Any one else get their Dreamcade Replay and not really like it?

HailGalvatron

CAGiversary!
I received mine on Wednesday and already disconnected it. 

I have many issues with it in it's current state that I could elaborate on if this turns into a discussion.

Even if I was to just try to sell it on Ebay, there's no factory reset right now...... :whistle2:x

 
I would be interested in what you found wrong with it...

My only question is what do you do when the ROMarchive.org site is shut down by some publisher?

 
I'd be interested in hearing thoughts about this as well... I honestly never thought this would even be released, I figured there's be some legal action which would prevent them from ever seeing the light of day. 

 
It’s basically a windows 10 computer with the Dreamcade front end. Setting it up was all through windows and annoying to me. I actually needed a mouse and Keyboard before I can even do anything it. Controllers do connect as said, but in my experience, I synced an Xbox one controller to it, then had to resync it to the  xbox one to use it on that. Then I had to resync it again on the replay, and put the inputs in again!
The interface is pretty lame IMO. If you have a ton of roms, there’s no way to quickly scroll through them. That’s a big pain. All the roms are being run through mame. All my roms ran like shit. Mario 2 that I downloaded through the archive was washed out and choppy. My own copy that runs fine elsewhere ran twice the speed on mame. The downloading roms from the archive is really as easy as they say it is though. I downloaded contra. Choppy, screen tearing, flickering, disappearing sprites. Mame won’t save my input controls, keeps listing start as “none”, like it did that for every new game I tried, not even leaving the emulator ...

Worst part.... no factory reset. on the forums they said they are "ironing that out" Wtf

there's a lot of tech savvy/extremely nice people on the boards though. the one member suggested installing Launchbox and retroarch, for thats what he did. I told him I'm not good at this kind of stuff and he said he would guide me through it. like I said, really nice, but it kind of feels like I bought a more expensive raspberry Pi at this point, and the whole Idea of this was to avoid having to set up stuff like that. I just wanted "plug and play" 

I'm curious as to what Ship will think of his.

 
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oh and the HDMI cable they sent wouldn't be picked up through my HDMI splitter so I had to use my own cable.

there is also an "emulation wizard" that supposedly lets you add an emulator to have the dreamcade launch it's games with that instead. That would be absolutely perfect, except even the really tech savvy members of the board said they can't really figure it out and its a pain in the ass. I think if that gets patched I'll appreciate it more. till then I'll just hold on to it I think and wait it out.

 
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Thanks, so it sounds like the one good part about this is that the Dreamcade interface is properly set up with for controller use but outside of that, it's nothing you can't do on a computer yourself. 

 
Yeah that’s pretty much it. Well I guess the big draw in is being able to easily download the roms or even stream games, but like I said, the mame emulation has been lousy for me. I’ll wait till more people get their hands one it. Not many people have it, I just got lucky being the 10% of people who got it early.
 
any more feedback? i have one preordered b/c I couldn’t resist the urge lol.

My plan was to set this up for my kids / visiting friends and make use of the “retro reload” feature for on demand games n64 emulation.

I already have a hakchi nes, hakchi snes, attract mode retropie, and alpha r2 for my personal emulation/nostalgia needs.

thanks!
 
I received mine last week.  This thing is a piece of gosa.   I am an avid retro arcade enthusiast and I have built my own bartop system based on retropie and its works great. Everyone who sees it has to try it out. It even has a Turbo Twist spinner for Tempest. I am also going to pick up one of those ArcadeOneUp 3/4 replica cabinets later this year.  I have quite a bit of experience setting up emulators like MAME, PCSX2, etc. and  FEs like Launch Box. 

The reason I backed this project was that Dreamarcades (creator of DreamCade Replay) has some of the most amazing looking high end, high price, multi-arcade cabinets I have ever seen!  I almost bought one but ended up making my own small bartop instead.

I was hoping this little "console" would be an easy way to get some MAME and NES/SNES games connected to my TV.  But this thing is 100% not a console.  Its a very cheap Win10 PC with what looks like Dreamarcades FE.  But its poorly installed, controller support was very bad out of the box, SNES games would not exit requiring a power cycle, the FE crashes, FE features like favorites and adding/removing games don't work. The system for finding new games does not even work with the Windows controller directly. They install this "virtual mouse" software that does not even work with Bluetooth Xinput devices (i.e. new Xbox One controller). 

I have experienced mostly just headaches getting it set up. 

On the one-up side, when it works (MAME works well) its shows it has true potential.  But I think they made some really poor choices and created some pretty buggy and clunky FE.  Its not a "console" in any way.  Unless you consider Win10 a console OS.  And, the thing that really ticks me off is that I have posted  a number of major issues on the forums and I get no fixes, nothing. They can provide updates and one did fix Xbox One controller setup but there are many, many more major issues that make this thing just unusable.

I am pretty harsh I know. But they really sold this thing as a plug and play console and I don't know about that.   Many people could not even get it working because they had to run through Win10 initialization and could not get it working at all.

So, consider yourself warned. If you want to tinker with a cheap PC, I would just buy a cheap PC and install a better MAME/FE. I get the feeling mine will just be gathering dust and hoping for updates that actually fix it.

P.S. Here is a pic of my home made bartop... always showing it off :)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/z19p9t491g9vzev/IMG_0414.jpg?dl=0

 
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I kinda wanted to pre order one glad I waited.
That being said if anyone wants to get of theirs let me know
I swear if you send me your address I may just ship it to you. Of course I will have to check back but it may be worth it
 
I finally received mine. It crashed during setup and now it won't even turn on. Their "forum support" has offered zero solutions. So far I'd recommend that people stay far away due to the serious lack of customer service alone.
 
it’s definitely not the plug n play console like experience as advertised. with that said, mine is working fine with the included controller and my 8bitdo n30 arcade stick.

so far i downloaded and played ~30 arcade games, a few colecovision, some 32x, some n64.

the retro reload rom searching tool is cool, but the download manager is buggy. i hope they further refine the front end to deliver the console experience promised.

i had to add vsync to mame and change to 60 hz to fix screen tearing...this should be addressed without user intervention.
 
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