The History of Odyssey 2 Emulators

Odyssey 2 Emulator / O2EM (1997)

O2EM

O2EM, or Odyssey 2 Emulator, was first developed in 1996 by Dan Boris, and was first released for MS-DOS in July 1997. The first version of the project was written with almost no technical documentation, and the system had to be reverse engineered . In May 1998, Erik Winblad created a front-end for the project, called Oxygen, with three versions in total, all released in the same month. Dan updated the emulator until September 1998, when he finished the project. In June 2001, O2EM was ported to MacOS X by Richard Bannister. The emulator was revived in June 2002 by Brazilian André de la Rocha. He maintained the DOS version and began creating Linux and Windows versions. Although there is a Windows version, it needs to be loaded via the MS-DOS prompt.

Oxygen and O2EM Launcher

Heitor Barcellos, a friend of André, also created a front-end in June to facilitate the execution of the Windows emulator, called O2EM Launcher, which was updated until January 2005. André released nine versions of the emulator in total, releasing its last version in December 2004 alongside fellow Brazilian Arlindo M. de Oliveira, who began to take care of the emulator from then on. Arlindo, in turn, released only two versions of the emulator, in May 2005 and January 2007. In January 2011, O2EM received another update, this time from developer Labbe Corentin, using version 1.5, the penultimate version by André de la Rocha, as the base.

O2EM v1.16 (Super Cobra)

The emulator has a single release, now called O2EM2, or Odyssey 2 Emulator 2. O2EM was created based on the Allegro game library, and became open source some time after its creation. In addition to emulating the ROMs, it also emulated The Voice module, which was an adapter connected to the console to fit games that supported it, and reproducing voices and special sound effects that the console did not reproduce. The original module had a 2 KB memory that stored the voices.

O2EM v1.00 (KC's Krazy Chase)

In the emulator, you had to download a set of these voice samples to be played. O2EM is also ported to systems such as MacOS, MacOS X and BeOS, consoles such as Dreamcast, Wii and Xbox, and portables such as GamePark GP2X. In 2015 it became part of the OpenEmu multi-system emulator for MacOS. Richard Bannister updates the emulator to this day, with the last update in November 2022.

MESS (2004)

MESS

The Odyssey 2 console also had support in the multi-system emulator, MESS, from January 2004, and later in January 2013 it was integrated into the multi-emulator MAME. Unlike O2EM, MESS does not need voice samples to play in the emulation of The Voice module. This may be done by some synthesizer that can reproduce voices and special effects by itself. But this is just a guess on my part.