power.

[Supreme2k]

Except for the next-gen emulators (post CD), most emulators will run on less than 1 GHz (most much less 300-500 range).

[smearbrick1]

With a few changes, the Dreamcast could still be a decent system. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the controller (one stick and the layout of the buttons). Has anyone seen the list of games in development for the Dreamcast when the plug was pulled? I couldn't believe it. If you have a Dreamcast, and have access to a copy, get Half Life for Dreamcast... Except for the controls, the graphics are pretty much on par with the PS2. Also, try QuakeDC. All you need is either an original Quake PC disc or the Quake demo and the QuakeDC files.

Sorry to go on and on about the Dreamcast. I believe it is completely underrated and well worth the $14.95 I plunked down for it at the local Electronics Boutique.

[neomaine]

xylob,

What are your 2 N64 emulators?

[Xylob the Destroyer]

Project 64 is the one I use most
get it, it is the easiest to set up

[Noahtuck]

It's better to get a real DC (10-30 bucks), and you can get games at the swap meet/flea market for about 1-2 dollars each (sometimes retail has them that cheap). Great system that died before its time. Some of the games still look and play as well as current XBox.

Yep!!

Sorry to go on and on about the Dreamcast. I believe it is completely underrated and well worth the $14.95 I plunked down for it at the local Electronics Boutique.

I still have my original DC from years ago with about 150 games and it's still kicks ass!!!
Nothing better than pulling out acouple of guns and playing "house of the dead 2" on the 54"

[lordsmurf]

Isn't the dreamcast basically a PIII or something? If so, it'll be a while before that CPU can be emulated.

[Noahtuck]

Isn't the dreamcast basically a PIII or something? If so, it'll be a while before that CPU can be emulated.

I don't remember, but i know it was pretty advanced in it's time when it came out....... and it still rocks!!!!!!

[Faustus]

I wish someone would hurry up and write a Athlon 64 3800+ emulator for my XP 3000+.

[Supreme2k]

Yeah. Wouldn't it be nice if there was forward emulation?

Kinda reminds me of that hoax where Doom was being ported to the Atari 2600

[doppletwo]

The xbox 180 has a low level PIII. The Dreamcast has a proc speed of a mid level PI and the PS2 has the proc speed of a low level PII. I am not sure of the arcitechure of the chips in the PS2 or the Dreamcast I would have to look them up, but the xbox180 is definately a pentium it could be a PII and not a PIII though. I think it's 6 or 7 hundred MHz.


About a year or two about I downloaded Chankast. I played about half of my DC games with only minor glitches. And there is a patched version that plays capcom games really well. I played games off of gdrom (special cd's DC games came on), cd, or a virtual drive like daemon tools.


I haven't check on the progress of chankast, but I though it had a competitor too.


Also Microsoft developed an xbox180 emulator for use with the xbox360 and the xbox360 harddrive. I haven't got a chance to give this emulator a test drive yet though.


This emulator was said to be impossible by all the critic, but MS brought in one of their top programmers and he got it done. I need to look him up again, his resume was so crazy.


What I wanna see is a PS2 emu for the Xbox360 and a Xbox180 emu for the PS3. That would be hilarious.

[Doramius]

DreamCast was made so early that there's a hack that allows you to rip the disc and you should be able to play it on your PC already & I think if you change the file format, it'll play on Playstation. Don't quote me for certain on that, it's been a long time since I've read something about that, but if someone has an article or remembers the same thing, please post a link to the article (as long as it's within forum rules).

BLEEM was an emulator so you could put you PS1 discs in your PC drive and play them on your PC. Bleem got in a big lawsuit and went under, but if they had better legal funding they might have won. Many people still have Bleem Discs and you can probably get some on eBay.

[smearbrick1]

DreamCast was made so early that there's a hack that allows you to rip the disc and you should be able to play it on your PC already & I think if you change the file format, it'll play on Playstation. Don't quote me for certain on that, it's been a long time since I've read something about that, but if someone has an article or remembers the same thing, please post a link to the article (as long as it's within forum rules).

BLEEM was an emulator so you could put you PS1 discs in your PC drive and play them on your PC. Bleem got in a big lawsuit and went under, but if they had better legal funding they might have won. Many people still have Bleem Discs and you can probably get some on eBay.

I've never heard of this. Not that I am an authority or anything, but this doesn't sound accurate.

Bleem! was a great PSX emulator. Unfortunately, Bleemcast! was not so great. It wasn't created to cover a broad spectrum of games like the original Bleem! for PC. I think Bleemcast was only created for 3 or so games. It didn't even use the original PSX disc to play (if I remember correctly).

[Supreme2k]

Here's some more info on the systems:
DREAMCAST
CPU:

128-bit Hitachi SH4 CPU
200MHz clock rate
360 MIPS (millions of instructions per second)
1.4 billion floating-point operations per second
3D calculations
800+ MBytes/second bus bandwidth
Graphics:
(comparable to a Voodoo2 card from 3dfx)
NEC/Videologic CLX1 graphics chip (AKA PowerVR Second Generation)
3 million polygons/second peak rendering rate
100 Megapixels per second
100 Megatexels per second
Perspective-Correct Texture Mapping
Point, Bilinear, Trilinear and Anisotropic Mip-map filtering
Gouraud shading
Z-buffer
Colored light sourcing
Full scene anti-aliasing
16.7 million colors
Hardware based, fog, bump mapping, and texture compression
Shadow and light volumes
Super sampling
Memory:

16 MB main operating RAM
8 MB video RAM (VRAM)
2 MB sound RAM 128KB Flash RAM
Sound:

Yamaha AICA Sound Core
RISC CPU
DSP for real-time effects
64 sound channels
Full 3D sound support
Hardware-based audio compression
Storage Media:

GD-ROM
1 Gigabyte data storage
12X speed
Other

56K Modem (33.3K in Europe - included, upgradeable)
Four controller ports
Built-in expansion ports


PLAYSTATION 2
CPU: 128-bit CPU
System Clock Frequency: 294.912 MHz
Cache Memory: Instruction: 16KB, Data: 8KB + 16 K(ScrP)
Main Memory: Direct Rambus (Direct RDRAM)
Memory Size: 32MB
Memory Bus Bandwidth: 3.2GB per second

Co-processor:
FPU (Floating Point Unit)
Floating Point Multiply Accumulator x 1
Floating Point Divider x 1

Vector Units:
VU0 and VU1
Floating Point Multiply Accumulator x 9
Floating Point Divider x 3

Floating Point Performance: 6.2 GFLOPS
3D CG Geometric Transformation: 66 million Polygons per Second
Compressed Image Decoder: MPEG2

GRAPHICS

Graphics Synthesizer™

Clock Frequency: 147.456MHz
Embedded DRAM: 4MB
DRAM Bus Bandwidth: 48GB per second
DRAM Bus Width: 2,560 bits
Pixel Configuration: RGB:Alpha:Z Buffer (24:8:32)
Polygon Drawing Rate: 75 million Polygons per second
Screen Resolution: Variable from 256 x 224 to 1280 x 1024

SOUND: “SPU2 + CPU”

Number of Voices: ADPCM: 48 ch on SPU2 plus definable, software programmable voices

Sound Memory: 2MB
Output Frequency: Variable up to 48 KHz (DAT quality)


IOP: I/O Processor

CPU Core: PlayStation (current) CPU (R3000)

Clock Frequency: 33.8688MHz or 36.864MHz (selectable; PlayStation/PlayStation 2 mode)

IOP Memory: 2MB

Sub Bus: 32-bit

Interface Types: IEEE1394 i.LINK, Universal Serial Bus (USB) x2,

Nintendo 64
CPU
MIPS 64-bit RISC CPU (customized R4000 series)
Clock Speed: 93.75 MHz

MEMORY
RAMBUS D-RAM 36M bit Transfer Speed: maximum 4,500M bit/sec.

CO-PROCESSOR
RCP: SP (sound and graphics processor) and DP (pixel drawing
processor) incorporated.
Clock Speed: 62.5MHz

RESOLUTION
256 x 224 ~ 640 x 480 dots.
Flicker-free interlace mode support


COLOR
Color frame buffer support
21-bit color video output

GRAPHIC PROCESSING
4 Meg Video Memory (expandable to 8 Megs)
Z buffer
Anti-aliasing
Realistic texture mapping: Tri-linear filtered MIP-map interpolation,
Perspective correction, Environment mapping

[Doramius]

I was a bit mistaken about the Dreamcast. I'll get more info on it, but you can apparently create a game using a certain software or find certain emulated games and burn them to CDR & could play them on the DreamCast. I found some info on it, but it's not the best and it's scattered. I'll find something better and post it. There were a few early PS1 games that could have their file extension changed and be converted to play in the DreamCast, but there wasn't a list of which games or how it was exactly done.

In Short, There was an ability to create & convert your own games or download emulated games and burn them to disc and play them in your DreamCast. Like I said, it's beena long time and I barely remember much on it.

[Doramius]

Here's some more info on the systems:
DREAMCAST
CPU:

128-bit Hitachi SH4 CPU
200MHz clock rate
360 MIPS (millions of instructions per second)
1.4 billion floating-point operations per second
3D calculations
800+ MBytes/second bus bandwidth
Graphics:
(comparable to a Voodoo2 card from 3dfx)
NEC/Videologic CLX1 graphics chip (AKA PowerVR Second Generation)
3 million polygons/second peak rendering rate
100 Megapixels per second
100 Megatexels per second
Perspective-Correct Texture Mapping
Point, Bilinear, Trilinear and Anisotropic Mip-map filtering
Gouraud shading
Z-buffer
Colored light sourcing
Full scene anti-aliasing
16.7 million colors
Hardware based, fog, bump mapping, and texture compression
Shadow and light volumes
Super sampling
Memory:

16 MB main operating RAM
8 MB video RAM (VRAM)
2 MB sound RAM 128KB Flash RAM
Sound:

Yamaha AICA Sound Core
RISC CPU
DSP for real-time effects
64 sound channels
Full 3D sound support
Hardware-based audio compression
Storage Media:

GD-ROM
1 Gigabyte data storage
12X speed
Other

56K Modem (33.3K in Europe - included, upgradeable)
Four controller ports
Built-in expansion ports


PLAYSTATION 2
CPU: 128-bit CPU
System Clock Frequency: 294.912 MHz
Cache Memory: Instruction: 16KB, Data: 8KB + 16 K(ScrP)
Main Memory: Direct Rambus (Direct RDRAM)
Memory Size: 32MB
Memory Bus Bandwidth: 3.2GB per second

BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH!!!!!!!

Got any information on XBOX, XBOX360, PS3, PSP, & GameCube?

[Supreme2k]

For Dreamcast emulation, you can go to www.dcemulation.com or http://boob.co.uk/emulators/emulators.html




For specs (not to threadjack), follow the links:

Gamecube

XBOX

xbox 360

PSP

PS3