Today I’m going to explain about the Dreamcast emulator that I normally use to play. NullDC.

What is Dreamcast?

Dreamcast is the last video game console from Sega during late 90s. It was came after the unsuccessful Sega Saturn, which cost Sega their reputation due to bad marketing, and became Sega’s last effort to win the console war against Sony and the big N

 Unfortunately, despite having some great titles like ShenMu and Soul Calibur; the lack of the third party supports, too many price cut, and strong competition from both Sony and Nintendo made it as the last Sega’s console. Afterward, Sega turned into third party software developer selling their games through their previous competitor. This made Genesis as the only console from Sega that managed to reigned champion during the console war.

Is it worth to play?

As a golden rule, in every console there will always be a good and bad titles and DC is no different. In my humble opinion, some of the titles are amazing particularly Soul Calibur. It moves fast, the control is very responsive; the scenery is a sight to behold (even if u compared it to newer games). And I guarantee that it was even better than the arcade version (especially if u play with HD graphic). Other Capcom titles like Resident evil Code Veronica, Plasma Sword, Giga Wing, Kikaioh also joined the game list and they are fun to play. And don’t forget to check Sonic adventure 2 ^^

What kind of CPU works?

As game became more and more pretty, the CPU needed better specs to handle the games at playable frame per second. Therefore, I will give minimum specification for the computer to made you capable playing the game at full speed from now on (yeah that including the “retro” ones). If your computer is the current generation PC, you can skip the requirement ;p

Here is the minimum specification

CPU: AMD Athlon XP/64/Turion at 2 GHz or Intel Pentium D at 2.1 GHz or equivalent.

Video Card: Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti or ATi Radeon 8500.

RAM: 1GB.

DirectX 9.0 or greater.

Lets Set up the emulator

Ok first of all, I assume u had a decent CPU and knowledge of internet search engine. The first thing u need is a dreamcast Bios file like this in pics

They are technically copyrighted material so.. I can’t give the place to download.. but Google is your friend like always ;D

Next step u need to download Null DC from https://segaretro.org/NullDC

Then, what u needs to do is extracting the nullDC.zip using either winrar or 7 zip and extract them inside a folder.

Inside the folder you will see two folders. One is nullDC_104.r136 is a Dreamcast emulator while the NullDC_ Naomi is the Sega Naomi arcade system emulator. We go inside the nullDC folder

 

Try to start the app by clicking the NullDC_win32_release-notrace

If you see an error code saying"unable to find bios", its normal.. Now, cut the dreamcastbios.zip to the data folder..and extract it inside the folder. After extracting the bioses, the error will be gone when you open the application.

Before start playing, it’s best to set the controller first by going to option- Maple - Port A - config keys for player 1

The emulator also support joystick or any USB controller but since I haven’t tested them myself, I focus on the default keyboard configuration

 

                                         Here you can set up the controller to your liking

let’s take a look at the plugin

Actually there is not much that can be configure in the plugin tab but you can change into a controller plugin in port A or setting up the keyboard for the 2^nd player here. Just go to Port B and then choose the controller or the keyboard plugin if you want to add another player in game.

 

Ok, now I’ll share some knowledge that I learn from using this emulator.

First let head to option tab

Power VR is equivalent to the Gpu plugin. In the resolution, u can use the maximum supported (if your PC had powerful specification, Maximum but up to 1280x800 will use the resolution of 720p+, Native will use the original resolution of Dreamcast. Half of maximum pixel and Quarter of maximum pixel will use even lower resolution than the DC itself. I believe u can choose which one is more suitable for your computer or you can try changing them by yourself to see if your current CPU can tolerate higher resolution or not. It’s easy; if the game started to get stuttered, keep getting lag/frozen; it means the resolution put too much burden to your GPU and you had to choose lower options.

Aspect ratio

 

 

Choosing different aspect ratio of the game screen.  whether you want the emulator to have a black border (borders)and had the exact  tv screen ratio of the original DC (640x480). Or stretching the picture to fill the entire screen (stretch); or even adding extra  geometry  to even more detailed and smaller images.

 You can check how they look from the example that I put below

Stretch

                                                                                 

                                                                              

                                          

Border

                                                                                     

                                                                                    

Extra Geometry

 

 

Pallete Texture

By default the emulator will choose versioned. Its quite hard to find a thorough explanation behind the static or versioned. However, versioned and dynamic point was considered as the best to go if your card support shader.

Sort

Things that I understand from this sort feature is

If you choose off, Its not very taxing for the emulator to run the graphic but you will see glitches and artifact more inside the game (I tested it on Soul Calibur).

Per strip still shows some flashing on the health meter(and also glitches) but it doesn’t look as bad as the off feature (and it had decent speed too) so I recommend this if your CPU is not very fast

If you use per triangle, the game will look way better and lose those graphical bugs but it makes your computer work harder and can cause slowing down with older machine/CPU. If you had a current generation CPU, I advise to use per triangle always

             Off shows some graphical glitches so is strip (to lesser extend)

                                         

        Per triangle show no glitches but it sure made the game slower on my old laptop xD

Modifier Volume deals with how the shadow is drawn in the emulator. Normal and clip is the slowest (first choice); while taking off the shadow (third choice) is the fastest.Opt for normal which had decent speed and good accuracy. Volumes is for debuging (which I don’t know how to.. so let stick with either the first or second choice)

 

 

                    

                                                                                                       Modifier volume normal

 

 

 

                                    

 

 

Modifier volume off (No Shadow)

                                                                  

Z Buffer Mode

Changing the Z buffer might cause some of the drawn images gone from the game. So, choose the second option always cause it’s the best one.

Texture cache

Texture cache is about how the emulator delete the old or invalidated texture that the game already displayed. There is no definite answer about this. so just leave this be

 

Next, we got the GDRom tab.

1.    Swap disc. Use if u want to change disk while the emulator is running (actually it still does not support all games)