Unless you are a big fan of the Dreamcast and play other games on it, or use it for other purposes such as homebrew, getting a Dreamcast just to play SA1 isn’t a good investment. The Dreamcast is prone to hardware problems (laser degradation, PSU) that eventually make it unable to read discs or boot at all, and the more reliable replacements (such as the GDEMU or USB-GDROM) are expensive and sometimes difficult to obtain.

Obviously you need to own a functional Dreamcast and a copy of the game to be able to play it.

However, using real hardware has its disadvantages: The most obvious option is playing the game on a real Dreamcast, which is perhaps the closest to the “definitive” way to play the game. In this situation one might wonder how to get the “definitive” version of Sonic Adventure. I do recommend looking it up if you are interested in RetroArch and/or support its development.Īs discussed on this blog, SADX Gamecube, SADX PC 2004 and the Steam/nextgen console versions of the game suffer from an alarming number of downgrades in almost every area imaginable, up to the point of completely misrepresenting the original Dreamcast version. I decided to leave the emulator drama out of this blog (we’re having enough fun with the base game as it is).

There is some controversy regarding unethical behavior of some developers of the flycast emulator and the RetroArch project in general (which was part of the reason the redream emulator went closed source), which you can look up elsewhere.

This post was last updated in October 2019, and Dreamcast emulators may have improved since then. You may have a different experience with these emulators and other games.

This post discusses various Dreamcast emulators in the context of emulating Sonic Adventure on a Windows PC based on my personal experience using them for this purpose.

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