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.