The Dreamcast sure has been getting a lot of love lately. Sonic R is the latest title to join the recent avalanche of fan-made ports to Sega’s sixth-generation powerhouse with version 1.0 (currently v1.0-bugfix1) dropping late last week.
You can find thorough instructions on building your Dreamcast playable .cdi version of Sonic R on the project’s GitHub.
This port was made by jnmartin84 — another notch in his belt — alongside their decompilation of the 1998 Sega PC release of Sonic R. Jnmartin84 said on the decomp’s GitHub that this “project is the product of several months of reverse-engineering and x86-to-C translation.” It is important to note that this decompilation effort made use of AI tools, namely “Claude Code (using Opus 4.6, Opus 4.8 and Fable 5).”
The Sonic R Dreamcast port was first teased on Bluesky back in April of this year — the relevant post is no longer publicly visible. Since then, jnmartin84 has regularly streamed their progress on the project. A beta has been available since early July.
The Sonic R decomplication’s GitHub says that this release was “extensively tested and validated … along with playtesting by many detail-oriented Sonic R fans,” thanking Mittens, Tongara and Neo.charmy, specifically.
This is a complete port with all original game modes supported. Not happy to stop at just making this a straight port, jnmartin84 included cross-platform network play.
For network play on Dreamcast:
- A Broadband Adapter (BBA) or W5500 serial ethernet adapter is required.
- Use UDP on port 7847.
- All players in a session must be playing on the same port version.
For those curious what makes the PC release of Sonic R — and thus this Dreamcast port — different from the Saturn original, check out this summary.
Hop over here for Peter Malek’s thoughts of the original Saturn release of Sonic R.
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