Translated Interview with Dreamer author
(original interview by www.emulatronia.com)

1. If Your DC emulator played commercial games, would you bring it out now?

To tell you the truth, it's too soon for a Dreamcast emulator to be playing
commercial games, we have to take in to consideration that the console is
still pretty new and now is the time that it starts to sell in mass
quantity. An emulator that could substitute it would pose big loses to Sega
and that's not what I intend to do with the emulator. I don't want this
emulator to be considered Warez.

2. Why have you coded this emulator?

The main reason is the same one as the UltraHLE programmer said he did his,
to demonstrate that with current PCs it's possible to emulate a powerful
system like the Dreamcast. I also did it to help the people that like to
program for the Dreamcast but don't have any means of testing their software
in a real console (A burner, cable connection or even people without a
Dreamcast).

3. Do you think that current PCs have enough power to run the DC games
properly?

I'm coding the emulator on a 600 Mhz Athlon with 192 MB of RAM and it's
power is more than enough to run the demos out there at this moment, we
would have to wait until all the 3D hardware is emulated to see how a game
that uses the hardware to the max would run. I expect the speed to be
acceptable with a system like mine.

4. Tell us how far off is your project at this moment.

Until a couple of days ago the emulator was stalled because I already had
emulated everything I had information about, but with the appearance of
Dan's 3D demo, I started working on the 3D.
The current state of the project is like this:
- All opcodes of the SH4. Most of them have been tested (in the previous
version there was a couple of them that didn't work, specially one of the
jumps)
- The FPU opcodes are emulated, but I've only tested a couple, there's also
some problems with divisions.
- The CDROM. Some commands are emulated, but not all of them, only the most
needed ones. This is what stops commercial games from running.
-Video Hardware. The 2D hardware is emulated and tested to work perfectly. I
just started emulating the 3D hardware.
- Recently the DMA controller and the Store Queues (very important for 3D)
have been emulated.
- The digital controllers work 100%, analog still needs to be emulated.

5. Do You think Sega would do to your emulator the same thing Sony did with
Bleem?

The Sony vs Bleem thing was because Bleem is a commercial emulator, people
pay for Bleem and don't have to pay for a PSX (witch is more expensive), and
takes away from Sony's sales. There never has been a problem (that I know
of) between Sony and Psemu, that's because Psemu was free. Although we all
know what happened with Nintendo and the N64 emu programmers, but that's
history now. Besides, at the moment Sega doesn't have to worry since the
emulator does not run ANY commercial games (until some time).

6. Is it possible to emulate the DC only with information available on the
Internet?

The Emulator has been coded using only public information available on the
Internet. No information has been taken from an SDK, Devkit or whatever it's
called. There's plenty of pages out there dedicated to the legal
documentation of the Dreamcast and I simply used that information.

7. What will you use for 3D acceleration, D3D, Glide, OpenGL or Software?

At the moment, it'll be done though Direct3D, but I haven't discarded OpenGL
yet.

8. What do you think about the attitude of some emulator programmers? If you
don't know where we're heading to, here's some clues....Reality....,
FPS....., .....

We have to respect the opinions of the programmers, they do it for free and
it takes plenty of time to do an emu. I personally don't share the decision
of some, let's not believe our selfs to be the king and then just say I
quit, this is as far as I go, and now let the people that were waiting for
something get angry because I don't feel like doing it anymore. I wouldn't
like to let down the people that have been waiting for a new version.

9. What do you think of the emulation scene?

Emulation has advanced a lot, in part thanks to the incredible rate at witch
PCs power is increasing. In it's time, N64 emulation looked impossible but
look at it now, there's plenty of them. Let's hope that the same happens
with the Dreamcast. I think that the emulation world needs a little push, an
emulator that would revolutionize everything again, just like UltraHLE did
(Note that I'm not talking about a Dreamcast emu). I would personally like a
CPS2 emu since I have years waiting to play D&D.