Shader effects – These are optional effects that change the appearance of the image.
Our test machine runs an Nvidia GTX 770 graphics card and has this setting at 32.
Setting it to 16 or 32 requires a powerful graphics card. On most computers, setting it to 8 will produce good enough results. We’re not actually certain what this setting does, but we know it affects emulation accuracy. Max layers – Available on the Direct3D 11 configuration window only. On our test machine we couldn’t go higher than 2x with the DirectX 11 plugin without the emulator crashing on startup. Users with fast PCs should start with 2x, while those of you with more modest machines should definitely start at 1x. Again a little experimentation might be required to find the most optimal setting. Typically this setting has diminishing returns, 2x is a lot nicer than 1x, but 3x and 4x don’t give such dramatic improvements. All you need to understand is that increasing this setting can significantly increase the visual quality of the games, but it also significantly increases the load on your computers CPU too.
Basically, internal resolution is the resolution the game is rendered at, this is different to the the full screen (Windows resolution) resolution which is the resolution the game is scaled to on the monitor. Internal resolution – Explaining this one is a little tricky. While setting up the emulator you might want to leave this setting off, until you have everything perfect, but normally most users would want to enable this option. Use Fullscreen – Usually you will want to play your Dreamcast games in full screen, without the distractions of the desktop around the window. Users with fast PCs can usually leave this setting enabled, those with more modest machines may need to experiment and see what works best. In that case, you might decide it’s better to put up with the occasional torn frame than suffer the sudden, jarring reduction in game performance as the emulators speed is typically halved.
If your PC can’t draw frames quite quickly enough, the frame rate of the emulator will drop significantly. Generally this is a good thing, but it has one significant drawback. It’s a technique that helps prevent graphics tearing or stuttering by synchronising the output frames to the refresh rate of your monitor. Vsync – Vsync is short for vertical synchronisation.
Demul should then copy whatever resolution you have Windows set to.Īspect Ratio – See “Aspect Ratio and Image Stretching” later in the article. Note – If the emulator seems to ignore this setting, you will need to change your Windows desktop resolution instead.
If you choose a widescreen resolution (such as 1080p – 1920×1080), be sure to read the section on aspect ratio and image stretching too. The higher you set this setting, the better things will look, but higher settings put more demand on your computers processor. The Dreamcast had a resolution of 640×480, but of course modern PCs can go well above this. The more pixels you have, the sharper and better defined the image will be. Windows resolution – Resolution is the number of pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. There are a lot of potentially complicated things to configure here, so take a deep breath and maybe brew yourself a coffee while we go through them all. Open the “Config” menu and choose “Video”. Lets dive right in and configure the graphics settings. The graphics settings are the most complicated, so we’re dedicating all of this tutorial to them. In the last tutorial we got Demul up and running, but in order to do anything useful with it we’ll need to configure some of its features.