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 exception. 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

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 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.

3

1.    

2.   

4.     

Aica is the sound plugin for nullDC

1 Config is the place if you wants to change the buffer of the sound etc. Thankfully the emulator already gives thorough explanation inside the config

2. Limit speed and sync audio will made the emulator trying to sync the audio with the video regardless of how powerful your CPU power is. This may be the best choice.

3. Sync audio will try to match the sound but if the machine (CPU) if too powerful, the graphic may Move faster than the music

4 Experimental DSP emulation. I tried to find the usage and find out that DSP emulation is like sound effect processor inside a Dreamcast. Still it's buggy (in experimental state) so you might not need to tick. Check www.ngemu.com for more info

5 Mute CD-DA tracks inside the GDRom

6 Mute Sound. Well it says so. There will be no sound playing in the game at all.

7 About The AICA plugin information

CDI or GDI

Before playing the game let me say that usually Dreamcast games (GDROM) are divided into either CDI or GDI form

CDI is the compressed version of Dreamcast GDROM and it works well with the emulator. Since it’s compressed, the size is smaller than the GDI counterpart. Also, usually CDI only consist of one file which is the CDI itself.

As for GDI, it is the 1:1 copy of the real Dreamcast GD rom. normally; the file is not just a single file but accompanied with raw files (like track1, track2, etc.). So, it’s better to put them into one folder with the game name in order to avoid missing tracks (because tracks got accidentally replaced by the other DC’s GDI raw images).GDI had lower compatibility for the emulator because of copy protection that some GDRom had. Still, it had the better quality since it is the full version copy (uncompressed) of the original games

Let’s play the game

I assumed that you already got your GDROM either in GDI or CDI format inside your local hard drives.

It is very simple to start playing and there is two ways to start the game

First, you can use the Normal Boot from the first tab FILE

You need to select the GDROM image by clicking on the … tab\

Choose the image you want to play by choosing the image name and click open

Second way to start the game is by using tab system

Just left click on the Start  (1) below the system. Stop(2) is for stopping the current emulation right away while Reset(3) instantly restart the game that you play

Whether you choose fast boot or start; you will be greeted by this screen. Next, you can choose the game just like the first one

If this is the first time you start the emulator, you need to set the date and the time.. By the way, the default date is the time when DC first operated. Just enter the current date or any date you like past the start date

Yes the game is now running. Congratulation ^^

Acknowledgement

I know that I’m no expert on this matter that why I would like to thanks many peoples in forum www.ngemu.com and https://forum.recalbox.com/topic/12945/dreamcast-cdi-vs-gdi-vs-chd-vs-iso/2 from indirectly helping me to know some of the emulator features.

Thank you also for many people contributed to the DC emulator scene. From the coders, tester, to the plugins creator whom enabled us to play the games once more time.

I’m making this tutorial to help user for playing the game with the least techie stuff (since I am a user too LMAO)

This guide does not completely cover all of the features; including the TV-system (PAL-NTSC) as well as the debug feature because I want to focus this writing to the end user of the emulator (I hope one day someone could explain more of the detailed stuff in my writing he he)

Thank you for reading my small guide and I hope by now you already playing your childhood memory ^^