Building Reicast: A Dreamcast emulator for Your ODROID

This guide will go over how to build Reicast from scratch, but if you are new to emulation, there is a short definition of what Reicast is at the official website http://reicast.com/. Reicast is a Sega Dreamcast emulator. It's an app that allows you to play your Dreamcast games on your computer or android phone. We've even baked in some magic to make things looks prettier than they did on the Dreamcast. Of course, not all games work, and the ones that do often have glitches.

Reicast primarily aims for speed and to run on android. It is derived from the nullDC codebase. We work on it in our spare time, because we love working on complicated, headache-inducing projects. Development traces back to late 2003 and has been largely non-continuous. Naturally, there are many other Dreamcast emulation projects, each with its own goals and priorities, including Makaron, Demul, Redream, and nullDC. If Reicast doesn't work for you, you may want to check out one of the other versions.

(Figure 1 - Dreamcast Games Overview)

Figure 2 - Reicast Emulator on the ODROID-XU4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0jEUcQx-vM

Build from source

To build Reicast from source, type the following commands:

$ cd ~
$ git clone https://github.com/libretro/reicast-emulator.git
$ wget -O xu4.patch https://pastebin.com/raw/pfVjnVs3
$ patch -p1 < xu4.patch
$ platform=odroid ARCH=arm make -j7
$ strip reicast_libretro.so
$ cp reicast_libretro.so ~/.config/retroarch/cores/.

First, you will need some BIOS files for NAOMI and Dreamcast, which can be found at https://www.libretro.com/index.php/reicast-libretro-now-supports-naomi-other-additions/ and https://docs.libretro.com/library/reicast/. If you want to know the md5 checksum of the NAOMI BIOS file, you can take a look into the core info file /home/odroid/.config/retroarch/cores/reicast_libretro.info

In order to play games at a decent speed, once you have loaded a game, open the RetroArch menu, go to Core Options, find the following settings and change them to:

reicast_framerate = "normal"
reicast_enable_rttb = "enabled"
reicast_threaded_rendering = "enabled"

For more information and further posts, please see the original thread at https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=98&t=32173#p234251.