The History of PC Engine Emulators - Part 3

Hu-Go! (1999)

Hu-Go!

Hu-Go! was created by Frenchman Olivier Jolly, better known as Zeograd). The emulator was a port of Bero's emulator, FPCE, developed from 1999. Initially it uses the base of Bero's emulator, also with much inspiration from Marat Fayzullin with his knowledge of the 6502 processor, with improvements from Hmmx, the first to port Bero's FPCE, named XPCE, and Shawn Hargreaves' library, Allegro, and developed the emulator. Zeograd also had help from David Michel, creator of Magic Engine, Jens Restemeier, creator of the first PC Engine emulator, VPCE, for the console documentation, among many others. Its first versions were released in early 1999. In March, it released its first beta version, 0.91 for MS-DOS. In the beginning it was also called FPCE, changing its name in the second beta version of May 1999 to Hu-Go! Initially it only ran games on HuCards and the recommended configuration to run the emulator was a 486.

Hu-Go! (MS-DOS)

In June, this recommended configuration became a Pentium 1. Also in June, the Portuguese translation of the emulator by CodeMaster was added. Also in June, parallel to the emulator, Zeograd created the ROM identifier called FPCE ID, probably identifying unknown ROMs for its emulator. The program also automatically classified ROMs and excluded duplicates. This identifier was inspired by the PCEID identifier, created by the Hu6280 emulator team in February 1999. In July, Hu-Go! began supporting the PC Engine CD through .iso files, as well as support for save states for CD games, and the Eagle filter. In the August 1999 version, a new sound library was added, which allowed the emulation of CD audio tracks in MP3 and WAV in the September 1999 version. In December 1999, a version for Linux was released. In January 2000, the Linux version began to support sound and MP3 playback in the June 2000 release. In August 2000, the Windows version came out.

Hu-Go! (Windows) (Interface/Menus)

Despite the Windows version, in December 2000 the Offend front-end added support for the MS-DOS version of the emulator. Eagle and Scanline modes arrived in the Linux version only in January 2001. Version 2.0 was also released in January 2001. The last MS-DOS version was released in March 2001 (2.0), along with the release of its source code. In July 2002, it gained a version for Xbox as HugoX. More than a year and a half without a new version, the August 2002 version appeared, with the Allegro library replaced by the SDL library, which helps in converting the emulator to other systems and a new sound engine. Also in August 2002, it gained a port for FreeBSD. More time without versions and the March 2003 version appeared, in which the full-screen and windowed modes were rewritten and CD support was improved. Also in March 2003, it gained versions for Debian, BeOS and RPM (a software package manager, mainly for Linux). In October 2003, it was ported to Solaris. After a two-year hiatus, it returned with the March 2005 version, which added the loading of compressed ROMs, partial addition of the Arcade Card accessory, which brought more RAM to the console, mainly to run Neo Geo game conversions, support for netplay and audio and video recording (this in MPG and AVI) and auto-detection of American games.

Hu-Go! (Windows) (Aero Blaster)

In addition to all this, the emulator also had screenshots, joypad support, scanline mode and others. In April 2005, its final version was released. At this stage, the emulator had good compatibility and image and all the resources necessary for its execution, with the exception of the sound that was never very well developed, with certain bugs and noises. The last official port of Hu-Go! It was ported to MorphOS in August 2005. The emulator also had several ports over time, such as for the Sheldows system in 2000, Xbox and GamePark 32 in 2003, Dreamcast in 2005, GameCube and GamePark GP2X in 2006, Nintendo Wii in 2007, Dingoo A320 in 2009 and Gamepark Caanoo in 2010. Of these, the best known port was Hugo-DX for Nintendo Wii in 2007, ported from HugoGC for GameCube in 2006 and released until 2010. Zeograd also developed another project for the PC Engine, called HuC, a C language compiler that translated the language of the console's ROMs to be read by emulators. This process is also known as ripping. The project was initially a hack made by David Michel of another compiler, for use on the PC Engine. David gave up on the project and moved to Zeograd. This program existed from April 2001 to April 2005.

Tgemu (2001)

TGemu (MS-DOS)

TGemu, also called TurboGrafix Emulator, was created by Charles MacDonald for the TurboGrafix HuCards and PC Engine. Charles was already known for having released emulators for Master System, Game Gear, Mega Drive and System 16. His first and only version was released in February 2001 for MS-DOS. The emulator had VSync support, frameskip, game acceleration and screenshot in .PCX format. Charles also had the help of Bryan McPhail who created the HuC6280 processor emulator. Bryan is also known for working from 1997 to 2004 on the MAME project. Among others who helped him was Dave from the DGen and Final Burn projects. The emulator had only one version released. Since it was for MS-DOS it ran on the command line, but since it did not progress, no third-party front-end supported it.

TGemu (Windows)

The emulator was also partially ported to GamePark GP32 in 2002. In multisystem emulators it was part of GuineaPig in 2004 for PalmOS. TGemu had official ports in 2001 for Windows by Pascal Bosquet and MacOS by Richard Bannister also in February and for BeOS by Caz Jones in March, three partners who ported all of Charles' emulators. The Windows and BeOS ports had only one version each. The MacOS port was updated for many years. Following the timeline of the Mac port, its second version in May 2001 added its Blitter library that supports 78 different video modes, fixed a bug with music not playing in games, added support for multiple processors, optimized video code making the emulator use less RAM and improved sound output. 

TGemu (Windows) (Out Run)

In July 2002, he managed to improve the much-criticized sound emulation of Charles' emulator. In July 2003, he added support for the joypad. In September 2003, he added the hq2x and hq4x modes. In December 2003, he optimized the OpenGL code. And it continued like this, mainly fixing bugs, adding filters and fixing the image, and yes, until September 2008, when the emulator went on hiatus. In March 2018, he returned with updates and rewrote the emulator for modern operating systems using 64-bit Cocoa APIs. On this occasion, Bannister rewrote several of his emulators in the same way. Its latest version was from December 2019.

Other Emulators

PCE Emulator and DPCE

In addition to these emulators, there were also others, such as DeePCE in 1999, DPCE and BePcEngine (only for BeOS) in 2000, Project PC2E in 2003, Ootake in 2006, Turbo Engine, PicchioEngine and PCejin in 2009 and ePCEngine in 2016.

Ootake

There have been PC Engine emulators made exclusively for other platforms. Among them, for portable devices, such as GPEngine for GamePark 32 and PCEAdvance for Gameboy Advance in 2003, PS2PCE for Playstation 2 in 2004, PCE for PSP for PSP in 2005, GP2Xengine for GamePark GP2X in 2006, PSPHugo for PSP and Temper for GamePark GP2X (later also ported to GCW Zero and Dingoo) in 2008, WiiEngine for GamePark GP2X and Nintendo Wii in 2008, and NitroGrafx for Nintendo DS in 2010. For cell phones, such as bf's Engine and Pocket Engine for Pocket PCs in 2001, temper4iphone for IPhone in 2008 and PCE.emu based on Mednafen for Android in 2011. And for PalmTop, such as Dream Engine for PalmOS in 2004.

Engine 16 and pcejin shift

The PC Engine also ran on collective emulators, such as MESS in 1999 (Turbo Grafix 16 in 2001), Darcnes in 1999, Yame in 2001 (also known as BeYame for BeOS), Xe in 2004, Mednafen in 2005, MAME in 2006, BizHawk in 2012, OpenEmu in 2013 for MacOS X, FBA in 2014, Higan in 2017 and Ares in 2020.

NEC-HE PC Engine/ePCEngine

The PC Engine CD ran on Xe in 2005, Mednafen and BizHawk in 2012, MAME in 2013, OpenEmu in 2015 and Higan and Ares in 2020.