FLYCAST(1)

🦋 FLYCAST(1) — the flycast manual page, bestie edition 🦋

okay so you opened the manual for flycast (that's section 1 of the manual, iykyk) and honestly? you're about to have the best time. it's a whole emulator and it's literally iconic. let's go 💅

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✨ NAME ✨

flycast — the Sega Dreamcast, Atomiswave and Naomi emulator. yes. all three. she's multi-talented 🎀

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

flycast [OPTIONS]... [IMAGE FILE]

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so flycast is a multi-platform emulator for the Sega Dreamcast, Atomiswave and Naomi systems. multi-platform. as in she runs everywhere. main character energy fr 🌈

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🌸 EXAMPLE COMMANDLINE 🌸

if you pass no command line options at all, flycast just starts up and loads every value from the config file. chill vibes only:

flycast

want to override the image that's specified in the config file and load a specific one instead? say less:

flycast /path/to/your/image.gdi

want flycast in full screen? periodt:

flycast -config window:fullscreen=yes

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🎀 CONFIG FILE 🎀

the config file for flycast lives right here, bestie:

~/.config/flycast/emu.cfg

🍓 VMU SAVE FILE 🍓

VMU save files are found in ~/.local/share/flycast/, and by default flycast will create two VMU files for the first controller:

~/.local/share/flycast/vmu_save_A1.bin
~/.local/share/flycast/vmu_save_A2.bin

🧚 BIOS AND FLASH ROMS 🧚

okay important one — flycast needs the original Atomiswave or Naomi BIOS files. the Dreamcast BIOS isn't needed in most cases, but it is recommended (highkey do it). for copyright reasons it is not possible to distribute them bundled with flycast, so you have to dump them from your own Dreamcast, no workarounds sorry 😭

flycast will look for these files in:

~/.local/share/flycast/data/dc_boot.bin
~/.local/share/flycast/data/naomi.zip
~/.local/share/flycast/data/awbios.zip

💜 CONTROLS 💜

flycast uses the kernel event devices for capturing input. you can define the evdev device id in the config file:

[input]
evdev_device_id_1 = X
evdev_mapping_1 = my_mapping.cfg

and if your version of flycast is compiled against X11, you might want to disable the built-in X11 keyboard support — it can interfere if your controller is detected as a keyboard. not cute. so:

[input]
enable_x11_keyboard = -1

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⭐ GENERAL OPTIONS ⭐

• -config section:option=value — temporarily override a value from the config file. just a little temporary slay, the file itself stays untouched 💅
• [IMAGE FILE] — load a specific image file. flycast supports images in GDI, CHD, CUE and CDI format, but you should avoid CDI images since they often have issues. 🙈 and if no image is given on the command line, flycast will display the list of available content. very demure, very mindful.

heads up bestie: that CDI warning is real — she'll run them, but they're the messy ones. GDI/CHD/CUE are the safe picks. 🫶

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

flycast is developed by a number of people. a list of contributors can be obtained at:

https://github.com/flyinghead/flycast/graphs/contributors

head over to flycast's git repository if you want to contibute:

https://github.com/flyinghead/flycast

and the legal bit, which we respect: this is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License (Version 2).

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and that's the whole page, bestie 💖 this drop is Flycast, dated November 21, 2020, straight from the FLYCAST(1) manual — go emulate something iconic, you've got this 🦋✨