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However, we here at the 'Yard appreciate that in 2014, not everyone owns a Dreamcast console, let alone a massive library of games be it due to financial or space-based reasons. Indeed, as is the current trend with retro games of all flavours, colours and creeds there are people out there who are intent on driving up the price of hardware and software to the point that it is no longer accessible to the average gamer. I'm not going to mince my words here - these hoarding traders are scum and I take great delight in telling them so whenever I spot a 'L@@K RARE' copy of Ready 2 Rumble on eBay with a Buy It Now price of £34.99. The Dreamcast Junkyard will not tolerate such activity.
With this in mind however, it is understandable that emulation is becoming very popular as it costs virtually nothing to get an emulator off the internet. Naturally, the whole legality of the owning of emulator software (or roms, as they're more commonly known) is a bit of a grey area but as long as you own the original software on a disk or cart, it's fine to own a back-up. Now the legal stuff's accounted for, here's the point of all that guff you just read: there's a new(ish) Dreamcast emulator available for Android devices! It's called Reicast, and you can get it from the Google Play store for your phone, tablet or even Ouya. Yep - the three people who still own an Ouya can now play some decent games, and as an added bonus you won't have to rub your fingers all over your device's touchscreen in order to earn some Kudos!
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I personally don't own a single Android-powered device (unless you count my old Huawei Blaze which is rotting in a box in the attic somewhere...which I don't), so I haven't been able to try Reicast, but judging by some of the videos I've seen it does appear to be a fairly solid emulator. I would imagine that you'll need a pretty beefy device in order to run DC games at a decent speed (running Android 2.2 and above), and the software is still in the Alpha stage so there are likely bugs and issues to be ironed out. You may remember that we ran an article on NullDC for Android some time ago, but Reicast looks like it may be the better option for more casual users - there's plenty of documentation on the Reicast forum and there's an official website too. Bear in mind that you'll need to 'acquire' a Dreamcast BIOS file in order to get the emulator working, but if you've played DC games on Reicast either on your phone, tablet or Ouya, let us know about your experiences in the comments section. Cheers dears!
