BeetleDC Libretro Progress Report

Libretro Team

Display VMU screens ingame!

NOTE: This feature currently works properly in BeetleDC Libretro non-OIT. BeetleDC Libretro OIT will require some more work before this feature will start rendering properly.

Thanks to RetroSven, here is another major new feature!

It is now possible to display the VMU screen ingame! You can also specify the exact positioning of each VMU, whether it should be positioned at the top left, top right, bottom left, or bottom right corner of the screen. You can also specify the opacity of each screen and the exact size of the screen. You can display all 4 attached VMU screens at the same time onscreen!

For those that don’t know, the VMU was the Dreamcast’s memory card which also could be used as a standalone device. It was powered by a ring battery, had a D-pad and some face buttons, and it was even possible to play some minigames on the VMU.Games could download VMU minigames onto the system and you could then play these minigames when used as a standalone device.

Samurai Shodown VI (NAOMI) renders properly now with Extra Depth Scaling option!

Reicast Libretro now has a new feature – Extra Depth Scaling. By enabling this, the graphics in Samurai Shodown VI (Naomi arcade game) will render properly.

Note that even with this enabled, BeetleDC OIT Libretro will currently have some display bugs that the non-OIT core won’t have. Hopefully the two can become just as good later on.

BeetleDC Libretro – Updates 26-7-2018

Libretro Team

BeetleDC Libretro and BeetleDC OIT Libretro have recently been updated.

Here is a listing of all the changes/fixes/improvements:

  • (Dreamcast/Compatibility) Eldorado Gate – Broken opening FMV fixed (link)
  • (Dreamcast/Compatibility) Demolition Racer now works (link)
  • (Dreamcast/Compatibility) Redline Racer – Graphics bugs fixed (link)
  • (Dreamcast/Compatibility) Fixed rendering issues with Tokyo Xtreme Racer games (link)
  • (Dreamcast/Compatibility) Conflict Zone – Modern War Strategy now works
  • (NAOMI/Compatibility) Metal Slug 6 now works without graphics bugs

BeetleDC OIT – Increased compatibility with AMD/Intel GPU drivers

AMD GPU owners on Windows/Linux and Intel HD users on Linux/Mesa should probably be able to use the Reicast OIT core now, as several GLSL compliance bugs have been fixed by now.

Note that BeetleDC OIT can still be very buggy for Intel HD users on Windows, and slow to boot. The renderer really lends itself better to discrete GPUs from AMD/NVidia.

Render to texture upscaling!

Previously, games which rendered to texture (such as Dead or Alive 2 or Crazy Taxi) would always output at 1 x native resolution. Now, you can set the upscaling factor. Games which render the screen to a texture should look much better as a result, provided your GPU is up to the task.

An example – here is a comparison of the Crazy Taxi pause screen – left is 1x native resolution, right is 4x upscaled –

xBRZ Texture upscaling

This new setting allows you to upscale all the textures in a game up to 6 x their original resolution using the xBRZ texture filtering algorithm! See it in action with Shenmue in this video below –