Makaron WIP - Dreamcast Emulator for Windows

[wraggster]

via elation comes more news of the upcoming Dreamcast Emulator for Windows:

Okay, so most of SEGA Mega Drive (Genesis for you US folks) aren't that playable. Too many graphics bug for one - the emulator makes heavy use of PVR OIT capability. Sound will usually get ugly when heavy action starts even though it's fine in menus. And there are other nasty problems as well, like falling through floors in alternate Prince of Persia.

But some games do work well enough (too bad Lotus 2 RECS is not one of them

By the way, I can't shake that crazy idea of connecting a hard drive to Dreamcast off my mind. I'm pretty sure it can be done. Basically all that's needed is some hardware to translate SEGA Packet Interface commands into HDD reads, and that's exactly what Makaron's GD module is doing. Right now there is logical link on register level but I'm confident I can extend it to handle singal layer as well. I do have some experience with ATA/ATAPI hardware.
At first I was thinking of FPGA to handle the ATA part, but perhaps a fast clocked ARM7 would suffice - I need research it some more and see what kind of latency I can expect. I really don't have time for this though... but if there's anyone out there with the money, skills and time and wants to try - contact me. I'll help

I feel like I could...

ScummVM works now (except the newest 0.10 version which is known to have sound problems on the Dreamcast port). Thanks to it crashing frequently on T8 I managed to nail down a bug in the MT version of Makaron.

Running emulator inside emulator is fun! Also, FreeSCI 0.3.5 port is actually performing better on Makaron than the native PC version...
SEGA Genesis emu works as well. I'll update tomorrow with some pictures.

More at the homepage here --> http://dknute.livejournal.com/

[ron]

Very nice info. Thx