Demul Emulator

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Tina Popielarczyk

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Aug 3, 2024, 6:06:58 PM8/3/24

to tilisepfa

By many requests we decide to make public build of emulator to show and share current stage of its development. It's an alpha/preview quality product so take it AS IS. It includes new features and new systems mentioned in this topic, many bugs fixed, as well as several unfinished parts, like new DX11NG render. Enjoy.

Second significant change is that GPU subsystem now migrated to the DX11 interface (currently DX10-capable GPU is enough). From this version old DX9 GPU plugins (DXv3 and DXLegacy) are obsolete, although they are still supported and included in current package. Further development of the DX9 plugins is stopped for now.

And finally overall interface and usability changes. Emulator is now support 7zip romsets for the bioses and arcade systems, most of the protection/encryption formats for the arcade systems, many many new romsets added during last year and many previously unsupported games or game controllers now are supported.

The rest is the sound subsystem have some bug fixes, improving known problems. And yes, totally forgot about... ;) Now we have our proprietary netplay plugin, too new to work fine, and totally untested, so you are welcome to try.

No, model 3 emulation still in the same state (except some overall graphics and compatibility improvements, made previously) all work currently suspended in favor to much more active supermodel emulator. Keep up good work, Bart! ;)

Not much work was done on the Naomi 2 subsystem too, there is no significant changes, just a little bit of fixes. DX11 support for Naomi 2 still imperfect and have some known issues, don't bother with that.

New GDR plugin gdrCHD. It supports Comressed Hunk of Data format (great thanks to MAME project). ".GDI" images can be converted to CHD with "chdman" tool from MAME project (e.g. "chdman -createcd my.gdi my.chd").This conversion will add some redundant sectors between image tracks so it`s better to write your own ".TOC" description and feed it to "chdman" utility.Both methods will produce functional images the difference is only in size (quick ".gdi" to ".chd" conversion is a bit larger than handmade ".toc" to ".chd").

Better late than never! ;) By numerous requests we have added support of old gamepads, which don't support Event Notification, to the PAD plugin.We hope that all PADs can now be used with our emulator.Of course, not a big change for "long-awaited" new build, but this is better than nothing. ;)
To install, just replace default padDemul with new one.

Besides compatibility status and game screenshots please report information about game's region(PAL, NTSC/JAP, NTSC/USA), size and checksum (e.g. MD5) of file 1ST_READ.BIN from the disc(or checksums of all files from the root directory), and also, if release group name is known,an nfo or full release name for further search. This will help us make up the compatibilitylist and search for mistakes.

Hello from Russia!We are very proud to introduce you new DC emulator DEmul! We have been tryingto write new emulator that will be able to run commercial games since firstand only real DC emulator Chankast so far is stopped to develop.

Emulator was started to development early in 2004 year by Wind, but just canceledafter Chankast released. About half a year it has been in hibernating, butChanka was still imperfect and emu was continued to developing. About a yearit takes before it shows up BIOS spiral, then early in 2006 year Wind foundsome emu-russia members and run his first most desired commercial game ResidentEvil: Code Veronica. Next progress was very fast and last six of seven monthtook improvements and debugging.

Now emulator is able to run most commercial releases by various groups all alongwith homebrew demos and free software. We hope you enjoyed it.

Emulator still imperfect and incomplete. A lot of work stillneeded. Sound, timing and graphics need improvement and speed up. Since maindeveloper is going to be little busy to do something with DEmul next year,we do not promise fast promoting and emulation progress. We try our best tofix as many bugs as we can and improve emulation.

Compatibility list with advanced features will be later all along with pluginsSDK, docs and faqs. Anyway, you can ask your questions (not dumb, please;)) bye-mail, report about some bugs or progress, please, read README.TXT file before.If you interest in development, we will glad to see you on IRC channels or forumsthat will be available later too. ;)

DEmul is a Sega Dreamcast, NAOMI, NAOMI 2, Atomiswave and Sega Hikaru emulator for Windows, developed by Wind, DreamZzz, MetalliC, ajax16384 and CaH4e3. It is able to run Dreamcast games which require Windows CE, and can load ROMs in GDI and CHD formats (only CHD files produced by chdman version 0.143 are confirmed to work; newer chdman versions may not work).

Sega Retro is part of the Backwards Compatible family of sites, which are dedicated to research and preservation of gaming history and culture.
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All my products and services are free.All my costs are met by donations I receive from my users.If you enjoy using any of my products, please donate to support me.Thank you for your support.Tom Speirs

DEMUL is the emulator to use when you want to run Sammy Atomiswave and Naomi/2 arcade systems. I had my system all setup great, then I decided to do a full upgrade. All of my roms are being updated, and the extras. I'm also working on upgrading the emulators that run them. So here I am, upgrading DEMUL from 0.57 to 0.582 WIP. At first, the emulator wanted to run using the DX11 graphics plugin, but it was so slow and choppy I decided to try and downgrade it to DX10. A huge improvement! Now when I play a ROM in the window mode, it has the proper aspect ratio, but when I go full screen, it's squished in, with a tremendous amount of black on either side. I'm talking 4:3 in widowed and almost 4:1 full screen. I checked the settings and I can't for the life of me figure out what's wrong. If I set it to 16:9, the image fills the screen (except for some games have a little of black edge on the sides) but everything is pixelated like it wasn't meant for that resolution. If I use stretch, it removes the black edges and fills completely 16:9, again with the bad pixelation. The only other option is the 4:3 mode which, as I said, is squished more than it should be. What should I do?

4:3 would be correct and I wonder why its squished if you go fullscreen. I also remember that on the very first start of a rom, the game will be slow, but if you start it again, it will start with "normal" speed (some kind of caching needs to be done). This still dont explain your strange behaviour. Check your Demul .ini files.

Yeah I actually removed everything from the previous version and tried to start from scratch as a starting point. DX11 works, but it is too slow and choppy. DX10 works great though (I think my card is only DX10). I looked at the ini files, the only thing that almost was a possibility, was the gpu ini, as it had a setting called "aspect ratio". Unfortunately, changing it was doing the same thing as if I was chosing it in the Demul menus directly.

I'm a bit afraid about that bug report. Doesn't seem right to completely cut off DX10 as a valid controller. I still have a DX9 card in my spare MAME system. And what is the ArcadeVGA card rated at? I'm sure it's not DX11.

Strangely enough, I completely removed everything DEMUL related and re-extracted the version 0.57 and it defaults to DX11 as the driver to use. That's not a problem though, since DX11 on .57 works great. Once I removed everything and put the 0.58 in, it defaults to DX10, and plays fine in windowed mode, but is scrunched for full screen. I tried to switch it to DX11 (since it worked so well in .57) and it was the correct aspect ratio, but very slow. It takes like 3 seconds for the NAOMI logo animation to complete, where as it should only take about 1/2 a second (with the other driver config). I tried various configs of DX10/DX11 on .581 and .582 also, and they all do the same thing (play great DX10 windowed, scrunched fullscreen, DX11 unplayable). So I guess I'm going to have to go back to .57.

I'm curious to try that other addon program, but if it is required to always be running, I don't think I will. It'd be ok if I can configure GameEx to run it as a launchbefore or something, but I don't want it always on. I'll check into some more perhaps on Sunday (my next day off).

If there is nothing in Roms and Bioses Paths, create the folder "roms" in the Demul folder and click Add. Navigate to the roms folder in the window that pops up and click on OK. Once done, close Plugins and Paths.

Thanks a lot for this. I looked at Demul briefly some time ago, couldn't get it working properly, then forgot about it due to being too busy to troubleshoot it. I'll be sure to give these settings a try when I have time!

While your guide is appreciated, honestly the best solution to get good speed but more importantly Correct emulation by leaving autosort on and using the DX11 gpu plugin, is to get a video card from the specs of about a GTX 650Ti and up, which does the trick for my cab with all Demul arcade titles.

Iirc auto sort affects ALOT more games than you listed, I went through every Atomiswave and Naomi game for cab, and it really needs to be enabled. It's just slow because the emu is just a mess IMO and really unbalanced/unoptimized.

I agree with tnrz, dx11 is usually faster. Dx11 is usually faster than dx10 even in windows games. Moreover disabling opaque modifier and translucent modifier will make 3d graphic worse. This emulator really likes hi-end videocards, demul is the only emulator to got a speed bump when i upgraded from 9800gtx+ to 660gtx.