A new update has been released for the dreamcast emulator Demul, increasing the version to v0.4.2! This new version is just a small update, which we should see more often from now. Here is what has been posted about this new version (translated):

As promised, we will start to spread more smaller builds from now an.Today just a small update by numerous requests, we added an autodetection for the region.

Nice new feature - should you be able to read russian, you can find many screenshots and additional information over in this thread. I've re-packed the package and moved the plugins to it's own folder.

» Download Demul v0.4.2 from NGEmu now

Great news for all dremcast fans: dknute has updated his homepage with the 10th test release of his DC emulator Makaron. This emulator features a great compatibility, if you want to see some games in action, make sure to check out the blog for many screenshots.

Here are the most important changes and notes for Makaron T10:

1. T10 might be a bit slower than T9 series. It'll most likely affect only low-end systems as there isn't really much of a difference (if any) on my E6600.
2. WinCE games usually crash when emulation speed drops below certain treshold. In other words, if you got fast system you should get stable performance.
3. Due to changes in GD-DMA code loading times are back. It's considered normal behaviour since this is how Dreamcast works. Thanks to those changes compatibility has improved and following titles should now boot and work: All Dream Preview discs, original MIL-CDs, Street Fighter Zero 3, SEGA Tetris Online and Tetris 4D.
4. CD-DA (audio tracks) will play, but still use the older method of fetching data. This might cause Makaron to crash but it's very unlikely as data reads and playing audio are mutualy exclusive tasks.
5. There are some minor changes in full-screen setup code (the debug window will be hidden and not forcibly refreshed). No 16:x aspect ratios yet.
6. Changes to sorting/drawing code broke shadows in Virtua Fighter 3tb. I'm not planning on fixing that anytime soon though, as it would break many other things. Late T9 versions have this problem too, by the way.
7. Makaron now disables screen saver when run. It's only going to be a problem if it crashes, as it might not re-enable it on exit. Just so you know.
8. If you manually enable MMU the recompiler will not switch to address translation mode until it's actually requested, so there's no speed penalty in BIOS and most games. Some however (like Ikaruga) use only partial translation and this can be emulated without full-blown MMU support. It'll work either way but will be a lot slower with MMU enabled. Some WinCE games are automatically recognized (this works only for GD images) and MMU will be turned on when necessary. In short: keep it off unless Makaron complains about it.

Please keep in mind that Makaron is configured through an INI file - if you are too lazy or don't know how this works, make sure to take a look at MKFro, a frontend for Makaron, which has also been updated to work with T10.

» Download Makaron T10 directly from NGEmu now.
» Check out the official homepage for many more notes on this test release.
» Thanks to legend100 for reporting this news item!

MasterPhW was kind enough to inform us about this post over at Emu-Russia, in which the authors of Demul released a new WIP version of their dreamcast emu! As this release is not stable yet, it hasn't been posted on the official homepage yet.

Let's take a look at the (translated) news post:

I hope you awaited this release as much as we did. After a year and a half of silence, development became active again, so this is not the last version to be released this year. I don't want to dissapoint you, but the emulator is still far away from being final. Much work is left, but as the emulator already plays quite a lot and is actively being developed again, we want to collect feedback.

We decided to release to the public for comprehensive testing, as a lot of bugs are still left, but we at least need to know where the bugs happen - this is why the main page has not been updated, instead the release is spread here. The main functions and operation principles described in the old readme.txt remain unchanged from the previous version, though the following innovations have been added:

Most important: BIOS files are now directly loaded from the MAME romset and must lie in a folder with the rom files as DC.ZIP, as with most other emus. The kernel has been rewritten several time, that was some tough work (especially for the Core2Duo). Together with the above changes, games for WinCE started to work. Okay, not all and not completly, but it's a start. The sound code is new, and with all games we tested it works almost perfect (...) Now it is also possible to change the region directly from the emulator menu, so the need to change the bios or flash files is completly gone. A small correction in the processing of triagnles solved problems on with Nvidia drivers (e.g. Sonic 2). Some old bugs (though not all) have also been corrected.

[Update] Thanks to Rikki, we are now able to offer you the download as well, even though the forum is still unreachable - so go ahead and give this emulator a try!

»  Download Demul v0.4.1 WIP now

nkeynes released another update for his lxdream Dreamcast emulator. It seems it can run Linux, now.

changes between 0.8.2 and 0.8.3:

• MMU Implementation - As previously noted, linux-dc now runs quite well, albeit slowly.
• Dreamcast mouse and keyboard controllers (also rather essential for running linux-dc)
• Support for real joysticks and gamepads (linux host only)
• Various bug fixes

» Download lxdream 0.8.3 now
» Check out lxdream's homepage

 

Our buddy drk||Raziel has made some nice progress on his Dreamcast emulator nullDC. I think pictures speak louder than words.... take a look :)

 

» Follow drk||Raziel's progress in this thread on Emuforums!

So much for me playing Crysis tonight -_-.....anywho, Makaron has a new test release for people to play around with.  Alot of internal changes have taken place inside the emulation core.  Here is the blog post:

Here is Makaron Test 9 for your pleasure. There are lots of internal changes, but nothing revolutionary - so don't expect it to be much better/faster compared to earlier versions. From user point of view, it's almost the same as T8. Quite frankly the only reason I'm releasing it is to test some new stuff inside. For example, it's only thanks to user input that I found the NVidia FX series cards bug so fast (and actually it affected all cards, just that FX couldn't cope with it at all).
There are also people out there who simply have to test anything new that is released, because they love emulating stuff. So this is like a small gift for them, to enjoy for few moments before the novelty wears off :)

Like I said, there are tons of small (and not so small) internal changes to the emulation engine. Some of this stuff is so new it wasn't even tested much yet, so expect bugs. If you find a game that doesn't work now and it used to, please drop me a note - I'd like to find and fix the regressions first.
I won't go into much detail, but here's a list of things I consider interesting enough to explain a bit:

Dynamic Z-buffer range compression
This is a new method of dealing with overblown Z/W values. Most of the work is done in vertex shader so there should be no noticable speed impact. I mean, if there is then your graphics card was too slow to begin with and this is just another drop in the bucket.
Now I can handle geometry more like PVR2 does, which is good because this allows proper shadow casting. Very much like NANs, infinities are now detected and handled CPU-side - so far it appears to work as expected. All this and no Z-precision issuses, not that I'm aware of at least. Unless there's a game out there making a real use of 32-bit floating point HDR in Z-buffer this might just be THE solution :)
Note: There are games that still do not render properly due to other bugs, also this does nothing to cure transparency/ordering problems.

Shader Model 2 is now default
Makaron will now use VS 2.0 and PS 2.x (x being 0, a or b - where available), and fall back to 1.1/1.4 if it has to. What's more, I might be dropping SM1 support sometime in future. There are so many problems with it... I've had VS 1.1 break geometry which VS 2.0 handled just fine. And let me remind you again that palletized textures filtering is disabled on PS 1.4 beacuse it's too primitive for that kind of processing.
It's also about features that older cards do not have - like multiple render targets, or floating-point type surfaces. The Z compression code is considerably shorter compiled for 2.0 profile than it is for 1.1 by the way. Funny thing though, even if SM3 code is shorter it actually executes slower on most cards. That and the bugs I found in the drivers made me choose SM2 as the best perfomer.

Texture caching fixed
At least I hope it is :) Makaron MT version should no longer crash so much or trash textures. That does mean the single-threaded version will be a bit slower though - it's a tradeoff I've made to allow for proper locking. Some bugs still remain, mostly to be seen in Soul Calibur, but that's another story.

Shadows now work
Well, most of the time, and so are enabled by default. There are several ways it can be done - so far I was unable to come up with one method capable of handling all cases. Maybe there isn't one... Well, for now you can switch between different algorithms - you'll need to do that for Crazy Taxi series at least.

You really should be using multiple-core system for Makaron, mind you - this is the target PC I'm aiming for. SH4 speed is very important, but once you can do rendering in parallel most games will happily run full-speed on as little as 70-100MIPS. Seeing as AthlonXP clocked at 2000MHz is just below the required minimum, I'd say any mid-level X2 or C2D system will do fine.

The known bugs you will surely ecounter are mostly in AICA (sound module) code. The volume levels are still wrong - not sure why, I made the tables up to the specs. And yet PCM range often exceeds 16-bit, causing major distortions even if clipped. Also, ARM speed has been reduced to 1.5MIPS - this should make Soul Reaver happy. This is not exactly correct either, and will probably break some other games... I'll keep looking for a better solution.

As usuall, if there are any silly-yet-critical bugs discovered, I'll fix them right away. Other ones will have to wait for next "major" release :P

WARNING! Be careful not to overwrite your VMU or INI files when moving to T9!

» Download Makaron Test 9 here
» Visit the Makaron blog

lxdream is a Dreamcast emulator for Linux (and coming soon, OSX).  Changes since version 0.8.1 mainly consist of the following:

• x86-64 architecture support
• Preliminary Mac OS X support
• Pbuffer support (to support OpenGL drivers without EXT_framebuffer_object)
• Support for more recent CDI and NRG image file versions
• Minor bugfixes

» Download lxdream 0.8.2 from NGemu
» Visit lxdream's site
» Thanks to [vEX] for the notification

Notes:

With the work done in the last month both for performance and usability, it seems worthwhile to release a new version. And since this version is actually (hopefully) useable by people who aren’t me, lxdream now has a real version number rather than a milestone. W00t!
Download it and enjoy. And of course, let me know how it goes.

Note: Please do not report rendering problems at this stage - there are many known bugs and unimplemented features, and it’s looking like the whole rendering stage may need to be rewritten for the next version.

Changes

• Implement more user-friendly GD-Rom changer (closes off #31)
• Add recent GD-Rom image tracking
• Fix for CDI images with more than 1 track per session
• Save render buffers as part of the save state (issue #34)
• Show preview screenshot in save state open dialog
• Remove gnome dependency (now just depends on GTK 2.0+)

Screenshot of the shiny new GUI:

Since the NG emulation scene is a bit slow on news right now, I bugged drk||Razi to find out some new details on one of the hottest dreamcast emulator out there right now, nullDC. A new version with some nice changes is on it's way, so we'll take a quick preview on the things to come.

First off, let's take a quick look at some of the features and fixes included in this upcoming version:

• Hz Selection Support for PAL Games Added. (nullPVR/Chanka PVR)
• Mouse & Keyboard emulation added.
• Image Reader can patch GD-Rom region at runtime, to allow .gdi images from all regions to boot.
• Image Reader can swap CD/GD-ROMs.
• nullDC can now set the DC's region (JAP/EUR/USA), broadcast type (NTSC/PAL/PAL_M/PAL_N) and cable type (VGA/TV(RGB)/TV(VBS)).
• Speed optimizations.
• New Maple (Input) plugin with Gamepad support.
• Fixes for the following games: Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Dino Crisis, Timestalkers, Dead or Alive 2 (LE), Virtua Fighter 3, Fighting Vipers, Sonic Adventure, Sonic Shuffle and many others ...

As you can see, the developers have spent quite some time into developing some cool things - you can find a full list with all changes over in this thread over at Emuforums. Here are some screenshots (thanks CK) which show the great progress:

 
 

Now the usual question is - when can you expect a new release? The good news is that, even though no date has been set yet, the release is pretty close (we're talking about weeks, not months any more) - we'll of course keep you updated here on NGEmu should there be any news on this!

If any wish to help out the nullDC project, by any means, we will keep a list of things we could use / use help with here.

Skill sets:

• Translators, Japanese to English, more later
• Developers, Anyone with a lot of knowledge of PIC16x
  

Donations:

Hardware:

• Any hardware related to Dreamcast/Atomiswave/Naomi/Naomi2/HIKARU
• Arcade Motherboards, Game Carts/GDROMS, IO Boards, Jamma Harnesses, Control Panels, Lightguns, compatible EPROMs. Just about anything will help us here.
  

Monetary:
Anyone wishing to donate cash:

All funds will be used accordingly for the project only, to buy hardware we will need to reverse unknown aspects of it. (Compatible EPROMs for Naomi bootrom is one example).

 

Please contact ZeZu or drkIIRaziel via a PM on this board for paypal informations or physical mailing address. 

• Hardware scaled resolution
• Assembler CPUs core enabled
• Others little optimizations
• New logo and menu skin

• Speed Up !
• Operative Menu: Throttle/Frameskip/Transpanrecy/Sound
• Fixed controls, 4 players supported.