The History of Sega Genesis Emulators - DGen

Today we will talk about DGen, another great emulator and I consider it the most notable on Linux systems.

 

DGen (1999)

DGen was created in 1998 by Dave, known in the emu scene as the creator of Final Burn, Dega and PicoDrive, among other emulators. Its first version was created in 1998 for MS-DOS, but we do not know if it was released to the public. Its first version is dated May 1999 for Windows. Right from the start, it came with support for stereo sound, emulation of the YM2612 chip with its six sound channels and the 68k processors, by StarScream and Z80 by Multi-Z80. Also in May, there were some versions with important updates, such as 1.03, which released its source code, which also ended up doing in the versions of May, July and August 1999. Version 1.04, bringing support for MS-DOS. Version 1.05, when it began to support DirectInput. And version 1.06, which added another 68k processor, the Musashi, which was slower than the StarScream, but more accurate. Both were available for use. In June 1999, support for the PSG chip and games in Zip format began. For good performance of the emulator, it was recommended to use at least a Pentium III processor. In January 2000, Dave released his last version and abandoned the project to dedicate himself to Final Burn. In this version, he changed the Z80 emulator to Richard Mitton's, instead of Neil Bradley's, correcting the out-of-time music in some games. Dave released 21 versions in total, not including the beta version. In addition to the functions already mentioned, the emulator also supported save state, region change, image speed from 50 to 70hz, pause, reset, joypad, Game Genie, full screen, triple image buffer, layer options, sound up to 16-bit, sound power of up to 44,100hz, latency change option (bringing greater sound precision) and support for sound recording in .GYM format, which is the original Mega Drive sound format, similar to the NES's NSF (this format starts in the Genecyst emulator, and in future emulators it is replaced by the .VGM format). Despite all these options, the emulator had some screen bugs with some games, with problems in parallax, background and sprites. Regarding the collaborations with the project, we had Neill Corlett with his 68k, Neil Bradley with his Z80, Tatsuyuki Satoh for his YM2612, Steve Snake from Kgen98 for the DirectInput code, Alex Townsend for the support of ZIP format ROMs, Karl Stenerud for his Sharp 68K emulator, John Stiles, owner of the MasterGear, iNes and ColEm emulators for Macintosh for his command line renderer and Flavio Morsoletto for great information about the console. In addition, Richard Bannister and Joe Groff also helped in the project by developing SRAM support in the emulator. Joe was also one of the people responsible for coding the sound of DGen.

About its ports, around May 1999, it was ported to MacOS by Richard Bannister. A curiosity about the port for MacOS. It was the first Macintosh emulator to emulate the Mega sound chip, the YM2612, which allowed most games to run with their full sound. The port was released for MacOS 8.1 and later, as well as 9. John Stiles adds Raster Effects and Gil Peterson adds SRAM support to Bannister's version. In December 2000, Bannister discontinues the port, leaving Generator in its place. In February 2000, Caz from the BeEmulated website creates a port for BeOS. In December 2000, tubooboo from the Ngine website even considered a port of the emulator for Dreamcast, but the project did not go ahead. In addition to all these ports, there was one in particular that ended up becoming the continuation of DGen after its termination. I'm talking about DGen/SDL, ported to Linux in June 1999 by Joe Groff, created on top of version 1.12 of the original emulator. The SDL version made it possible to create ports of the emulator for several operating systems, such as UNIX, BeOS and BSD. Phil K. Hornung helped him with the project, adding filters, joypad support, among others. The project also supported Game Genie, compressed ROMs and other additions. In the same month of its creation, in June 1999, it gained a port to BeOS by Andrew Bazar. It was easier for Andrew to create a port of this version than of Dave's Windows version. In June 2000, it gained another port to BeOS by David from the website smaug.co.uk, since there was no more up-to-date version for the system. Andrew updated his version again later. In addition, DGen/SDL had the help of several other influencers in the field, such as Steve Snake, creator of KGen98. In July 2001, Joe and Phil abandoned the project, releasing their last version of the emulator, totaling 11 versions released. Andrew's last version for BeOS also came out that month.

DGen/SDL was ported to the XBox by XPort in July 2002 as DGenX and to the PSP by Syn-Z in June 2005. In 2008, Bertrand Janin, Tamentis, tried to revive the project, putting the latest version of the emulator made by Joe and Phil online on his website at SourceForge, an open source developer website, in an attempt to have some kind of cooperation, but was unsuccessful, releasing only one version of the emulator in August 2008. Bertrand, together with Inkscape, were responsible for creating the first logo for the emulator in May 2008. In 2011, the emulator was once again revived, this time by Zamaz, releasing nine versions of the emulator from September 2011 to July 2014. As of October 2011, Zamaz also began releasing versions for Windows. This version had no interface, requiring the ROM to be dragged on top of the emulator executable to be run (I believe this was the case since Joe's first version in 1999). Compared to the previous Tamentis version released in 2008, Zamaz added video filters, automatic region selection, a 68k debugger (Dave's Cyclone 68k, created after the original DGen was finished), OpenGL support, and several other updates and improvements. The emulator has not had any further versions released since 2014.

The History of Sega Genesis Emulators - Gens

Today we will talk about the story of Gens, one of the greatest voice actors for Mega Drive and also for Sega consoles.

Gens (1999)

Gens was started in July 1999 by Frenchman Stephane Dallongeville, known as Stef, as a prototype. In October 1999, it released its first version for MS-DOS. Despite this, it later became popular as a simple Windows emulator. The only emulators that ran well at the time were Genecyst and KGen98, but they only ran on MS-DOS, and Gens wanted to be the first Windows-mode emulator with good performance, and at the time, the only ones available for this system were DGen and Megasis, which did not perform so well. The Gens project had a lot of support from the Genesis scene, such as Steve Snake from KGen98, Atani from Windows ports of Generator and Genital, Charles MacDonald from SMS Plus from Master System, Red5 from The Genesis Project for testing the emulator and creating its documentation and Christian Schiller from Eidolon's Inn, among others. The first version of the emulator was semi-functional, running only the 68k debugger created by Stef, called C68K, and running games in BIN and SMD formats. In November, it began supporting the reset option. In January 2000, it integrated Neil Bradley's Z80 emulator, added 4 buttons to the second Mega controller, supported frameskip and was able to run 50% of the console's ROMs. In February, it launched the Windows version in partnership with DirectX, known as Wgens, and at the same time launched the latest version for MS-DOS. In this version, it added save state in the format of the famous Genecyst emulator. In March, it began supporting sound, both through the Yamaha chip and the PSG. In mid-March, it began using Neill Corlett's 68k processor and began emulating the DAC. In the penultimate version of March, it was already running 75% of the games, and in the last one of the month it decided to continue using Neil Bradley's Z80 after changing the emulation for Mitton's Z80 several times between February and March. Also in March, it added support for a sound rate of up to 44,100hz. In April, it added support for the joypad. In May, it started supporting specific directories for saving screenshots, save states and others and loading ROMs in .ZIP format. In June, it added the 2xSAI game texture, the same used in the SNES, ZSNES and Snes9x emulators, as well as the pause option. It also added Scanline mode, the famous TV Mode (or TV mode). In June, it added stereo sound. In September, it added Game Genie, VSync and language support, starting with Spanish and French, reaching in June 2001 to support 23 languages ​​in total, including Portuguese, when it stopped supporting them and returned to only English. In October, it supports screenshots. In April 2001, it starts supporting netplay via Kaillera. In August, it adds stretch mode, which stretches the game screen. One of its differences was the addition of support for the Sega CD in September, being the first Mega Drive emulator to have this option. With this update, the bios menu comes,which later also supports the BIOS of other consoles supported by the emulator. In October, it brings the option of choosing up to 64kb of SRAM for Sega CD emulation. In July 2002, it begins to support color adjustment, with options to change contrast and brightness. And finally, in August, it begins to run 32X games. In addition to all the functions mentioned, the emulator also has the ability to save emulator settings, several Scanline derivations, change the game region, among others. The last version of the emulator is from October 2002. Its end is largely due to the competition with Kega, started in January 2002, and reborn as Kega Lazarus in September 2002, and which in the future would become the famous Kega Fusion. At the time of its launch, Kega is praised by Stephane as an emulator with good game compatibility, and better speed than Gens. It also had support for Master System and Game Gear, which Gens did not have. One of the few advantages of Gens was that it began supporting the Sega CD before Kega. Regarding its executable icon, it was added in April 2000 and modified in December 2000, and its icon/logo at the top of the emulator, it was added in June 2000 and modified in July 2002. In May 2003, Gens was ported by Caz to BeOS and in July 2003 to Linux/SDL by Stéphane Akhoun, using the core of Caz's port as a base. Gens ran on a simple Pentium 200MHz with 32Mb of RAM and a 2Mb video card, an affordable configuration in 2002. For the Sega CD, a Pentium II 233MHz was required. For 32X, an 800MHz processor was required, with a recommendation of up to 1Ghz, which at the time was considered a top-of-the-line computer configuration.using the core of Caz's port as a base. Gens ran on a simple Pentium 200MHz with 32Mb of RAM and a 2Mb video card, an affordable configuration in 2002. For the Sega CD, a Pentium II 233MHz was required. For the 32X, an 800MHz processor was required, with a recommendation of up to 1Ghz, which at the time was considered a top-of-the-line computer configuration.using the core of Caz's port as a base. Gens ran on a simple Pentium 200MHz with 32Mb of RAM and a 2Mb video card, an affordable configuration in 2002. For the Sega CD, a Pentium II 233MHz was required. For 32X, an 800MHz processor was required, with a recommendation of up to 1Ghz, which at the time was considered a top-of-the-line computer configuration.

In January 2005, a team from SourceForge released an update to the emulator, with some bug fixes and increased compatibility, reaching 92% of games played. It was known as Gens 2.12b. This version also changed the icon at the top of the emulator, and was widely used as a basis for several clones/hacks of the project. After that, DarkDancer, creator of the Gens fork, Gens32, released a version in May 2006 known as 2.14, with some elements from Gens32. It became known under the codename Souvenir, which means memory in French, and is the best-known version of Gens to this day. Both versions had the participation of Stef. At this stage, Stef also had the help of influencers Rodrigo Cardoso from the Gens fork, Gens Plus! from 2004 and Fox68k's NeoGeo CD emulator for Dreamcast, NEO4ALL from 2005. Due to its huge success, Gens was one of the most cloned emulators of all time. We had clone versions for Windows like sGens in 2003, IDC Log Gens, Gens Re-Recording (also for Linux, with Nitsuja as one of the authors, who also helped in the creation of FCEUX for NES), Gens (authored by Nick o'DIMM – nick ou-dem), DebuGens, Gens KMod and Gens Plus! (the latter becoming a Sega 8 and 16-bit multi-emulator) both in 2004, Gens32 in 2005, Gens Surreal (evolution of Gens32), Gens32 Ray (version for weak PCs of Gens Surreal) and Gens Tracer both in 2006, DualGens in 2008, Gens+ REWiND! and Gens/GS (also for Linux) both in 2009 and RaGens in 2018. Debu, Tracer and IDC are the only clones that have no apparent modifications in the interface and credits. For other devices, it was ported to Xbox by XPort, as GensX and NeoGenesis in 2003 and Gens_xport in 2004 and by Hikaru as Gens X in 2003, to Android as Gnome Gens in 2003 and TigerGens in 2012 and to Dreamcast, as Gens4All in 2008 (by the Spanish Daniel Lancha, Chui, creator of PSX4ALL for PSX and collaborator of the PicoDrive emulator of SMD). The interesting ports that we can highlight are the Gens/SG from 2009 that comes with the proposal of cleaning the source code and combining features of several other Gens ports. There was a second version of the emulator called Gens/GS II that began to be written between 2014 and 2016, but was never finished. The IDC Log Gens from 2004, also known as GensHack, which has a process of understanding assembly instructions of a ROM. Gens Re-Recording from 2004, previously known as Gens Movie Test, which specializes in recording videos and all the tools around it, being an emulator widely used by the TASVideos community, a YouTube of games recorded on emulators. And DualGens from 2008, which was developed to compare differences between ROMs. The remaining ports add image effects, video, information on technical parts of the emulator and the ROMs being run, among others.

The History of Sega Genesis Emulators - Generator, Megasis and VGen

Today we will talk about the Generator, Megasis and VGen emulators.

Generator (1998)

Generator was an emulator that began in November 1997, created by James Ponder for a third-year college project. Its first version was released in March 1998 for UNIX (also running on Linux), and is among the first emulators for the Mega Drive. The project was born from open source and was built to be portable to other systems, such as Solaris, Net, Risc and Open BSD and RiscOS. Its first versions did not support sound, joypad, or save state, and had many bugs. In 1999, it gained ports for the Amiga by AmiDog and MacOS by Richard Bannister. In January 2000, it began to support sound by emulating the Zilog Z80 processor (by Neil Bradley's Multi-Z80) and the YM2612 chip (by Tatsuyuki Satoh). Also on the same date, it brought improvements for the M68k processor and palettes, among others. The first version for Windows was released in February 2000 under the name Generator32, and was created by Atani (it was closed in May). This version ran too fast for slow computers of the time, making it impossible to play anything that ran on it on modern computers. In April 2000, James released a second original port of the emulator, now for MS-DOS. This version had a fixed front-end that remained on the screen along with the game. It could be disabled by a keyboard shortcut. In addition, it also had NTSC/PAL video support, choice of region between US/EU and JP, full screen, reset, save state, screenshot and changes in video quality. Interestingly, James' emulator used its own 68k emulator, unlike other projects in the emulation world. It was even born with this proposal, to create processor emulation techniques (such as the 68k, for example) in an optimized way. In August 2001, Z80 emulation was added using Richard Mitton's Raze Z80. Its latest release was released in May 2003 for Linux and MS-DOS. The emulator also had several other ports, such as for Pocket PCs, iPAQ and Cassiopeia (the precursors of smartphones) in 2001 by Domenico Dato as PocketGenesis, two ports for Dreamcast in 2002 by Atani Software and MetaFox, for Playstation 2 in 2002 by Sjeep (and in 2010 also working on PS3s compatible with PS2, by aries2k), PSP in 2005 by sougen, and for UNIX by Christian Biere. Interestingly, in August 2003, Richard, who had ported the emulator to Mac, began to develop it himself (now for MacOS X). The emulator was last updated by Bannister in November 2022.

Megasis (1998)

Megasis (a mix of Mega and Genesis) was a Mega Drive emulator released on November 11, 1998, by Japanese developers JT and Bori. Interestingly, it was released for Windows, when at the time most emulators were released for MS-DOS. To run the emulator correctly, a Pentium 133MHz was required, and a Pentium 2 was recommended. A graphics card with DirectDraw support and, if possible, hardware acceleration was also required. For sound, DirectSound support was required. The emulator only really started working in the December 1998 update, when it started emulating the Z80 processor, and the PCM and FM sound chips, as well as fixing bugs in the 68k processor. The emulator had perfect emulation of the YM2612 chip (the console's FM chip), as well as stereo sound with up to 44,100hz quality. It also had save states (in .GSV and .KSB formats) and ran BIN and SMD game formats, as well as ZIP and LZH compressed formats. In addition, it also supported pause, reset, frameskip (with great acceleration for low-end computers), full-screen mode, multiple window modes, multiple game regions, sound recording in .WAV format, as well as FM and PCM sound recording, echo effect, changing the 68k processor clock, support for a six-button joypad, VDP emulation (which is the console's GPU), editing shortcut keys for various emulator functions, among others. Megasis had six versions in total, the last one being released in April 2001. From November 1998 onwards, fans were asking for a MacOS version. It seems that there was some indication from the creators for this at the time. In January 2000, it was posted on the project's home page that this version would be developed, but by June of the same year this information had already been taken down.

VGen (1998)

VGen or Virtual Genesis began to be developed in 1997 by Jason Meehan, and was released in March 1998 for MS-DOS. From May 1998, it began to run games via the command line, and in the November 1998 version it began to emulate sound through the Zilog Z80. The emulator also emulates the console's two sound chips, the PSG and the YM2612. The processors it used were Neill Corlett's 68k and Neil Bradley's Z80. VGen later provides a GUI that you control with the mouse, in addition to support for two controllers, supporting various joypad styles, various screen size modes and formats, frame rate, reset, up to 44,100hz sound, changing the game region and access to various technical information about the emulator, among others. Despite this diversity of options and information, the emulator was very deficient in speed, sound and compatibility, never leaving the alpha state. VGen also supported the Sega CD bios without running the games. It is said that the emulator would have been the first to run the Sega CD bios in the first version released in 1998, when in fact the first to run it was the NextLEVEL emulator in October 1997. Some information about Sega CD was brought by Christian Schiller, owner of the website Eidolon's Inn. In addition to the Sega CD, Master System and Game Gear were also planned for the emulator. The emulator ran on a Pentium 1 with 8Mb of RAM. Its last version was released in June 2001. As far as we know, the emulator would have had four versions released in total, the launch, two in 1998, in the months of May and November and the closing.

The History of Sega Genesis Emulators - KGen, KGen98, Kega, Kega Lazarus and Kega Fusion

Today we will talk about all the emulators created by Steve Snake, from the classics KGen and KGen98, quite famous in the 1990s, to Kega, Kega Lazarus and the renowned Kega Fusion, one of the greatest emulators, not only for Mega Drive, but also for Sega consoles in history. Check it out.

KGen / KGen98 / Kega / Kega Lazarus / Kega Fusion (1997)

KGen, short for Kega Genesis, was released in August 1997 by Steve Snake, alongside Kode and Muzak Ltd for MS-DOS. The project was developed over a two-month period, from June to August. Describing the emulator, it works on the command line, without its own interface (gaining a GUI from September 1997), had a VSync function to run games on a Pentium 200 with twice the speed of a regular Mega Drive, and the regular speed of the console on a Pentium 133, as well as screenshots (in .PCX format), keyboard and joypad control configuration, frameskip, region switching, as well as good emulation of the YM2612 sound chip, and from October 1997 of PSG Sound. The emulator also had save states, however, unlike other emulators, here it was called snapshots, and saved them in KSS format. From September 1997 onwards, save states began to be loaded in GSV format, corresponding to the Genecyst emulator. In May 1998, a front-end (interface) for Windows mode of the emulator was released by Airds, called Kgen Loader, and was updated until August 1998. The same person also created versions for GenEm for Mega Drive and ESNES and Snes9x for SNES. Steve had help from some people on the project, such as Colin Rodgers and Stuart McKenna with information about the Z80A and 68K microprocessors, his friend Warren Mills for information about his own Z80 emulator, and the creator of the Magic Engine for PC Engine, David Michel, helping with some questions, among others. The emulator had eight versions between August and October 1997, when it ceased its activities.

In late 1997, Steve began to create an emulator for MMX processors, a new Intel technology released earlier that year. Due to several optimization tricks used in the emulation, the speed gained by MMX processing was barely noticeable, causing Steve to give up on the idea, which was called KGen-X. After that, he began to develop KGen98, completely rewritten and with better performance than KGen-X, releasing it in June 1998 for MS-DOS. In addition to better performance, it also rewrote and improved part of the GUI, added support for Game Genie, improved video quality, with the addition of scanlines, 8/16-bit mode, among others, and brought stereo sound quality to the emulator. Your save state can now be created and accessed within the game, no longer needing to go to the main menu. KGen98 had only four versions, all in June. Also in June, the Kgen Loader front-end also began to support Kgen98. Due to the success of his emulator, Sega called Steve to be the lead programmer for the Sega Smash Pack project for Windows. To do this, they used Steve's Kgen98, which received some changes and got a new look. The collection was released in 1999, with eight games: Golden Axe, Shinobi, Phantasy Star II, OutRun, Columns, Sonic Spinball, Altered Beast and Vectorman. Next came Sega Puzzle Pack, also released in 1999, with the games Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine and Columns III, as well as the puzzle Lose Your Marbles created by Sega in 1997. And finally, Sega Smash Pack II, which contained the games Comix Zone, Flicky, Kid Chameleon, Shining Force, Sonic The Hedgehog 2, Super Hang-On and Vectorman 2, in 2000. At the time, he received a proposal from Sega to create a new emulator especially for the future Sega Smash Pack packages, which would be released for Dreamcast and GBA, but Steve refused and the project was developed by other creators. These releases without Steve were Sega Smash Pack Volume 1 in 2001 for Dreamcast and Sega Smash Pack in 2002 for GBA.

After almost four years away, Steve resurfaced alone with the launch of Kega in January 2002 for Windows, which came with the Sega CD feature, already used in the competitor Gens. Kega did not use any of the KGen98 source code, except for parts of the 68k and Z80 cores. The rest was completely rewritten from scratch, and now with Windows support. The difference was its speed and compatibility with games. It came completely revamped, with a completely different interface and several other options included, such as bios configuration for emulated consoles, various screen sizes, TV mode, selection of quality in hz for sound, giving the choice between 11025, 22050 and 44100Hz, the Perfect Sync option, which synchronized the two 68k SegaCD cores for perfect synchronization (being suggested only for powerful PCs and for specific games), among others. Kega also supported games compressed in .zip format (only for SMD games). The difference with the project was that the code had been created by Steve himself. In March 2002, Kega included the Game Gear and Master System consoles, having later depopularized the Meka emulator, which until then had been used for games on these consoles, mainly the Master System. The project has five versions released, the last one in March 2002.

In September 2002, Steve came up with an alternative version called Kega Lazarus. It was the beginning of the emulator, and yet another beginning of a Mega Drive emulator in Steve's history. Steve had suffered a hardware failure and lost all of Kega's source code, with the exception of the code for version 0.02 from January 2002, the third version of the emulator. Many of the changes from the emulator were maintained, and new ones appeared, such as a completely new Z80 core, faster Master and Game Gear emulation, and improvements in Mega and Sega CD emulation. It was basically identical to Kega in terms of interface and options. The second version of Kega Lazarus came out only seven months after the first, in April 2003. This version was special for Master and Game Gear, with all kinds of improvements for the consoles, from compatibility, graphics, to performance. In the May 2003 version, it also adds support for Sega's SG-1000 and SC-3000 consoles. In the latest version from June 2003, it makes improvements to Sega CD support, adding Bin/Cue support, improving ISO support, among others. Steve said that this version surpasses in every aspect the last version released by the old project, Kega. The emulator had six versions, from the second to the fourth version, that is, three of them, dedicated almost exclusively to optimizing the Master and Game Gear consoles. It is mentioned on some websites that the project would have added support for the 32X, but neither in the "readme" files nor in the emulators themselves was this support mentioned or implemented.

After a year without updating Kega Lazarus, Steve released his latest emulator, the acclaimed Kega Fusion, in July 2004. The project is the merging of part of the Kega and Kega Lazarus emulators with Kega Fusion. Much of the source code was rewritten from scratch, remaining as close as possible to Kega's previous projects, while maintaining the user interface and functions of the emulator. It was only in this new phase that Steve was able to support 32X in one of his emulators, releasing it in the first version of Fusion. As he described, it was the most accurate emulator of all at the time for emulating the add-on. In addition to all the console support, chip and processor emulation, tools and performance also present in Kega Lazarus, it added many other functions to the emulator. Also in 2004, it supported rendering plug-ins such as 2xSai, hq2x, and two created by Snake, such as Double and DoubleRaw. At this time, the Gens emulator, which had been the priority for 16-bit console games, began to be displaced. Over time, all other Sega console emulators below the Sega Saturn began to lose popularity due to Steve's emulator. In 2005, the emulator changed its numbering from 0.1 to 3.0. The reason was that this numbering was linked to emulators that were still in a very early stage, which caused people to lack interest in downloading it. Steve then had the idea of ​​changing this, and since Fusion was the third emulator in its Kega series, he put it as 3.0. In this version, from February 2005, support for MP3 format was added to Sega CD game audio, in addition to the Pro Action Replay cheat. In February 2006, support for Netplay was added, unlike many emulators that used to use the Kaillera server. In this version, users could choose whichever server they wanted to host their games. There were no updates in 2007. In 2008, there were also important updates, such as in December 2008 with support for SVP (Sega Virtua Processor), used to run the game Virtua Racing, which originally came in a special cartridge to generate 3D graphics. This support was initially brought to the PicoDrive emulator, Fusion's latest competitor. Also in the same month, Fusion began running on MacOS X. In September 2009, Linux was able to run the emulator. That month, Mac also gained another version. The emulator also supported Direct3D thanks to its joint work with DirectX. Its latest version, which is still used today, was released in March 2010. The emulator has had sixteen versions in total.

The History of Sega Genesis Emulators - Megadrive Emulator, GenEm and Genecyst

Today we will talk about the first Mega Drive emulators: Megadrive Emulator, GenEm and Genecyst; the latter being the first popular emulator for the console.

Megadrive Emulator (1994)

Megadrive Emulator or simply Mega Drive, was the first Mega Drive/Genesis emulator developed. It was released in 1994 for MS-DOS. Its creators were Steve Riddle, The Careless Gamer (]TcG[), as the main programmer, and Baalzamon, Berzerker and Stegg, as secondary programmers. The emulator was in its initial state, and only ran Sonic, and even then with deficiencies, such as slowness, problems with sprites and no sound functionality. The project ended when the source code was lost in a hard drive failure. The last version released was dated July 1994 as 0.5 Version 2. There is information that the emulator would have had a last version in July 1996, but there is no confirmation about this. Megadrive Emulator is considered one of the first console emulators, being among the first five known.

GenEm (1996)

GenEm was developed by German Markus Gietzen in 1996. It was the second Mega Drive emulator to be released, around mid-1996 for MS-DOS, but it also had several problems. It ran several games, but only Sound Blaster could play most of the sounds. The Z80, which was a microprocessor used in the SMD as a sound coprocessor, was only available with commands from the DOS prompt. Games that did not have sound emulation on the Z80 worked with very slow sound. In fact, this was one of the biggest complaints about emulators at the time: the sound was only stable on expensive sound cards. Despite this, even with everything favorable for playing sound, some games simply had no sound. Also in 1996, the GenNew executable began to be released along with the emulator, for slower computers, running at twice the speed of the regular GenEm. In September 1996, Airds released a front-end for GenEm, called GenEm Loader, for Windows, which had the help of Markus in some information displayed in it about Mega Drive. In October 1996, a version for Windows 95 and NT, called GenEm95, was released. This version came without sound, but with the option to enable sound emulation through the Z80. The last version of the emulator was released in May 1997, for DOS and Windows. In the same month, the last version of GenEm Loader was also released. In July 1997, GenEm was ported to PowerPC (running on MacOS) by Brian Verre, and in 1999 to UNIX/Linux by Magi under the name XGenEM. This was the first port of an MD emulator to UNIX, and one of the first to Linux, alongside Generator in November 1998 and DGen in June 1999. Five versions of the emulator were released in total. Markus also became known in 1996 and 1997 for creating the Atari 5200 emulator, XL-It!

Genecyst (1997)

Genecyst was created by Icer Addis of Bloodlust Software in 1997, and released in June of the same year for MS-DOS. It followed the same interface and menus as the NES emulator, NESticle, from the same company. The emulator was the first to actually run a large list of NES games, and without the problems found in previous projects. It implemented, among others, save state, sound recording (with the option of recording general sound and FM sound) and conversions of SMD games to BIN. In addition, it also supported pause, reset, snapshot, various video resolution sizes, frameskip, Vsync, two controls (with support for both keyboard and joypad), support for various technical information, such as palette colors and the ability to change layers (between background, sprites and parallax), choice of game region (USA, JP and EU), in addition to emulating all sound chips, such as FM, PSG and DAC, and giving the ability to play the sound at up to 44,100 Hz. The emulator was also a pioneer in recording audio in the .GYM format, which is the original SMD audio. GYM is the abbreviation for Genesis Yamaha, because it records the sound directly from the 2612 chip, providing a clean sound with digital quality. Other SMD emulators later supported this function. In addition to the DOS versions having more memory and processing at their disposal because they did not share them with the operating system, the emulator also used little of each of these. It only required a Pentium 1 with 8 MB of RAM to run the games. The emulator also had good support from the emulation scene, such as Ishmair with information and help about the YM2612 sound chip, Neill Corlett with his 68k emulator, Merlyn LeRoy with his Game Genie, as well as help from Marat Fayzullin from the MasterGear Master System project and the legendary emulator website, Zophar. For some time, Genecyst was considered the best Mega Drive emulator out there. The emulator had seven updates from June to September 1997, when it went on hiatus. It returned with the latest version in August 1998, bringing loading of games compressed in ZIP format, sound recording in WAV format and support for stereo sound. Despite being closed in 1998, Genecyst was widely used until the early 2000s.

The History of the Sega Genesis - Its Games, Competition with the SNES and Add-ons

A little bit of the history of the Mega Drive, with its arcade-inspired hardware, its launch, its add-ons, its competition with the SNES and its games.

Mega Drive

The Mega Drive, or Sega Genesis in the US, was released in 1988 in Japan, and was a competitor to the Nintendo and the newly created PC Engine. Its hardware was based on the Sega System 16 arcade system created a year earlier, which used the Zilog Z80 and M68k processors. In the MD, the Zilog Z80 was used as the sound coprocessor and the 68k as the main CPU. Its 68k processor was 16-bit and had 7.6 MHz and its Zilog Z80 coprocessor had 3.5 MHz. It also used the PSG SN76489 sound chip, based on the SG-1000 and Master System versions with 4 channels of PCM sound and a Yamaha 2612 chip with 6 channels of FM sound. Its GPU (video processor) was a VDP called Sega 315-5313 or Yamaha 7101 at 13.4 MHz, based on the Sega VDP of the SMS, which in turn was based on the TMS9918 of the MSX and SG-1000 (that is, the graphics part of Sega consoles was always based on that of their predecessor consoles). It also provided 512 colors with 64 simultaneous. And finally, it had 136kb of total RAM, 64 for the main system, 64 for video and 8 for audio.

The console had some peripherals, such as the Sega CD, released in 1991, which added games with modern digital sound and dimension and rotation, similar to the Mode 7 games for SNES, and the 32X, released in 1994, with games with more colors and polygons. Both used the MD hardware to enhance themselves. The MD also took advantage of them, such as acquiring better sound with the Sega CD and better colors with the 32X. The console also provided access to the network through the Mega Modem, which was connected to the back of the console and which allowed the download of some titles to the console through the Network System service. The accessory was released in 1990 in Japan, and made 24 titles available for download, most of which were games that were never released on cartridges. These were games of a maximum of 128kb, due to the network limits of the time. A game took on average eight minutes to download. The accessory and service were also launched in Brazil in 1995, both under the name Sega Mega Net. Unlike the original version that required a modem connected to the back of the console, this version worked with a cartridge that connected to the console's main input, with a cable to connect to the telephone line.

The success of the console, which was known as an arcade at home, given the various ports it received from these hardware, was soon consolidated. Regarding its cartridges, there was a difference between the Japanese and American ones, not in the board that was identical, but rather in the plastic casing, but they fit easily into any Mega Drive. However, there was a region lock in the console's hardware, unlike Nintendo consoles that had a physical lock, preventing games from other regions from working on their consoles made in other countries. In the US, the console was released in 1989, as Sega Genesis, because the name Mega Drive was already registered in the country. In Brazil, it was released in 1990, by TecToy, which already brought the Master System console to the country. The model and region were based on the American console. The second model of the console was released in Brazil in 1992, being the same device, but now, with Sonic The Hedgehog in memory, and no longer Altered Beast as in the first version. The third version of the console (inspired by the second American version) was compact and was the best-selling in the country from 1993 to 2001. The console with the Japanese system was never released in the country, but as most Japanese games were recreated in the West, few games remained unknown to Brazilians.

With the arrival of the SNES in 1990 and its success from 1991 onwards, competition with the MD became frenetic. Franchises such as Mortal Kombat, Fatal Fury and Street Fighter became one of the biggest battles between consoles, with ports that were sometimes better for one console, sometimes better for another. Other games competed with the SNES, such as DC Comics' Batman Returns, Marvel's Wolverine Adamantium Rage and Captain America, Disney's Aladdin and The Lion King, Warner's Animaniacs and Taz Mania, the Aero Acrobat, Aerobiz, Bubsy, Earthworm Jim, Double Dragon, Power Rangers, Robocop 3 and Terminator franchises, as well as Battletoads, Pitfall, Pit-Fighter, Rock'n Roll Racing, and countless other games.

As for its games, franchises such as Sonic The Hedgehog, Simpsons, Strider, Shining Force, Phantasy Star, Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Jurassic Park and Shinobi were very successful on the console. Other specific niches were also part of the console, such as racing games, such as the Road Rash, Super Monaco GP and Top Gear 2 franchises; sports games, such as the World Cup, FIFA Soccer and NBA Jam franchises; fighting games, such as Samurai Shodown, Art of Fighting and Primal Rage; RPG games, such as Wonder Boy in Monster World, Beyond Oasis and Dungeons & Dragons; simulation games, such as Urban Strike, After Burner II and Populous; Run and Gun games, such as Contra: Hard Corps, Alien Soldier and Zombies Ate My Neighbors; platform games, such as Comix Zone, Ghouls 'n Ghosts and Alien 3; and beat'em up games, such as Alien Storm, Tomjam & Earl and Altered Beast. Puzzle games, such as Puyo Puyo, Columns and Lemmings. Shmup games, such as the Thunder Force franchise, Darius II and Sub-Terrania. Anime games, such as Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z and Yu Yu Hakusho. Disney games, such as several Mickey games (such as Fantasia and Castle of Illusion), Mogli and QuackShot. Warner Bros. games, such as Bugs Bunny and some Tiny Toons and Taz Mania games. DC Comix games, such as the Superman and Batman franchises (such as Batman and Robin and Batman Forever) and the Justice League Task Force game. And finally, Marvel games, such as the Spider-Man franchise (such as Maximum Carnage and Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin) and X-Men franchise (such as Children of the Atom), as well as The Punisher. The Mega Drive had almost 900 games released in its nine years of life. The console was discontinued in 1997 with 30.75 million units sold.

Simulator: Aerobiz, Jungle/Urban/Desert Strike, Populous, After Burner II, King Salmon

RPG: Shining Force, Phantasy Star, Gauntlet IV, Light Crusader, Landstalker, Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun, Wonder Boy in Monster World, Beyond Oasis

Puzzle: Columns, Puyo Puyo, Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine, Lemmings, Zoom, Blockout, Pac-Attack, Puzzle & Action

Run And Gun: Contra: Hard Corps, Alien Soldier, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Ranger-X, Gunstar Heroes, Mega Turrican

Platform: Alien 3, Strider, Comix Zone, Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Shinobi, Judge Dredd, Sonic The Hedgehog, Simpsons, Jurassic Park, Pitfall, Battletoads, Robocop 3, Earthworm Jim, Terminator, Aero Acrobat, Bubsy

Beat'Em Up: Double Dragon, Tomjam & Earl, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, Altered Beast, Power Rangers

Racing: Out-Run, Road Rash and Super Monaco GP, Virtua Racing, Top Gear 2, Rock'n Roll Racing

Sports: World Cup, FIFA Soccer, NBA Jam, NHL (Hockey), WWF (Wrestling), NFL (American Football)

Fighting: Mortal Kombat, Fatal Fury, Street Fighter, Samurai Shodown, Eternal Champions, Art of Fighting, Primal Rage and Virtua Fighter II, Pit-Fighter

Shmup: Thunder Force, Darius II, Musha, Truxton, Sub-Terrania, 

Animes: Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, Maruko Chan, Shin Chan, Hokuto no Ken, Patlabor, Slam Dunk, Yu Yu Hakusho

Disney: Aladdin, Lion King and Mickey Mania, Mickey (as Fantasia and Castle of Illusion), Toy Story, Mogli, Goofy, Pocahontas, QuackShot, The Little Mermaid

Warner Bros: Bugs Bunny, Animaniacs, Taz Mania, Tiny Toon, Taz Mania

DC Comix: Superman, Batman (as Batman and Robin, Batman Forever and Batman Returns), Justice League Task Force

Marvel: Spider-Man (as Maximum Carnage and Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin), X-Men (as Children of the Atom), The Punisher, Wolverine Adamantium Rage, Captain America and The Avengers, The incredible Hulk

The History of NES Emulators - Squeem, Nintendulator and Nestopia

Today we will talk about the Squeem, Nintendulator and Nestopia emulators, as well as other less famous emulators for NES.

Squeem (2000)

Squeem was released in February 2000 for MS-DOS by Dead Body, and already came with its own interface (GUI) created by the author. Squeem was one of the pioneers in adding sound, video and control plug-ins to NES emulators. According to its creator, Dead Body, who was only 15 at the time, did not know that the Pretendo emulator had done the same thing a year earlier. The creators of Pretendo later ended up helping him with the project. Dead created everything from scratch, taking inspiration from the plug-ins of the first PS1 emulator, PSEmu Pro. At first, it ran without sound, was accelerated, had bugs and had few compatible games. Also in February, its second version was released, this time for Windows. Dead alternated between releases, sometimes with a version for Windows, sometimes with a version for DOS. In March, it added support for plug-ins, along with its own video (Glide) and joystick plug-ins, as well as full-screen mode. In April, it began supporting save states, Famicom DiskSystem, sound plug-ins, frameskip, and rewrote its mapper system and created its own 6502 emulator, called Dead6502. From the beginning, it used Neil Bradley's m6502 emulator, which it continued using for a while until it implemented its own. In May, it added scanlines mode and Game Genie. In December, it completely rewrote the emulator. Its last version was released in April 2001. It came with support for netplay and several video and sound modes, mostly DirectX plugins (remember that the plug-ins were downloaded separately). Another of its differences was the choice of CPU cores. It made available three of its Dead6502 cores, in addition to Matt Conte's Nes6502 and Shu Kondo's s6502 cores. It also allowed you to choose the APUs, which were audio processors, with those from Matt Conte and Xodnizel and palettes from Chris Covell, Matt Conte, Kevtris and Roni available. For a better experience, you had to test the plug-ins, processors and palettes with each other and see which one was the best compatible. Sometimes certain combinations would change the game or speed it up, for example. The project also supported screenshots in .BMP format and pause (in the first versions), reset (in the latest versions) and screenshots in .PCX format (in the latest version), among others. Squeem was a very promising emulator, with a project for a Linux version started after its last release, but never released. Dead Body created another NES emulator in 2002 called Marijuanes, which only had one version released.

Nintendulator (2002)

Nintendulator was a project started by Quietust using a recently bankrupt emulator called NinthStar NES by Akilla as a base, with only one version released in January 2001. NinthStar initially wanted to become a multi-console system, but the idea ended up being abandoned along with the project. Quietust reworked several things in the emulator. It also used mapper DLLs from the NESten emulator until April 2003. Among its many options, it ran well-known NES game formats of the time, such as NSF, UNIF, iNES and FDS, the latter belonging to Disk System games. It also supported Game Genie, four controllers, save state and video recording. Throughout its existence, it has had very few releases, being released in June 2002 for Windows, and having another nine updates in March 2005, January 2006, June 2009, January 2010, August 2014, January 2019, March and July 2022 and July 2024. Nowadays, it is considered, alongside Nestopia and FCEUX, one of the three most popular NES emulators.

Nestopia (2003)

Nestopia was developed in mid-2002 by Martin Freij in C++. The first version was released in June 2003 for Windows, and its distinguishing feature was its CPU requirement, with a minimum processor requirement of 800 MHz, which was not a small feat at the time. This was due to its high emulation accuracy. It was also known as one of the emulators with the greatest game compatibility. All of this made it considered the best emulator of all time, and it is still used today, even after its discontinuation. The emulator supported the main tools of the NES and its competing emulators, such as CPU/PPU synchronization, netplay kaillera, image filters, support for VS System and Disk System, games in UNIF, FDS, NSF, INES and other formats, Game Genie, save state, video and sound recording in AVI and WAV, screenshot, as well as support for various controls and keyboards. It also allowed sound customization, with changes in multiple channels, noise, bit, hertz, between mono and stereo, and allowed choice of sound driver to use. And video customization, with changes in resolution, filters, bits, palettes, brightness, saturation, color, hue, and also choice of video drivers. Other features included having an NSF file player, which were the original NES sound files, and a ROM editor, with modifications between NTSC, PAL, RAM and ROM memory, for console or arcade, horizontal or vertical screen, among others. Like many other projects, it had help from many influencers in the field, such as Marat Fayzullin from iNES with documents, Matthew Conte with audio processing information, CaH4e3 from the FCEU-MM project with mapping information, Xodnizel from FCE Ultra also with mappings, Yoshi with the nestech.txt documentation, among many others. The MacOS X version was released in December 2003 by Richard Bannister, a leading name in ports and emulators for Macintosh, who continued to update it even after the original project ended. The last update to the Mac version was released in May 2021. There was also another version for MacOS X around July 2007 by Deamoncollector. The Linux version was released in May 2007 by Richter Belmont, who had left the Emuhype project, which developed emulators for arcades. The last version of Nestopia was released in June 2008. The emulator had 32 updates in total. There was an attempt to port it to the Nintendo 3DS called Nestopia3DS in 2006, but this never came to fruition. Nestopia was ported to the Xbox in 2010 by Nes6502 under the name NestopiaX. It was also ported to the PS3 under the name NestopiaPlus, also running on Linux and Windows, and to iOS as just Nestopia, both in 2013. Also in 2013, it was added to the OpenEmu multi-system emulator for MacOS X. Nestopia has always been open source, which has led to the creation of several ports and forks of it. In March 2010, a hack of the emulator was created by Keith Kelly, known as Nestopia 1.41.1 Unofficial.Its purpose was to fix a joypad lag in the original emulator, which consisted of a delay when the VSync option was activated. In May 2011, it was updated by Geestarraw, adding full-screen support for secondary monitors on PCs with more than 1 monitor. The same author created another update in September 2012. In January 2013, notBald modified the Geestarraw version, adding several image filters. He created versions 1.41.2 and 1.41.3 in the same month. A little earlier, in late 2012, Dan Brook created a fork of Nestopia, called Nestopia Undead Edition (something like a living-dead edition), known as Nestopia UE. This project combines updates from the versions by Geestarraw, Keith, notBald (more below), and Bannister's version 1.40 AH for MacOS X. The emulator was released for Windows and Linux (it also runs on Open/Free/NetBSD, as well as Ubuntu) in 2012, and in January 2016 it was ported to MacOS X, among other systems. The project added, among others, a new interface (GUI), fullscreen mode with native resolution, OpenGL rendering and save state in SRAM (i.e. for read-only devices). Its main updates were optimized versions for several different systems. Nestopia UE was ported around February/March 2013 to libretro/RetroArch by themaister (creator of RetroArch) and twinaphex. In 2020, Rupert Carmichael joined Nestopia UE, helping Brook on the project. The last update of Nestopia UE was made in March 2024.Nestopia EU will be last updated in March 2024.Nestopia EU will be last updated in March 2024.

The History of NES Emulators - Darcnes, Pretendo, JNes and Nester

Today we will talk about the emulators Darcnes, Pretendo, JNes and Nester, the latter being one of the great NES emulators. Check it out.

Darcnes (1998)

Darcnes was created in 1998 by Alastair Bridgewater, aka Nyef. Its first version is dated December 1998 for Linux, based on the NES documentation, Nes.Doc, and the 6502 emulator, both by Marat Fayzullin, and the NES documentation called Nestech.txt by Jeremy Chadwick, aka Yoshi. Right at its launch, Alastair made it clear that the emulator would be multisystem, considering later launching support for the PC-Engine and Master System consoles. From 1999 onwards, the emulator began to support the Game Gear, PC Engine/TurboGrafix 16, Master System, ColecoVision, SG-1000, Apple II PC, PC Engine CD (only on UNIX), Famicom Disk System, SC 3000 and MSX PC systems, added respectively in January, March, May, June and November 1999, January, February and June 2000, and March 2001 (the last two systems mentioned, SC and MSX, were released in this same version in March 2001). Its DOS version (the best known) ran on command line, with only additional functions of volume control and frameskip. It supported both keyboard and joystick control. The games, specifically NES, SMS and GG, performed well, without bugs and with great sound. PC Engine ran well, but without sound and ColecoVision and FDS did not work. The Windows version was very simple, with a menu just for loading ROMs and no other additional functions. It was controlled only by keyboard. The games performed well on NES, SMS, GG and SG-1000, but the buttons didn't work on GG and SG-1000. On the PC Engine, not only did the buttons not work, but the emulation was also very fast. And ColecoVision and FDS didn't work either (at least in the tests I performed). It was also another prototype project with a great future ahead. In addition to the UNIX version, Darcnes was also ported to several other operating systems, such as MS-DOS in January 1999, Amiga in March 1999, BeOS in June 1999, Linux in August 1999, Windows in January 2000 and NetBSD in April 2001. Some of those responsible for the ports are famous people in the field, such as AmiDog, who ported emulators such as Handy, Frodo, MAME, MESS and FPSE to the Amiga, Abazan who ported DOS and ZX Spectrum games and the DGen emulator to the BeOS, the Brazilian Rafael Rigues, Sephiroth, who worked in companies that spoke of Linux, such as Conectiva and Revista do Linux, with the ports of the emulator to DOS and Linux, and the creators of the Japanese system NetBSD, as well as Vector with the Windows version. Alastair also made two official ports, for Windows in January 2000 and for BeOS in May 2000. The latest version of the emulator was released on April 1, 2001, the same day as the NetBSD port mentioned earlier.

- MS-DOS by Sephiroth in January 1999 (Also a version for Linux in August 1999, and for Power PC later. Sephiroth is a Brazilian named Rafael Rigues, who worked at Conectiva, a Linux sales and technical support company, and was a columnist and editor for Revista do Linux in 2000)

- BeOS by Abazan in June 1999 (Also responsible for porting to BeOS arcade games such as Arkanoid, Breakout, and Columns, DOS games such as Nibbles, Sokoban for the ZX Spectrum PC, and the DGen emulator for the Mega Drive)

- Windows by Vector in January 2000 (along with Alastair's official version)

- Amiga by AmiDog (also converter to Amiga for emulators like Handy for Atari Lynx, Frodo for Commodore 64, MAME and MESS for Arcade, FPSE for PS1, and others) in March 1999

- NetBSD by The Japan NetBSD Users' Group (creators of the operating system itself) in April 2001

I intend (1999)

Pretendo was an emulator written by Evan Teran and Eli Dayan, known as Proxy and Delta, in April 1999, with versions released for Windows from December 1999 onwards. A Linux version was due to be released, but I don't know if this ever happened. Its distinguishing feature was the addition of video, sound, control and CPU plug-ins, being the pioneer in using this function on the NES. Regarding its CPU plugins, it used versions inspired by the emulators of Neil Bradley, used in NESticle, Shu Kondo, used in fwNES and TNSe, used in the NESten emulator. It also used color palettes from several authors, such as Matthew Conte, from Nofrendo, Alex Krasivsky, from LandyNes, as well as palettes from LoopyNES, DarcNES, Pasofami and even the multi-emulator MESS. Without a doubt, it was a very complete emulator. Its sound plugin was reasonable, but with some flaws. Its emulation and speed were good and it had good graphics. Other than that, it had other features, such as joypad support, save state, pause, reset, snapshot, game genie and IPS patcher. It also read games in .zip format. It was one of the few NES emulators that allowed free window adjustment, despite already coming with three predetermined zoom sizes. It had four public versions, the last one being released in June 2000. Also in June, Delta created a port for BeOS.

JNes (1999)

JNes was programmed by American Steven Rellinger, known as Jabo, in March 1999, and is considered one of the best NES emulators for Windows. It was first released in October 1999. At its launch, it recommended the use of a Pentium 133 MHz, DirectX 5 and a 2MB video card. This was an average computer for the time. Initially, it came with two window sizes, fullscreen with four different sizes, stretch mode (to stretch the image horizontally), audio, support for two joypads, game genie, save state, pause, reset, snapshot and audio recording in WAV. It also used DirectX for video, audio and control input. The emulator initially supported mainly American and European games, and gradually supported Japanese games. In the following years, it added support for kaillera in April 2001, external palettes in June 2001, super 2xsai and scanlines in July 2002 and support for other languages ​​from December 2005, giving support to the Portuguese language in February 2008. By the end of the project, it had supported 20 different languages. In December 2007, it began supporting video recording in JMV format. Among the people who were part of its team is Gent, being a tester and cheat creator, as well as Smiff, RadeonUser and TrotterWatch. Jabo was also influenced by some people in the scene, such as Nyef from Darcnes, Akilla from Nintendulator, Yoshi from the Nestech.txt documentation, among many others. Regarding its interface changes, it changed its logo in the first beta release of the emulator in January 2001. In February 2005, the front-end had some more changes, among them the display of the ROMs in the center of the interface. There were some other changes over time, but only aesthetic, changing the logo in December 2007. In December 2016, it changed the icon again and the appearance of folders in the central part of the interface, for a better choice of ROMs. From January 2013, it began developing its Android version, which led to the release of updates to the Windows emulator from January 2017. Between 1999 and 2017, it had only 7 non-continuous years of hiatuses, 2003, 05, 09, 11, 12, 14 and 15. Right from the start, it was on Google Play, being removed from the platform in December 2015 and returning to it in February 2017. It also had hiatuses in the release of the Android versions in the years 2014, 2016 and 2018. Its last version for Android came out in December 2021. JNes is considered one of the NES emulators that has been updated the longest, as well as being updated the longest by the same person.

Nester (2000)

Nester was created by Darren Ranalli in early 1999 and released on August 7, 2000 for Windows. Influencers Sardu from NESticle, Marat Fayzullin from iNes, Yoshi from nestech.txt and Nyef from Darcnes helped the project in some way. Nester uses the CPU (nes6502) and audio emulators from Matt Conte, creator of the NES emulator Nofrendo. Speaking of the sound part, Nester also supports DirectInput, which brings great sound quality. It also supports the execution of songs in the .NSF format, which is the standard music format of the console itself, ported from the Nosefart plug-in for Winamp, also created by Matt Conte. The support for save state in the .SNSS format is compatible with other emulators, such as Nofrendo, LoopyNES and others. Starting in November 2000, in the third update of the emulator, Darren began to release its source code. The emulator had three releases in total, the last one in January 2001 with the Public Beta 4 version. In February 2002, a small update was made to this last version, but only superficial changes, without actually changing the executable. After that, several fork projects and ports of the emulator began to appear. The first was the Unofficial Nester (also known as UONester), by the Japanese Toshiya Takeda, which began to be developed in September 2000. The emulator had some improvements in speed and in all the main functions of the console, in addition to support for Game Genie, Disk System, games from the PlayChoice-10 and Unisystem arcades based on the NES hardware, support for several original controls and keyboards of the console, as well as recording and playback of videos and netplay via TCP/IP. Its latest version was released in July 2001, following the November 2000 release of the original Nester, Public Beta 3. The second project is the well-known NesterJ created by Japanese developers Screw and Mikami Kana, also starting around September 2000, and with its first public versions in November 2000 in English, and in January 2001 in Japanese. The project is nothing more than the fusion of the original Nester with Unofficial. The latest version of the emulator is dated July 2003. NesterJ was also ported to the PSP by Chinese developer Tensai Wang in December 2009, and known as NesterP. The third fork was NNNesterJ in early 2001 by Japanese developer R1, a modified version of NesterJ. It adds a different interface, more practical joypad configuration, video recording in AVI format, and netplay through Kaillera. Its last version was 0.23 in December 2002. The emulator also had Japanese and English versions. All three forks were for Windows. Nester was also ported to the Dreamcast as NesterDC by Ken Friece in 2001, and had further ports in 2001 by Fumihiko Takayama, 2003 by Warmtoe, 2005 by Scherzo, and 2008 by Christuserloeser. In 2002, it was ported to the Xbox as Nester X by Hikaru, who is responsible for several emulator ports for the Microsoft console.It was also ported to Gamepark 32 in 2003 and 2004 and Nintendo DS in 2005. In October 2007, the original author, Darren, registered his emulator on SourceForge, and unexpectedly updated it again in February 2009, using the Beta 4 version from February 2002 as a base. This same version received other updates, such as in February 2011, April 2013, October 2015 and August 2018. In this new phase of 2007, he had Chris Brunner at his side as project administrator.

NesterDC was a port of the emulator for the Dreamcast console, made by Ken Friece. In late 2001, Fumihiko Takayama (another Japanese guy taking care of a version of Nester lol) took over the project, and added savestate for the Dreamcast memory (for the VMU, Ken had already added it), GameGenie, bilinear filtering, NNNesterj cheatcode, and better compatibility, making the emulator the best for the NES for the Sega console. In December, he released the latest version of the emulator, 7.1. Ken released three versions of the emulator and Fumihiko five. After that, NesterDC got a port in early 2003 by Warmtoe, called Nester DC 7.1+. In late 2005, Scherzo also created a port of Nester DC, called NesterDC Special Edition (or NesterDC SE). And finally NesterDC SE is updated by Christuserloeser in December 2008 to version 1.1, correcting an error in the rom directory listing.

The History of NES Emulators - FwNES, FCE, RockNES and FCEUltra

Today we will talk about the emulators FwNES, FCE, RockNES (forked from xNes) and FCEUltra (originated from FCE), the latter being the most famous and forked NES emulator. Check it out.

fwNES (1998)

FwNes was released on February 24, 1998 by Chinese developer FanWen Yang and Japanese developer Shu Kondo for MS-DOS and Linux. Fan worked on the main core and Shu on the sound core. In addition to being one of the oldest NES emulators, it is also the pioneer in emulating the Nintendo Disk System, the famous Famicom floppy disks. The emulator runs the .FDS formats for Disk System games and .NES and .NEZ (with z) for NES games. In addition, it is a great emulator for sound, emulating the five sound channels of the NES, and the extra sound channels of the Disk System, with compatibility with several cards besides the Sound Blaster, a drama from the 1990s, which suffered with sound compatibility mainly in emulation. Despite this, some games had problems with sound emulation.

The emulator worked well on a 586 with 16Mb of RAM. However, on PCs later than those recommended for running it, it worked extremely fast, making it impossible to play. This happened so that the emulator could adapt to the low performance of older PCs. fwNES also had a great front-end, with ROM selection by folder, language selection, color, theme, save state, reset, screen, sound and joystick adjustment, palette adjustments, speed, as well as choice between Shu Kondo's and Marat Fayzullin's 6502 cores, among others. fwNes also used Neil Bradley's 6502 emulators and the NESticle NES emulator throughout the project. Also at the time, it was considered one of the best NES emulators for Linux. The emulator's latest version was released in November 1998.

In 1998, Shu also created his own NES emulator called BioNES for Windows, which only had two versions released, ending in the same year. The project was quite promising. It's a shame it didn't go ahead.

FCE (1998) FCE or Family Computer Emulator, was created in 1998 by the Japanese Bero, with its second version released in April 1998 for PC-98. The emulator uses Marat Fayzullin's 6502 processor emulation, Yoshi's NES documentation, and Sound Blaster support for DOS achieved in Reki Murakami's MSX2 PC emulator fMSX98-AT, among others. It was an extremely beginner project, with a very fast emulation speed, very poor sound, low compatibility and many bugs. The project was discontinued in 1998.

Despite its shortcomings, it inspired several other NES emulation projects, such as FCE Ultra (with its various derivatives) by TrelaneQ and NextFCE (and its PlasticNES variation) by grugru, both around January 1999 for MS-DOS. The emulator also gained a port for UNIX, as xfce by eggman around May 1999. Bero also developed other emulation projects, such as FPCE for PC-Engine and FPSE for Playstation 1.

RockNES (1998)

RockNES is a fork of the xNES emulator created by Brazilian Fabiano Lopes, known by the pseudonyms Zepper and Fx3 in 1998. RockNES was released in June 1998 for MS-DOS. Initially it was titled xNES (as a continuation of the project that ended in January 1998), changing its name in August 1998.

Initially, it used the xNES source code, but some time later it was completely rewritten. During 1998, it added save state, screenshot, and joypad, until December, when it supported the console's 4 sound channels. RockNES was one of the most functional emulators of its time. In January 2000, it released its first front-end, still in DOS mode. This front-end changed its color and size over time.

In March 2000, Alexandre da Veiga created the Windows version of the emulator, called RockNES X, a name given due to the use of DirectX required for its execution. The Windows version was released until April 2002. RockNES was only released for Windows again in October 2004, when Zepper ended the releases for DOS, which had occurred until August 2004. This version was known as RockNES/Win32, and used the same front-end as the DOS version. This front-end also changed its color, size and word spacing over time. Around the year 2000, the released versions of the emulator required a Pentium II 300Mhz processor with 128MB of RAM, and sound and video quality cards, a medium-high configuration for the time.

Regarding ports to other systems, the famous Richard Bannister ported the emulator to MacOS around October 2000, discontinuing it in October 2005, keeping only the Nestopia port that he had been working on for some time. Before RockNES, Bannister had also ported its predecessor, the xNES. Chris Vallinga ported the emulator to Linux in March 2001, discontinuing it in July of the same year. There was only one more Linux port of the emulator in July 2004, by Matheus Villela. RockNES is one of the oldest and longest-running NES and video game emulators.

Its updates occurred between 1998 and 2021, being continuous from 1998 to 2008, and with hiatuses in the years 2009, 2015, 2018 and 2019. Among the various updates it received in all these years, the one that stood out from 2010 onwards was the launch of two versions of the emulator simultaneously, one for more current technologies, and another for i586 and i686 computers, which are based on Intel processors from the 1990s. The latest version of the emulator is dated May 2021.

FCEU (1998)

FCEU, Family Computer Emulator Ultra, or simply FCE Ultra, was created in November 1998 for MS-DOS by TrelaneQ, Zaik, based on Bero's FCE emulator created in April of the same year. Trelane worked closely with Bero, and developed the Linux version of the emulator at the time of the project's release. The emulator was largely rewritten by Trelane, which resulted in a much more stable and compatible emulator. In version 0.17 for MS-DOS in September 1999, it was the first NES emulator to support Nintendo's arcade game, UniSystem (or Nintendo Vs.).

The emulator supported sound through Sound Blaster, making it one of the best NES sound emulators at the time. In addition, it also supported 5 video modes, joypad, Game Genie, save state, snapshot, among others. It also had good speed, so a fast PC was recommended to run it, and it had good compatibility due to the number of mappers it supported. In late 1999, the Linux version was released on top of version 018. The project had the help of several influencers, such as Nobuaki Andou from Pasofami, Yoshi from nestech.txt, Marat Fayzullin from iNes and Matthew Conte from Nofrendo, who provided various information about the console, among many others. It was recommended to have a Pentium 233Mhz, with 16MB of RAM, a 512KB video card and a Sound Blaster-compatible sound card to run the emulator more smoothly. The emulator also had synchronization between CPU and PPU (central and mathematical processing), which was poor in most emulators. The emulator also supported the NSF player, and the iNES and fwNES NES format ROMs and the FDS Disk System format ROMs. The emulator was closed in September 2000, when the Windows version was also released. It was a simple version, with no front-end, with only the menu to select games.

In November 2000, it was ported to Pocket PC. Also in November, Trelane released the source code, and Xodnizel became interested and began developing the emulator from then on, continuing with the DOS, Windows and Linux versions released in the same month. Around the beginning of 2001, a front-end for Windows was released, with several video, sound and joypad settings, among others. Around July 2001, it was ported by Caz to BeOS as FCEU Ultra/SDL. In mid-2002, it was ported to Xbox as StellaX. In early 2004, a version for MacOS was also released. All versions worked via the command line, except for the Windows and Xbox versions, which had their own interface. The project has dozens of versions, with graphic and sound corrections, added support for several games, and support for the Zapper gun via mouse. The last version was released in May 2004, with a correction in October. The emulator gained ports for the portable WonderSwan in 2000, GP2X in 2006 and PSP in 2006 and 2009, and for the Playstation 2 consoles in 2007 and Nintendo GameCube and Nintendo Wii in 2008. It also received a port for the portable PC, Pepper Pad (unfortunately we do not have its release year).

Because it has always been open source, several versions of the emulator have emerged, including while it was still being developed, such as FCEUD (FCE Ultra Debugger) in 2002 by Parasyte, FCEU-MM (FCEU- Mappers Modified) in 2003 by CaH4e3 going until 2016, FCEUXD (FCE Ultra eXtended-Debug) in 2004 by bbitmaster and DahrkDaiz, FCEUXD SP (FCE Ultra eXtended-Debug Sebastian Porst) in 2005 by Sebastian Porst going until 2007 and FCEUXD SP CE (FCE Ultra eXtended-Debug Sebastian Porst Championship Edition) in 2006 by UglyJoe. It also had a version with recording support, FCE Ultra Rerecording, made by blip in an unidentified year, and updated in 2006 and 2008 by Nitsuja and other influencers in the field.

In March 2006, the initial FCEU project was brought back by Anthony Giorgio and Mark Doliner, but due to lack of time they did not continue it, nor did they release any version of the emulator. Zeromus and Sebastian Porst then thought of merging all the unofficial versions and forming FCE Ultra X, or just FCEUX. The project was started in 2006, and several authors of old ports of the emulator participated, such as Parasyte (péurasait), Cah4e3, bbitmaster and Uglyjoe, as well as many other contributors. The first release was in August 2008. FCEUX played both Famicom and NES ROMs from all regions. The emulator also allows the creation of videos for the ROMs, the famous Tool-Assisted Speedrun, a feature coming from the Re-Recording version, in addition to also allowing changes to ROMs, a process known as Rom-Hacking. In March 2009, it modified the logo of its front-end. In June 2021, it released its 64-bit version, called QFCEUX, with several modifications and extensions to the front-end. FCEUX has had versions for Windows, MacOS X, Linux, UNIX and BeOS since its launch. The project had twenty-two versions released from 2008 to 2013, and in 2018, 2021 and 2022. The last version released was in March 2022. The emulator was added to multi-system emulators such as RetroArch in 2011 and OpenEmu in 2013.

Evolution of Games - Ranma ½ (1990-1996)

Today's Evolution of Games brings you the Ranma ½ anime game franchise, with its games released between 1990 and 1996, for Gameboy, PC Engine, SNES and others, of fighting, adventure, puzzle and RPG. Check it out.

The History of NES Emulators - NESticle, xNes and Nofrendo

This is the third part of our article about NES/Famicom emulators, now talking about the first free emulator and the most famous NES emulator of the 1990s. We also talk about the important xNes, which later inspired the creation of the legendary multi-console emulator, MESS, and Nofrendo. Follow along.

NESticle (1997)

It was released on April 3, 1997 for MS-DOS by Icer Addis, from the Bloodlust Software team. It is simply considered the greatest emulator of all time, and the most used in the 1990s. It is the first free playable NES emulator. The emulator had many interesting functions for the time, such as save state, online play, editing game graphics and recording audio and videos of the games. Another difference of the emulator was the possibility of running on simple computers of the time, such as a 486, for example. NESticle used NES.DOC, which was the console hardware documentation created by Marat Fayzullin for the creation of the iNes. In addition, Y0SHi and other influencers of the scene helped the project with the sound part. Other people in the field also helped with the project, such as Neill Corlett, Neil Bradley, the website Zophar, among others.

The Windows version of the emulator was released in August 1997, known as NESticle 95, as it ran on Windows 95, Microsoft's most recent system at the time, and had three updates in total, the last one in September 1997.

An interesting fact about its name. It was a combination of NES (Nintendo Entertainment System, the little Nintendo) and testicle, from the English testicle (believe it or not). The name is as bizarre as the trashy visuals used in its emulators.

A cracker named Donald Moore stole the emulator's source code, and since then Icer Addis decided to discontinue the project, which ended in August 1998, with the last version of the emulator in DOS mode, known as x.xx.

In a survey conducted by the famous emulator website, Zophar in May 1998, it was found that 26.6% of the users who participated had had their first experience in the world of emulation through NESticle, followed by 20.7% by others and 20.5% by Virtual GameBoy.

xNes (1997)

xNes began to be developed in 1997 by Nicolas Hamel, aka Shin Gouky, alongside Robert Rosario, aka Skeletor, and Brad Oliver, aka Bradman, who helped with the emulator's coding. David Michel from Magic Engine was not a permanent member, but he also helped with the project, being one of those responsible for creating the source code and one of the most important for the first operation of the emulator. One of the first versions of the emulator was released around September 1997 for MS-DOS. In October, a version for Linux was released by Chuck Manson and in November for MacOS by Richard Bannister. Both were also part of the xNes team. Another who was also part of the team was Jeff Mitchell, from the Retrocade and Mame projects, most likely trying to port the emulator to the UNIX system. xNes used Marat Fayzullin's 6502 emulator.

Its emulation was good in terms of colors and had good compatibility, but it did not support sound and the emulation was accelerated (like most emulators of the time), so that it could run at a speed considered normal on very slow computers. It ran well on a Pentium 1 computer with 8MB of RAM. On current PCs, it is almost impossible to play due to the speed of the games. It was based on line code, but promised a GUI in the future, as well as sound support. Regarding the ROMs, it ran in the .NES format of Marat's iNes emulator. Its last version was released in November 1997. In January 1998, they announced the discontinuation of the emulator and released its source code. Despite this, the Linux version continued and was released in October 1998.

The project had help from important people. In addition to Marat, Shawn from the Allegro library, Yoshi with his nestech.doc documentation, Loopy for the color palette, and Zoop from the Meka SMS project for hosting the project website.

After the end of the project, Brad Oliver and Richard Bannister joined forces to create the MESS project for multi-emulation of computers, consoles and portables. The emulator was released in March 1998, and the first system emulated in the project was the NES, born from the old xNes code brought to the project by Brad and combined with Matt Conte's sound code. The xNes also had a fork released in June 1998 by Brazilian Fabiano Lopes, known as Fx3, called Rocknes. Bannister also ported this fork to MacOS.

Nofrendo (1998)

Nofrendo was released by Matt Conte on February 8, 1998 for MS-DOS. In late 1997, Matt contributed to the XGS projects for Apple II and PCAE for Atari 2600. That's when he had the idea of ​​having his own project. Developed in partnership with DripWare Software, Nofrendo featured Neil Bradley's 6502 processor, .STA format for save state, compatibility with NESticle (and changed to .RTX format in the latest version of the emulator), gamepad and keyboard support, digital sound, volume control, five video modes, two types of selectable color palettes, screenshot, reset, frameskip, among others. Its distinguishing feature was its sound emulator, later used in other projects, such as MESS and MAME in 2000 and Squeem, Nester and UONester in 2001. Its palettes were also used in the Squeem emulator in 2001. In addition, the emulator had good speed and compatibility, and worked well on slow PCs, such as Pentium 1. Despite this, it had several buggy problems with the background images of some games.

The creation of the project was quite unusual. Matt just wanted to show himself that he could create a NES emulator. His friends liked it so much that he was forced to make it available to the public. Matt always aimed for precision, trying to make the emulator as faithful as possible to the original console. Its unusual name originated from the term No-Friend-o known to refer to Nintendo addicts.

The project had help from several influencers in the scene, such as Neil Bradley, Sardu from NESticle, Marat Fayzullin from iNes, Jeremy Chadwick, Yoshi from Nestech.txt, John Dullea from PCAE, Paul Robson from A26, among others.

In March 1998, he released his last version, but continued working on the project. Around June 1998, he was rewriting the project, and still released some updates during 1999. In 2000, he officially decided to close the project. In May 2001, a pre-version for Linux was released, known as Nofrendo SDL, created by Neil Stevens in partnership with Matt. It also came with its source code to be ported or forked. Because it was SDL, it allowed ports to several systems.

Matt was also known for utilities from the NES scene, such as NEStoFAM for the .FAM format exclusively for the Famicom.exe emulator and CajoNES, the continuation of the same program expanded for the PRG/CHR formats of the Pasofami emulator, both respectively in February and July 1997, in addition to the NES music player in the .NSF format, called Nosefart released for DOS and Winamp in May 1999, and which also used his sound emulator.

In addition, he also helped with projects such as the Apple II XGS and A2600 PCAE in 1997 and the NES, LoopyNES, JNes and FCE Ultra projects in 1999. Around April 2001, he also created the Nes6502 (known as the fast 6502 core), an emulator of the NES CPU, used in the Squeem, RockNES and Nester emulators in the same year of its creation. This processor was never used in his Nofrendo.

Evolution of Games - Taisen Puzzle Dama (1994-2011)

Today's Evolution of Games brings you the puzzle franchise, Taisen Puzzle Dama, with its 17 games. Check it out.

The History of NES Emulators - iNes, NESA and Famicom.exe

In the second part of the history of NES emulators, we will talk about the primary Famicom Emulator, the prototype LandyNes, the renowned iNes, the beginner NESA and the classic Famicom.exe.

Famicom Emulator (1996)

In 1996, another Famicom emulator was released in Japan, the Famicom Emulator, also known as DirectX Famicom Emulator, created by M. Kami. Its first known version was released in May 1996, version 2.4 for Windows 3.1 and 95. The emulator included some demos and only ran ROMs in PRG/CHR formats, extensions used in Pasofami, but it had low compatibility. There was a 50% English translation patch for this version made by Acey. A version 3.0 was released, but it required version 2.4a to work. We do not know if DirectX support began at the beginning or the following year.

There is almost no information about this emulator. In May 1996, M. Kami also released an emulator for Super Famicom called Super Famicom Emulator for MS-DOS, with only version 1.01 being known.

LandyNes (1996)

was created by Alex Krasivsky, who released a beta version (a prototype in fact) on September 8, 1996 for MS-DOS, which ran only simple, slow games with no sound, and was also known as DC NES. An official version of LandyNes was never actually released. The project was left aside, and ended up helping the creation of Marat Fayzullin's iNes emulator. Alex actually gave up on the project in 1997, with the release of NESticle.

iNes (1996) (InterNes)

The project actually started in 1996, with Russian Alex Krasivsky, who found some Famicom programming information on the internet and wrote the original code (it remains to be seen whether this leak was from the original Famicom hardware programming, or from the hacking that Pasofami suffered. Who knows?). As the project progressed, Alex lost interest in it, and Marat rewrote the code for him. Meanwhile, Marat encouraged Alex to copy features of the original Famicom hardware to transform into support for various cartridges, and add-ons for the emulator.

Its first version was released on September 9, 1996 for Windows, titled 0.5. Marat also brought versions for FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris and other UNIX systems. John Stiles and Marcel de Kogel made ports respectively for Macintosh and Linux. All these versions in the year of release. Initially the emulator already supported 85% of the console's games, which in fact makes it the first playable NES emulator. But this came at a price, US$ 35 dollars. Only the Windows version was paid. The MS-DOS version is reported to be under development between 1996 and 1997. It is not known when it was released, but from 2005 it was reported on Marat's website that it came with the Windows version. Around June 1997, it gained an online version on the Kagi website, also shareware.

The emulator also had its own game format, .NES, which became the standard format used to this day. Due to piracy, Marat decided not to release the source code or freeware versions for MS-DOS and Windows, releasing only versions for the UNIX system. The Macintosh version was also freeware. Marat did not like Windows programs, as his origins were always with Macintosh. In addition, he had become frustrated with the piracy that had occurred just a few hours after the emulator was first released.

Over time, the price of the DOS and Windows versions dropped, reaching $25 in 2006, $19.99 in 2008, and finally becoming free in 2015. The last MS-DOS version came out in 2014. From 2015 onwards, it simultaneously released versions for Windows and Linux. Its latest emulator version was released in March 2021.

In 2011, he launched iNes-Android for smartphones. In 2019, he integrated iNes-Android into his multi-system emulator also for Android, called VGBAnext, which ran all three Gameboys. Marat already had classic emulators for these systems, and the well-known VGBA from which the multi-emulator originated.

NESA (1996)

Also in 1996, NESA (Nintendo Entertainment System In Assembler) was developed by Paul Robson, the same creator of the A26 for Atari 2600, using the same base to develop NESA. The project was launched in September 1996 for MS-DOS, and its beta version was released in the same month. The difference with iNES was that, in addition to being free, it released the source code to help other developers in the field. NESA had no sound, joypad support and little game compatibility, but promised all of this in future versions. The emulator also ran slowly. It was a very early project, even though it was already in beta. It ran on very simple PCs, such as 386 with 640kbs of RAM. In 1997, the project was discontinued and migrated to TNES, which was an emulator with more robust tools and resources than the old emulator. The sources of its programming survived and provided the basis for several subsequent emulators. The project was officially closed on January 1, 1998.

An interesting fact. Paul said in an interview that CPU power was so limited that the first emulators reduced games from 60 to 10 frames per second. Imagine how difficult it would be to play something like that? Another interesting fact that Paul mentioned is that some Gameboy emulators hacked the PC's VGA card, that is, the video card of the time, to achieve a resolution similar to the portable one, without a drop in quality or frames like in the first NES emulation projects, such was the scarcity of virtual resources.

Famicom (Fami/Famicom.exe) (1997)

The Famicom emulator, known simply as Fami or Famicom.exe, was released in February 1997 by Japanese developers Taka2 and Nori for Windows. Its first version required the execution of ROMs in its own format, FAM, which required a converter from the NES format. This converter (called NEStoFAM) was developed by Matt Conte. In version 2 of the emulator, the FAM format was modified, becoming the emulator's default from then on. Only a few FAM format games from the first version were executed.

The emulator came with real NES sound and competed with NESA in the freeware category. It had two advantages: speed and sound quality. Its first version was in Japanese, but from the second version onwards SoM2Freak, Zofo and VmprHntrD created EFamicom, which replaced the executable with an English version, which was used in subsequent versions. These modified versions were known as FamiE. In version 3, it began to support the joypad, as well as changes to the color palettes. In version 4, Famicom Disk System games began to work. From version 4.01e in October 1998, the authors began to include the English version in the original emulator, and to develop one in parallel with the help of MEGABYTE. After a few more versions in English and Japanese, they released their own version, 100% in English and the last of the emulator, 4.04, in November 1998.

Fami ran smoothly on a Pentium 1 100MhZ with 32 MB of memory. Despite the emulator's advantages, one of its main problems was the impossibility of 85% of ROMs with sizes above 64Kb being executed.

An erratum. Initially this emulator erroneously credited Seil as its creator, something that was denied in the emulator's own readme in later releases by the project's creators.