The History of Sega Genesis Emulators - Part 7

PicoDrive (2004)

PicoDrive

The PicoDrive project can be called a leap into the future of emulation. The project was created by Dave in 2004 based on his 68k emulator, the Cyclone 68k, which in turn was created in the same year with the aim of helping to emulate hardware within ARM devices, a new technology contained in processors, and which would later become common in smartphones, tablets and laptops. At the time, ARMs worked on Pocket's PCs, which were large-screen cell phones of the time. A little earlier, in 2003, Dave had received a GP32 from his friend Craig, who knew that he liked to write emulators. And it was for this system that Cyclone was created, and later PicoDrive, to test his 68k emulator. One of the first third-party emulators to use his Cyclone 68k was fGen32, a port of the Genesis Plus emulator also for the GP32 handheld, in July 2004. Dave was passionate about Mega Drive, having created the DGen emulator for Windows in 1999, and in 2004 the GenaDrive projects for XBOX and GigaDrive for the GP32 handheld, a handheld that was a phenomenon at the time in terms of capacity, portability and storage in a handheld. PicoDrive was launched in April 2004, and had fifteen versions, the last one being released in September 2005. Before its completion, a fork of the emulator for SymbianOS was created by Neil Davis in April 2005. This fork was updated until June 2006, and had several updates taken from another fork called PicodriveN. Also in 2005, a port of Dave's emulator for UIQ, a Symbian-derived system for smartphones of the time, such as Sony Ericsson and Motorola, appeared, but due to its many flaws it was soon discontinued. And finally, at the end of 2005, a port for UIQ2 by Notaz called PicodriveN (since Neil's port was already called PicoDrive) appeared, with release at the end of the year.

PicoDrive ( Sega Top Ten )

Its first released version was in January 2006. Notaz had been taking care of Dave's Cyclone 68k since around August 2005, which he did until 2007. Notaz's fork became the most important of PicoDrive, being in practice the direct continuation of Dave's emulator. The February 2006 version of PicodriveN added the SN76489 emulator, a programmable sound generator and the YM2612 sound chip, both from the MAME project, as well as the DrZ80 emulator from Reesy's Zilog Z80 (who also contributed to Notaz's early version of Cyclone68k), which was also linked to sound emulation, and the emulator began to provide full sound support from then on. Notaz then acquired the GP2X handheld and created a port for that system, with the first version released in September 2006. This version began to adopt the emulator's original name, PicoDrive, since Neil's port (which used that name) was discontinued. In November 2006, he created a port for UIQ3. In August 2007, he released his source code and in September 2007 he created a port for the Gizmondo handheld. In November 2007, he began developing the emulator for the PSP handheld as well. From this version onwards, he began to support the Sega CD and 32X, thanks to the Gens source code released by its creator in May of the previous year. This version has its own 68K emulator, called FAME/C created by Chui, which in turn is based on the C68K of Stephane Dallongeville, creator of the Gens emulator. In this version, PicoDrive also had a new Z80 emulator, called CZ80, created by NJ and based on codes also from the creator of Gens. In other words, the Gens emulator was very important for Notaz in its port for PSP. In March 2008, the GP2X version added support for SVP (Sega Virtua Processor), to run the game Virtual Racing. It is considered the first Mega Drive emulator to run this device 100%. Credit goes to Exophase and Rokas.

PicoDrive PSP

In May 2008, a single-release version for Windows was created, with all the programming from the PSP version, with Dave's GenaDrive front-end and support for the Sega Pico. It was very simple, with reset, load and four screen resolutions (with the possibility of freely enlarging the screen size, being one of the few SMD emulators for Windows that allows this type of change). In August 2009, it also began supporting the GP2X Wiz handheld. In June 2010, it released its last port, for the Pandora system. We don't know for sure, but it seems that around 2010, the emulator also began supporting SMS. In August 2013, it changed the user interface of the Pandora version to that of the PS1 emulator for ARM, PCSX ReARMed, also written by Notaz, and considered one of the best PS1 emulators of all time. Its last updates were for PSP, Gizmondo and UIQ3 in August 2008, GP2X/Wix in October 2013 and Pandora in October 2017. In January 2019, it released its latest version, being executable on several laptops and smartphones. Notaz's PicoDrive also gained third-party ports, such as for RiscOS by Jeffrey Lee in September 2006, for Nintendo DS by ryanfb in July 2008 and for PS2 by SP193 in September 2013 from version 1.51b of PSP's PicoDrive in August 2008. It also had a fork for iOS created by ZodTTD, called genesis4iphone, also in 2008. Around 2013/2014, it began to be part of the RetroArch emulator, emulating Mega, 32X and Sega CD. Later in the emulator, it only emulates 32X, leaving the other emulations for the Genesis Plus GX. In 2013 it is also part of the OpenEmu multi-emulator for MacOS running 32X. In addition to those already mentioned, there were other people who helped in the Notaz project, such as Charles MacDonald from Genesis Plus for MD information, Mark and Jean-Loup for the Zlib multimedia library, Peter van Sebille from ECompXL and his various Symbian open source projects, and the development team of the Symbian GCC Improvement Project, with various tools for the Symbian system and its derivatives. Some of the people who helped Notaz at the beginning of the project were later with him in the PS1 scene, as was the case of Exophase, who helped Notaz create the PCSX ReARMed emulator. ZodTTD and Chui, on the other hand, were in the PSX4ALL project in 2006.

Other Emulators

SegaEMU

In addition to the emulators mentioned, we also had other projects, such as St0rm Sega Genesis Emulator (known as SGE) for MS-DOS and Genux for Linux, both in 1998. 

Regen

Most of them emulated several Sega systems together, such as AGES (from MD and 32X) in 1997, RetroDrive (from MD and 32X) in 1998, SEGAEmu (from Sega 8 and 16 bits) in 1999, Mimic (from Sega 8 and 16 bits) in 2002, Regen (from Sega 8 and 16 Bits) in 2007 (with a port to Linux in 2009), HazeMD (from MD, 32X and Sega CD, by Haze, from the MAME project) in 2009 and MD.Emu (from Sega 8 and 16 Bits) for Android in 2012.

HazeMD

There were also several projects that did not come to fruition, such as EmulatorX, Moge, Triton (also for Sega CD and 32X) and W95 GenEMU. There was also the Kyoto project, created by Haruki Ikeda, which was not released due to his death in a car accident.

In versions for other devices, we have DrMD for GP32 (by DrZ80 creator Reesy, and with Dave's Gigadrive core and interface) in 2004, jEnesisDS for Nintendo DS in 2008, Gensoid for Android in 2009 and NeoGensPlusGX for Xbox in 2015.

Within multisystem emulators, it worked on MESS in 1998, MAME in 2003, Xe (for Linux) and GuineaPig (for PalmOS) both in 2004, Final Burn Alpha in 2008 and Higan in 2017.

 

Come and learn the history of PicoDrive and Other Emulators in video on our YouTube channel.