Sega NASCAR Arcade - DEMUL (New and Improved Sega Hikaru board Emulation)
DEMUL, the Sega Dreamcast, Naomi, Atomiswave and Hikaru emulator has had an update, with a focus on improving the emulation of the Sega Hikaru games. I'm genuinely amazed by this, I thought updates on DEMUL had finished years back, but apparently things have still been going on behind the scenes with some non-public builds.
Here's Sega NASCAR Arcade running on the latest version of DEMUL, with a quick playthrough on the first two tracks in the game. This a Sega Hikaru arcade game being emulated at home.
My ancient PC has always struggled a bit with the demands of the Hikaru emulation in the past, but performance seems much better now in this new DEMUL build. Hikaru emulation is seemingly pretty demanding as I always ended up with slightly garbled audio when I tried to play this in the past, with the game running around 55 -50fps. I seem to be getting a much more consistent 60fps now. The audio balancing seems a bit off at the moment though, with the engine being a bit too loud. I don't think there's any audio balancing options in DEMUL, but TBH I haven't checked.
As far as the game itself goes, Daytona USA this ain't! It feels like one of Sega's weaker arcade efforts (but I guess that's what happens when you involve EA in one of your arcade titles). The gain time for drafting and slowly advancing up the ranks mechanic is novel, but it's like Sega forgot to add the fun element and the pace of the gameplay feels a bit ponderous compared to the likes of Daytona USA, Scud Race, OutRun 2 and Indy 500. It's not a sim racer as such, but it does feel like it's missing the real life physics defying fast and furious gameplay that makes those other games so entertaining to play.
Another curious thing about this game is that if you play with a pad (like I am here) rather than a racing wheel, It seems to be a lot harder to catch up with the CPU cars. I seem to instantly lose speed by about 20 KPH after the rolling start and struggle to make up places. When I have used my wheel to play this in the past, it seems like less of an issue. I think what's happening is that if you steer all the way to the left or the right you lose speed, so with the pad, you might think you're just making very small corrections to how you're steering, but actually the game is seeing it as a really hard left or right, because of the much smaller travel distance of the X axis of the left stick compared to a steering wheel.
#SegaNASCARArcade #Sega #hikaru