Dreamcast Light gun Games on the PC

Dreamcast lightgun games

• Death Crimson 2
• Death Crimson DX
• Confidential Mission
• House of the Dead 2
• Virtua Cop 2

The Sega Dreamcast was a great console with  some amazing games. There weren’t a lot of light gun games but the ones it had were pretty good. One of my favorites across any platform was confidential mission and I had a lot of good memories playing that.

For a long time, the best/only way to play Dreamcast games was with the Demul emulator. I’m not a big fan. Its a good emulator but seems a bit complicated to set up.

A more recent emulator called ReDream has come a long with great features, supporting excellent up scaling and a really easy/intuitive user interface.

More importantly, its just got light gun support and even better – it basically just works out of the box!

Using Redream on the PC

https://redream.io/download

ReDream ships with its own bios so you don’t have to mess on but you can add an original bios if you want to and you have one, (you don’t need to though).

Its a great emulator and it’s worth paying the unlock fee to get up scaling and additional memory cards etc, however, you don’t need if you play light gun games and only need it for more advanced features and up scaling. It’s cheap and I think it’s both worth it and a great way of supporting the dev if you like it.

ReDream has native light gun support which works really well. The only issue is that it does not currently support Virtua Cop2 as it uses WinCE which has not been implemented in the emulator.

Also, at the time of writing, it is not possible to remove the cross hair from ingame. There seems to be a lot of chat about that in the Discord so it will probably get addressed at some point.

Setup is very easy

Just download and  install the emulator then run it:

Once it has started up, click on the Library Tab to add a games directory:

Next just select the directory and click ADD:

ReDream should automatically populate the games list from the games found. Its very quick:

Once that is done, you need to set up a controller. Redream supports light guns natively now and it is one of the easiest emulators to get working as a result.

Select Input and click on the port that you want the light gun plugged into :

Next, select your input device, set the device type to light gun and configure your controls. If your light gun does not have a dpad or something similar then you will need to use the keyboard or something else to map to the dpad as it is needed to navigate menus.

You will also want to set your Video options. Redream runs very well and can upscale a lot even on modest pcs. Set your resolution as you want it (remember that there is no point setting it greater than your monitor resolution though!)

It’s also useful to set the window mode to full screen so that you can get the immersive experience and also so that your mouse clicks don’t click out of the ReDream window and pull you out of the game.

Setting Redream and your Dreamcast light gun games up on a front end.

I personally like to have all of my games running from a front end. That way, It’s nice and easy to play different games and switch between them – I just have to go to one place. Most importantly, I can get hem all set up and scripted to work in one place which keeps everything tidy.

IMy favorite right now is LaunchBox as it is easy to use, customizable and works really well.

Once you have your games loaded  and working in redream, its easy to add them into Launchbox.

One point is that you may want to place your games and your Redream install into your Launchbox folder structure. This keeps everything together and makes it easier to navigate when you come back to it after a break.

First, go to the Menu, select Tools and then Manage Platforms:

Click Add to add a new Platform – This is the console etc that the games run on.

Next, go to the Tools ment and select Manage Emulators.

Click to add an emulator

Then add the Emulator Details:

You only need to add the Name and the location of the Emulator executable.

Once you are done there, you can import your Rom files. Go to the Tools menu and select Import Roms. Just follow the wizard and Launchbox will automatically populate the details and pull your games in.

At that point, the games should just work when you click on them or select play. If you have any changes that you want to make, you can just go to the Redream emulator and make changes there. They will be saved and apply to the games when you next run them.