The History of Sega Genesis Emulators - Part 1

Megadrive Emulator (1994)

Megadrive Emulator

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 main programmer, and Baalzamon, Berzerker and Stegg, as secondary programmers.

Megadrive Emulator (MS-DOS)

The emulator was in its early stages, and only ran Sonic, and even then it had deficiencies such as slowness, sprite problems 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.

Megadrive Emulator (Sonic The Hedgehog)

There is information that the emulator 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 (MS-DOS)

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 part was only stable on expensive sound cards.

GenEm Loader

Despite this, even with everything favorable for the execution of sound, some games simply had no sound. Still 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.

GenEm95

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, along with 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

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, different 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 possibility of playing the sound at up to 44,100 Hz. The emulator is 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, bringing a clean sound with digital quality.

Genecyst (Interface/Menus)

Other SMD emulators later supported this feature. In addition to the DOS versions having more memory and processing power at their disposal because they did not have to share them with the operating system, the emulator also used little of each of these. It only needed 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 on the YM2612 sound chip, Neill Corlett with his 68k emulator, Merlyn LeRoy with his Game Genie, as well as help from Marat Fayzullin of the Master System's MasterGear project and the legendary emulator website, Zophar. For some time, Genecyst was considered the best Mega Drive emulator there was. The emulator had seven updates from June to September 1997, when it went on hiatus. It returned with its last version in August 1998, bringing loading of games compressed in ZIP format, sound recording in WAV format and support for stereo sound. Despite ending in 1998, Genecyst was widely used until the early 2000s.

 

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