Retroarch issues with reicast

[sarge1979]

When trying to load a dreamcast game with retroarch I am presented with this error message does anyone know what I am doing wrong. I have followed instructions on the youtube video and set it up exactly how is shown in there.

[DivinityCycle]

A bunch of things worth mentioning in response to this:

-Bro, you are running Windows, so you can easily generate nice screenshots using the built-in Snipping Tool utility. It's been around since at least Vista but like NO BODY knows this program exists. It's probably already on your computer and will help you make nice screenshots. You can read more about that over here if you want.

-When troubleshooting RetroArch on Windows, I found it to be really hard to find a way in at first, because by default ALL you get back from the program is the generic "Windows crashed. That.. didn't work for some reason..." message. That's not enough to go by in trying to track down what's going wrong. To get a lot better idea of what is killing your RetroArch, you'll need to delve into the command line a little bit. If you already know how to command line in Windows, just navigate to to the directory where you've got RetroArch installed, and then run retroarch.exe -v --menu 2>log.txt, or you could take whatever command line you were using to fire up Reicast & the ROM and just add the -v switch and then add 2>log.txt at the end. The easiest way I know of to get a command line opened up is to go to your RetroArch folder, hold Shift and then right-click on an empty space in the menu, which should give you a new option in the context menu "Open command line here". That should get you to a command prompt and also automatically move into the directory you're looking at. Once you're in there, like I said above, you'll want to run retroarch.exe -v --menu 2>log.txt. The -v switch tells Retroarch to be "verbose" in its output, so it will output a lot more info about what's going on than normal, the --menu switch tells it to launch to the normal menu you will get if you just double-click retroarch.exe in Windows, and the 2>log.txt tells Windows to capture the error output from the program and save it to the file log.txt. You can use any filename you want for this, it's just a way of capturing the output from the program into a file, so you can open it up and read through it. I find this much nicer / easier than having to navigate through a ton of stuff in a command line window. Anyways, reading the error logs should help you figure out what's missing. My guess is the BIOS files.

-The Reicast core is in its infancy as of a couple weeks ago when I tried it. It has serious graphical issues with some games and has no proper BIOS support at this time, so you're going to see the "Set the system date & time" prompt every time you launch it and what you punch in can't get saved yet. The most common cause of it just not launching at all is that reicast cannot find the BIOS files it needs, or the files are "the wrong" files. They need to be in your Retroarch's "system" directory, inside a folder named "dc". The files will usually be named dc_boot.bin and dc_flash.bin. Most forums and places are not OK with linking directly to the BIOS files, as these are copyrighted material that Sega owns, so I don't think I can just pos them here  I didn't have too much trouble Googling them up, but PM me if you still can't get them.

Edited November 4, 2016 by DivinityCycle

[DivinityCycle]

Same issue on multiple games? The tricky thing with DreamCast games is that there are lots of releases floating around online which are not "100% untouched" originals, as games have been modified to make them burnable in a lot of cases. Usually the easiest way to control for this is to test both a couple different games, and if you can, several releases of the same game.

[DivinityCycle]

Same issue on multiple games? The tricky thing with DreamCast games is that there are lots of releases floating around online which are not "100% untouched" originals, as games have been modified to make them burnable in a lot of cases. Usually the easiest way to control for this is to test both a couple different games, and if you can, several releases of the same game.