Request: Sega Genesis / Megadrive Emu for RC5

[Foxdie]

Hi all,

Can some nice caring Z-loving person please compile a sega genesis/megadrive emulator to take advantage of the new RC5 features?

It would be great to play genesis games with full speed and sound whilst travelling on the train to work every day

[kic]

I second this. I really like the idea of pdaxrom, but I've been using cacko as I had problems with rc4 (that have been solved, according to most reports). While I have an nes and an snes emulator running on cacko, I'll be damned if I can get a genesis emu working.

I'd like to switch back to pdaxrom to try it again, but I'm playing the waiting game right now. I want to see some stuff compiled for it and see if there's some performance improvements (and right now, that's all beyond my capabilities, so I'm patiently waiting while others do it). Working emulators would decrease my waiting time significantly.

[iamasmith]

Hi guys, I gave this a try.

DGEN is pretty slow compared with the still fully maintained XMESS (source included in the XMAME source) so I compiled two versions of XMESS for Kathrin RC5 with the latest dev tools, one based on SDL and the other based on X11.

Problems were as follows..

* The emulator seems to insist on using 32 bit colour depth internally and with the SDL GUI it can't select an appropriate mode. It seems to insist on selecting the video mode. You can select -bpp 15 to select 15 bit colour depth (there's actually no such thing as 16 bit, think about it - 3 colour values into 16 doesn't go right ?) but the display gets screwed when you do this.

* The X version relies heavily on the XVideo extension for scaling so had to turn that off. Without scaling it's desperately slow anyway. With Kathrin RC5 could only achieve 3.5fps and no recognisable sound at all.

Finally XMESS as a base project emulates about 50 architectures and results in a binary of about 10Mb !.

Sorry guys, I couldn't find a more suitable project with a Linux source.

You may have to wait a while on this one.

- Andy

[ikm]

You can select -bpp 15 to select 15 bit colour depth (there's actually no such thing as 16 bit, think about it - 3 colour values into 16 doesn't go right ?)

JFYI, there actually is such a thing as 16 bit, with a green color getting 6 bits instead of 5, as it really deserves it being in the center of the spectrum.

[Vanguard]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gens/

That's the one we want.  Gens is by far the best emulator for the desktop, and probably the one we should try to get running for the Z.  (We may want to leave out segaCD and 32X support if that's an option during compilation)

I've seen reports of a newer version, but I can't seem to find it anywhere.

[Vanguard]

http://www.squish.net/generator/

Is another one we can try, but I don't have any experience with it, so I don't know how it will do with compatibility, run speed, etc.

This one was ported to the ipaq, so it sounds like it's quick enough to run on a handheld.

The maintainer also seems pretty eager to help with porting, and it sounds like porting the console version should be pretty easy.

[kic]

Hey iamasmith, feeling ambitious?

On a slightly more serious note, it's too bad xmess is kinda slow. 3.5 fps is unplayable.

Would be nice to see if either of these alternatives run things faster, and still manage to do so with sound. Nice work on finding them Vanguard. Now we just need some compiles and packages.

[scoutme]

3.5 frames?

did you use the correct (framebuffered) resolution?

use ALWAYS xrandr -s 320x240 to switch to 320x240 res, it gives you an enormous boost

xrandr -s 640x480 to get your full vga res back when you finished playing

(tip: launch programs with:  xrandr -s 320x240 && foo && xrandr -s 640x480  where "foo" is the program name with his arguments)

[ScottYelich]

and what happens if foo crashes or returns an error?

maybe we could write an intelligent script that wraps the call, etc.

:-()

Scott

[scoutme]

errors remain in the bash, isn't itgood enough?

[caleb]

errors remain in the bash, isn't itgood enough?

I think the && means to only execute the next command if the previous one returns successfully, so it wouldn't switch the screen back if it returned an error.

[ScottYelich]

bingo.

I haven't tested... but what you want is

xrandr &&  job; xrandr reset

job shouldn't go to the background (ie: fork to daemon and return immediately, etc)

I'll work on a script.

Scott

[scoutme]

any new emu ready for testing?