Yeah, the reason I used Demul is because of the advice about transparency in this article https://dreamcastify.unreliable.net...sonic-adventure-is-this-a-good-or-a-bad-idea/ Of course that's Oct 2019 and Redream is being actively developed so the story may well be different now. Edit - wrong link
Sega Retro | Redream Okay there's a lot of issues. Category:All Dreamcast screenshots They're all going to need to be checked at some point, though most(?) should be fine. Fun fact about Planet Ring: if you wait long enough on the title screen, the development credits will start orbiting the planet. Except some of them scroll by too fast to read. I thought it might be easier to see through an emulator than through YouTube... but nope!
Slightly off topic, but how come the MK Gold hidden content screenshots I mentioned above don't show up on that 'all screenshots' page you linked to @Black Squirrel?, they are in the category 'All Dreamcast screenshots', but presumably I missed something else when I uploaded them? Mortal Kombat Gold/Hidden content - Sega Retro
So I wanted to make a page for the demo discs that come with Xbox: The Official Magazine (US) but I don't know what to call them. What do?
I have no idea Official Dreamcast Magazine demo disc (Jan 2000 Vol. 3), is the format I ended up with with the US Dreamcast demo discs. I'm assuming it doesn't call itself something when booted up?
It's all old news to someone, but it's not on our wiki so it can't be common knowledge. Some Dreamcast games run at half the resolution: 640x240 (and again, Psychic Force 2012 isn't listed as VGA compatible - coincidence??) Our current screenshot is 640x480, and it's a bit weird. The logo is being doubled vertically, but the background has square pixels, as if it's being filtered. And there's a 1-pixel green line at the top. Don't mind me, I'm just a Sega Saturn running higher resolution 3D fighting games than the Dreamcast... with interlacing and fewer polygons and shut up
Kenji Eno making my life difficult ten years after his death: "Polygon sorting" is an issue in Redream. It defaults to "per strip", but it has "per pixel" options, which you want because... that's more accurate. Is it completely accurate? I don't know. Here's some real hardware, you tell me. Why does it default to the lesser setting? Because it's faster, and most people just want to play the games. I don't think this is the right call, but I suppose if I want something different I'd have to make my own emulator, with blackjack, and hookers. In fact, forget the emulator. This is the not-particularly-well documented D2 Shock by the way. "SECRET DATA SAVE" can apparently be used in the final game to learn about the original, scrapped version of D2 for the Panasonic M2. A lot of Dreamcast stuff not on our wiki, I'm finding.
Hm, on doing a bit of digging I see our Dreamcast screenshot guidelines here only mention NullDC, which was supplanted by Reicast up until RetroArch's lead dev harassed the developer into retirement and the project was abandoned. TCRF's screenshot guidelines have instructions for nullDC, Demul, and Flycast, but I don't know how accurate any of them are. I might be chasing a wild good here, but is there a way to capture screenshots from the console via homebrew? Google's turning nothing up from a quick search, but I also don't 100% know what I'm searching for so it's possible it's out there and I'm just not seeing it. Edit: I did some more looking around and I don't think capturing screenshots via the console itself is viable; I can't find anything for this feature in DreamShell and all of the resources I can find are external adapters for manipulating the signal between the console and a TV. Even if they could send their output to a screenshot they would not be useful for the wiki. From some quick Googling I seee Redream seems to be one of the most recommended Dreamcast emulators? Just reading what's out there I'm running into the same issue where all of the emulators are touting their upscaling, speed, and other features without any of them focusing of accuracy. It looks like MAME has Dreamcast support based on a GitHub Issue requesting MIL-CD support, but searching for information about Dreamcast support in MAME is rather difficult due to a port of MAME for the Dreamcast returning in most of the results.
MAME's Dreamcast emulation is preliminary, a few games work but most have glitches. It isn't really suitable for a documentation quality screenshots yet. Best bet is ReDream or Demul at native resolution with every accuracy feature enabled. We just need to figure out what those features are!
Here's DEMUL's interpretation of Rush 2049 Demo's title screen for comparison. Curiously it's stretched the image slightly compared to Redream, leaving me none the wiser as to which one is outputting a raw image and which one isn't! What a pain.
Flycast is one of the recommended Dreamcast emulators (and may even be the best), but it doesn't support high DPI displays correctly, and unlike other programs, doesn't seem to respond to attempts to override the setting. It means on a machine with Windows scaling turned on (see: many laptops, people with 4K displays, and those who just want their text to be a bit bigger), 640x480 mode in Flycast is never 640x480, and thus Alt+Print screen will give you a resized image. It's a bug, but regular users probably wouldn't notice it, because their aim is just to play the games (in fact I think Flycast defaults to 1024x768 or something). I've had more than my fair share of trying and failing to explain this feature of Windows at work. People don't see pixels.
There are multiple of these "per pixel" options for polygon sorting between 8, 16, 32 and 64 layers, which muddies things up even more. All those Rayman 2 screenshots I took for the sub-pages over a year ago were taken with Redream's default settings ("per strip"), and they came out fine enough. I don't know how much of a difference the other settings would make for this game, but it would be something to do for the other Japanese differences I have yet to get screenshots of (mostly more saturated characters by this point, though I think I remember Clark having one of the more noticeable changes, not as much as Ly's though).
I'm going down the Dreamcast rabbit hole now, Quake III Arena is getting the 'hidden content' treatment. I was able to get a screenshot (from Redream this time) of the cheat menu which you unlock by playing a little VMU maze game after you win the single player game (or grab a save from someone who already has! ;-P), Redream actually lets you play the game as well, but I don't think this is screenshot worthy as the VMU appears as a semi-transparent layer over the main window, which obviously isn't remotely accurate! There basically are no VMU emulators which are 100% functional or even close, but I hope I can find one with enough functionality to screenshot that maze. Something else I'm interested in opinions on, we have a screenshot of the main menu as our title screenshot, but I propose another candidate. Seems a bit more title screeny to me. Could equally be described as a loading screen though. A+B+X+Y+Start returns to the main menu, so maybe I'm overthinking it... Next mission is to see if the emulators can handle Dreamcast keyboard+mouse so I can start messing with the console.
A mission for somebody: US Shenmue didn't have a title screen on Sega Retro - now I think I know why. There's some cack at the bottom of the screen in Redream (and Flycast), but I can't tell if it's meant to be there. Is it meant to be there?
Well from that, erm... Official Xbox Magazine Xbox Game Disc #13 December 2002. Rolls off the tongue!
The # character won't work for titles in Mediawiki, so you might have to do "Official Xbox Magazine Game Disc 13" or something. Today on "why are Dreamcast title screens so difficult" We've had this screenshot for Tokyo Highway Challenge since 2010. The last column of pixels looks suspicious but the rest seems fine enough (bearing in mind the logo is a bit crusty to begin with). We're using the North American title for the page though, so I figured having a matching screenshot was a high-ish priority: That's... dark. And it's not just the US version. Footage of the PAL version on real hardware suggests it's meant to be similarly gloomy too. There's a fair number of murky-looking Dreamcast games, which as mentioned above somewhere, I thought was an emulation issue. Turns out, the issue could be that some are too bright!
