(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
Reicast 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 Reicast 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.
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:
The libretro team shared the news about an exciting new feature: Their Reicast cores, both Reicast and Reicast OIT, support now Sega Naomi arcade games.
What is Sega Naomi?
Naomi was an arcade videogame system based on the Sega Dreamcast hardware and the successor of the Sega Model 3. While being nearly identical in terms of architecture, it did have double the RAM and fillrate of the home console version.
Naomi became one of the longest lasting arcade systems to be used second only to the Neo Geo AES. Various licensees (such as Capcom, Arc Sys, and even Nintendo) licensed the hardware during its lifespan to produce arcade games with.
How to use it
You will need a NAOMI BIOS file inside your system directory. The BIOS with the best compatibility so far is epr-21576g.ic27. This is a file that is contained inside the MAME NAOMI bios zip. Rename this file to naomi_boot.bin and move it to your ‘system directory/dc directory.
NOTE: MAME ROMS won’t work (yet). Proper Atomiswave roms won’t work, however, most Atomiswave to Naomi GD-ROM conversions should at least work or boot.
Currently existing issues
There are some issues that remain with Naomi support:
By default, two arcade sticks are hooked up.
There are some video and syncing glitches right now. One of the most immediately apparent is the flickering Naomi boot screen.
There is no analog and/or shoulder button support yet for Naomi games.
Videos
Toy Fighter
Dolphin Blue
King of Fighters XI
Dead or Alive 2 Millennium
Street Fighter Zero 3 Upper
A new core option called ‘GD-ROM Fast Loading Mode’ has been added. It can severely cut down on loading times, sometimes even removing them almost entirely as can be seen in the game ‘Daytona USA 2001’ here.
Various sound fadeout bugfixes
Through some judiciously applied hacks, the following games no longer suffer from sound fadeout issues:
Border Down
Bomberman Online
Chaos Field
Death Crimson OX
Fatal Fury/Garou: Mark Of The Wolves
Jet Set Radio/Jet Grind Radio
Napple Tale
Phantasy Star Online
Phantasy Star Online Ver. 1
Radirgy
Segagaga
Sonic Shuffle
Trigger Heat Exelica
WWF Royal Rumble
Graphics fixes
Thanks to the awesome efforts of flyinghead, several graphics glitches have been fixed, like Virtua Tennis or Psyvariar 2.
Other changes
Reicast OIT
Added an accumulation Pixel Buffer Size core option. You can set this to 512MB, 1GB or 2GB, depending on how much VRAM your video card has. For higher resolutions to output correctly, you might need to increase this to the highest value possible.
House Of The Dead 2 failed a verify assert – should boot and be playable now.
Rebase ADPCM decoding.
Reicast (non-OIT)
Multipass rendering is now enabled by default. Plenty of games need this for accurate rendering and the performance tradeoff should be minimal.
House Of The Dead 2 failed a verify assert – should boot and be playable now.
Again news from the Libretro team for Reicast. See their blog for details.
