Reicast Ported To The Nintendo Switch – You can now play some Dreamcast games

A short while ago, the Reicast folks teased their Dreamcast emulator on the Nintendo Switch and now, a release has unexpectedly descended upon us! In this article, we’ll be looking at the recently-released build of this 6th-generation console emulator for Horizon OS

Yesterday, Reicast Developer David G.F., released an alpha version of Reicast for the Switch in NRO format so that Dreamcast fans could enjoy their favourite games on Nintendo’s latest home console/portable. He went on to state that this version of Reicast was rushed to completion and as result, it has many issues although a proper release should be coming in the future. One of these major issues is that there’s no exception handling so texture invalidation isn’t working right now which may lead to some games having odd graphical issues.

On the bright side, this Reicast port has JIT (Just-In-Time compiler) support thanks to flyinghead which means that it performs quite well and some games can even run at twice the speed. This is pretty substantial considering that the Dreamcast is a console of the same generation as the PlayStation 2 and GameCube, consoles which were still pretty popular even up to half a decade ago.

Getting Reicast to work on your Switch is pretty simple and only requires you to:

• Install the NRO file provided in the link below
  
  • Reicast needs a fair amount of memory (512MB+) so it’s not recommended you override the gallery/album application when launching it
  
  
• Create a directory named “reicast” on the root of your SD Card
• Copy the Dreamcast BIOS files (dc_boot.bin and dc_flash.bin) to /reicast/data on your SD card
• Copy any ROMs (i.e games) you want to run to the /reicast/ directory mentioned above

While there’s no official compatibility list, the following games run pretty well as per user reports in the release thread (below):

• Crazy Taxi
• Jet Set/Grind Radio
• Chu Chu Rocket (there are issues in the Settings menu but the game itself is fine)
• Metropolis Street Racer
• Sonic Adventure 1 till Windy Valley
  
  
  
• House of the Dead 2
• Shadowman (menu issues)
• Shenmue 1
• Spawn in Demon’s Hand
• Dead Or Alive 2
• Virtua Fighter 3

As stated above, an update will come in the near future so stay tuned for that if playing Dreamcast games on your Switch is something you’re into!
GBATemp Thread (download link + more info): https://gbatemp.net/threads/reicast-...-alpha.538394/
Reicast Team Twitter: https://twitter.com/reicastdc
Video demonstrating Reicast on the Switch in action (there’s Part II with more games; neither Wololo or myself are affiliated with the creator): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBB563f-DaY

http://wololo.net/2019/05/15/reicast...at-full-speed/