Intensive Gaming Diary

The blog about videogames.

Redream – A Dreamcast Emulator

Posted on by Viljami

Segas last gaming console, Dreamcast, was released in 1999, at least in Europe. It was actually released in November 1998 in Japan. It wasn’t a bad console. Many say it was the best gaming console that was ever released. To some it was even better than the first PlayStation. It sure was more powerful. It had many great games but it only stayed available for consumers to buy for a short period of time. Dreamcast was drawn from manufacture at the end of 2001. So there might have been more games released for this system if it would have been longer in the markets.

Some good Dreamcast games that I’ve played are Skies of Arcadia, NBA 2K2 and Crazy Taxi. I have heard that games like Sonic Adventure, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Quake III Arena and Jet Set Radio are good games also. If you have a game for Dreamcast I haven’t mentioned here feel free to comment this post. Skies of Arcadia is a nice role playing game. It reminds a lot of Final Fantasy games. Crazy Taxi is a kind of a driving game where you pick up customers and drive them where they want to go. NBA2K2 is pretty much what the title says – a basketball game.

Let’s talk about Redream. It is a Dreamcast emulator. It is available for Linux, Windows and Mac. There is also an option for a download for Raspberry Pi. The setup is made easy for a user of a computer. You select the download that corresponds to your operating system. Then you unpack and just run the application. You might want to add shortcut to desktop also. The user interface is also easy to learn. You can see all the games you have currently. You can select the location of your rom files inside your computer. You can also adjust some settings concerning your saved games, input devices, video (for example the resolution of the screen you are using) and some other options related to localization.

Redream is a good looking Dreamcast emulator. It’s clearly the easiest one to use when I think about its competitors such as DEmul and NullDC. They required more fiddling with the settings. Dreamcast emulators, all in all, are far more easier to setup than a well known PS2 emulator PCSX2 is. Don’t get me wrong. PCSX2 is a great emulator. It just is a bit hard for a non technical user to setup. Redream also works very nicely. I haven’t had any problems. It hasn’t crashed at all as I have used it for some time now. You can download stable release or development release. This means that the stable version has been tested and development version is the most recent versio´n that has the most recent new features.

You can download Redream here

D-Fend Reloaded – A Frontend for DOSBox

Posted on by Viljami

Ever wanted to play those old and definitely retro MS-DOS games you played tens of years ago? Guess what? That is completely possible! There is a tool called DOSBox. It is basically an emulator which then operates an emulation of MS-DOS. It might be a bit tricky to first get it to work but I am glad to say that there is a solution that makes running your DOS games easier. The thing is called D-Fend Reloaded and I am going through in this article where you can get it, how to install it, how to fiddle the settings and how to install a game for it. You can even go as far as installing some other frontend for your mobile device but that can be discussed later in some other article.

1.) Download D-Fend Realoaded

It was very easy to install D-Fend Reloaded on my Windows 10 computer. DOSBox is included in the setup. You can download it here . I am not going into so much details when it comes to different options you can download. Just choose “Default package” and download the installer of version 1.4.4. That is what I am using here. It might be alreaady updated but that’s usually a good thing. Installation is pretty much easy. Make sure you have a folder somewhere that has some zipped, preferably freeware, games that you can install with D-Fend Reloaded.

2) Download a .zip file of some “freeware” game

Next, we are going to download a free game so we can go through the process of installing a DOS game. There are lots of DOS games on “DOSGames.com”. Let’s download “Acid Tetris”. Just click “Download The Game Free”. The .zip file gets downloaded. You can move it to some folder you like.

3) Adding/installing a ´game to the frontend

This is the trickiest part of this easy tutorial. Open D-Fend Reloaded. Now click “File” and navigate to “Import”->”Import archive file…”.  Then select the file we downloaded (“DOSBOX_SABA.ZIP”).  Click “Open”. Add “Profile name”. It can be for example “Acid Tetris”. Click one more time “OK”. And now we have the game in the list.

4) Play the game we just installed

Just double click the name of a game (inside D-Fend Reloaded) that you want to play …

 

 

 

Transition from 2D to 3D

Posted on by Viljami

You can see clearly the differences between games based on 2D graphics and games based on 3D technology. Two dimensional gameplay has been around longer. Typical 2D games are platformers, like Super Mario Bros 3, shoot-em-ups, like Gynoug, M.U.S.H.A. and many others, and beat-em-ups, like games of Streets Of Rage series.

The distinction becomes clear when you are playing a game. Movement can be restricted only to two dimensional movement. You can think of how playing Tekken is compared to Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat. You can also compare the first Super Mario to a pioneer of 3D games Super Mario 64, which was a game for Nintendo 64. Some games are something from between 2D and 3D. Like many PlayStation 1 games.

Games that are three dimensional usually provide wider movement options and are based on 3D models. You can clearly interact stronger with the objects that are inside the game. Graphics also look more realistic. I don’t think there is a reason today to call a game a lousy game for not having 3D qualities. Again, this is just a difference in the game and it has surely been thoroughly given a long thought when the game was developed. This hasn’t always been the case.

Somewhere in the middle of the 90s 3D was amazing and new. The technology that was used for making games was developing at a very fast pace. Today these games are considered to be retro. It doesn’t matter so much today how the game is developed as long as it is of a good quality overall.

So I would say that we today have a much wider and more accepting community of gamers playing many different kinds of games. And I think this is very good. There will always be games that are based on the latest technology but there is also games that aim to some other target.

The featured image here stands out as Tomb Raider was one of the earliest and most popular games that used 3D technology. It was released in 1996. The possibilities of this games graphical abilities was amazing and almost endless as you could run the game with very high graphical settings if you had a good graphics card. I recall this time as a dawn of new technology that made personal computers more powerful than ever.