Emulation Names - Part 4

Dave

Dave's TMNT Emulator

Dave, known at the time as Dayvee, with an ay and two e's at the end, was a well-known emulator creator. His first project was in 1998, with DTmnt, an acronym for Dave's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, based on the Konami arcade game of the same name and which emulated the game in question. At the time, Jeff Slutter had released the source code for his emulator, TMNTEmu, which emulated the same game and was also created in 1998. Dave wrote his emulator from scratch using Jeff's emulator as the information base. Dave's emulator had two versions, both in late 1998. It was ideal for a 586 computer. The board had two Z80 central processors and the M68000, which Dave specialized in. In 1999, Dave had plans to release the DTmnt 2 emulator, with the Turtles in Time version of the game, but this never happened.

DGen

In early 1999, he released the DGen emulator for the Mega Drive, which he had already started developing in 1998. He released it for both Windows and DOS. It was ported to several systems, such as MacOS and BeOS. Parts of it were used in 2001 to create Xega. Dave updated the project until early 2000. Some time before, in mid-1999, a port of DGen called DGen/SDL was created, which became the direct continuation of the original project after its completion, lasting until 2001. This fork even had versions for PSP, XBox and others, ported by third parties. The emulator was resurrected by third parties in 2008 and 2011, with this last version surviving until 2014.

FinalBurn

After leaving DGen in early 2000, Dave dedicated himself to the arcade project, Final Burn. Its original name was After Burner Emulator, as it started by emulating the second version of the game in question. Shortly after, it became Final Burn. The project emulated Sega's X Board, Super Scaler, Y Board and System 16 arcade machines, and Capcom's CPS-1 and 2. At the time, Dave was known as Final Dave, such was the fame of his emulator. In mid-2001, he ended the project, releasing its source code, which allowed the Final Burn Alpha fork to emerge. In 2002, Dave unexpectedly appeared with updates to Final Burn that lasted only a few months, and the project was finally closed. The Final Burn Alpha project continued its history until 2018, when it received its final version. The FBA project had famous forks, such as FBANext and FB Neo, in addition to gaining several ports for other systems, such as XBox 360 and PS3.

Dega

Docs: Dave's PSG Sound Emulator, Dave's Optimized Z80 Emulator and Cylcone 68000

In mid-2001, around the same time as Final Burn's first shutdown, Dave released the Dega emulator for Master System and Game Gear, later ported by Hikaru to XBox and Linux as DegaX. Along with it, he released an optimized Z80 emulator, called Doze (Dave's Optimized Z80 Emulator), which was part of Final Burn Alpha since its inception and was also used in Dave's Final Burn when it returned in mid-2002. This helped other developers to get to grips with this processor. Dega also used Dave's PSG Sound Emulator, an emulator of the console's so-called programmable sound generator. Around 2004, Dave began developing an emulator for M68000, called Cyclone 68000. At the time, what inspired him was Neill Corlett's Starscream, which had been used for several emulators, and Dave wanted to do the same with Cyclone, but for ARM systems. At first it was only going to be used to develop emulators for smartphones, which at the time were known as Pocket PCs, but it ended up being used in his second Mega Drive emulator, PicoDrive, also released for Windows in 2004. The project existed until 2005. At that time, some ports of it appeared for portable systems, such as Symbian OS and UIQ, but the most important was for the UIQ2 system by Notaz, known as PicoDriveN. This project was the direct continuation of Dave's, and over time gained ports for systems such as UIQ3, Gizmondo, GP2X, PSP, Wix and Pandora. It was updated until 2017. It was also part of multi-emulators, such as RetroArch and gained third-party ports for N64, PS2, NDS, iPhone, among others.

GigaDrive

GenaDrive

In 2004, at the same time as the release of PicoDrive for Windows, two more Mega Drive emulators were released: GenaDrive for Xbox, which also had a version for Windows, and GigaDrive, for the South Korean handheld GP32, a handheld that in 2001 already ran emulators, used memory cards and had a USB port. GenaDrive was written from scratch and did not use Dave's M68k. GigaDrive, on the other hand, uses the entire PicoDrive codebase, as well as its library and Dave's M68k. Along with these two releases, the latest version of Dega, SMS and GG, was also released, as well as its port for Xbox called Degabox, since Hikaru's DegaX had some execution problems. Although he started in the world of emulation through Konami, his passion for Sega was evident, from the company's arcades to its four Mega Drive emulators and its SMS and GG emulator.

Websites Dave's DGen Emulator, FinalBurn, Dave's Home Page and GitHub

An explanation about the processor emulators developed by Dave. The Z80 was a microprocessor present in several video game consoles, such as the Gameboy series, Neo Geo Pocket, Sega's 8-bit consoles and portables, the Mega Drive in the sound part, the NES and the ColecoVision. The Motorola 68000, on the other hand, was present in arcades such as the Sega System 16, CPS-1, CPS-2 and Neo Geo MVS, and in the home consoles Mega Drive, Sega CD, Neo Geo AES and Atari Jaguar, and in the Sega Saturn only as a sound coprocessor, just like the Z80 was for the Mega Drive. In 2005, even though he retired from the emulation scene, Dave updated his website with information about XBOX, PSP and PC until early 2006. Dave also had projects that he never released, such as Full Spec, I believe some specification standard in the style of Zilmar Spec, with standards for sound and video for some emulator, and DMicro, which I have no idea what it is, both developed around 2001. This information was given by Dave in an interview done in 2004 for the website Hooka about the portable GP2X.

Emulators:

DTmnt (1998), DGen (1999), After Burner Emulator/Final Burn (2000), Doze (2001), Dave's PSG Sound Emulator (2001), Dega (2001), Cyclone 68000 (2004), PicoDrive (2004), DegaBox (2004), GenaDrive (2004), GigaDrive (2004)

Bero

MasterGear

Bero (berobero) was a Japanese emulator developer. His first project was a port of Marat Fayzullin's MasterGear SMS and GG emulator for the PC-9801, a well-known Japanese computer at the time, in 1997. The port had only one version. In the same year, he also ported it to the Playstation, under the name Master Station, which was updated until 1998 and had five versions in total. In 1998, he created FCE – Family Computer Emulator, inspired by Marat Fayzullin's 6502, using it on his iNes and Yoshi's documentation. The project had only two versions.

FCE

FCE inspired the creation of FCE Ultra at the end of the same year, a well-known NES emulator to this day that has spawned several forks of its own. Among them, we had FCEUD in 2002, FCEU-MM in 2003, FCEUXD in 2004, FCEUXD SP in 2005, FCEUXDSP CE in 2006, FCE Ultra Rerecording around 2006/08 and FCEUX in 2008. Another great emulator by Bero was FPCE – Free PC-Engine Emulator, also created in 1998. It only had one version released. A few months later he also ported it to the Playstation 1, but only running its games on Hu-Cards. His audacious plan was to run PC Engine CD games on the PSX itself, but this never happened. In the same year, a fork called XPCE for Windows was released, which in 2003 received a port for the Xbox called XPCE X. But the main fork of Bero's project was the Hu-Go! emulator, which used both FPCE and XPCE as its base. It was released in 1999 for MS-DOS and received a version for Windows in 2000. It existed until 2005, and from 2001 to 2009, it received ports for a variety of portable devices, consoles and operating systems. All of Bero's emulators remained in the initial stage, with most of them being finished in 1998.

FPSE

Bero's only project that was developed further was FPSE – Free PlayStation Emulator, released in 1999. Bero developed it throughout 1999, releasing six versions. Despite this, he was never able to run a game on the emulator, only loading its BIOS. In 2000, he formed a partnership with the Italian LDChen, and from then on the project began to evolve until it finally started loading games. This loading only occurs via CD-ROM. The project ended at the end of 2000, and LDChen continued it alone, recreating it in 2001 as FPSEce for Pocket PC, the smartphones of the time. The project continued until 2010, when in 2011 it was renamed FPSE and was converted to Android, being updated to the present day.

Website, DCDEV and PSXDEV

Bero was mainly an enthusiast of PSX emulation, so on his website he developed the PSXDEV tab, where he posted his emulators in question that were linked to the PSX and other software, such as an MP3 Player for the console, as well as programming CPU, GPU, BIOS, memory and hardware in general. He created documentation to help program in C/C++ on the console without official tools and to run individual software on locked consoles of the SCPH-1000 model. His material was free to help other influencers develop emulators and programs for PSX. At the time, he was also looking for people to release Visual Novel games for the console. I believe it was homebrew or homemade games that later became popular. In 2001, it was Bero's turn to create DCDEV, to create software and information about the Sega Dreamcast.

DC Viewer

His main work for the console was ripping games, releasing DreamRip, video, sound and image converters for formats such as MPEG, WAV and BMP, patches for better graphical loading of images and burning of games on CD-R, DCViewer, which runs images in PNG, JPEG and BMP on the console, music in MP3/OGG, WAV and Midi format and text in TXT format and porting the SDL library to the Dreamcast, for the creation of software in this language for the console.

Doom

Heretic

Hexen

Quake

Quake 2

Another of his fantastic works was porting the games Quake I and II, Hexen I and Hexen II, Doom, Heretic and Descent 1 from PC to Dreamcast. He even had unfinished projects to run PSX and PCE, through his FPSE and FPCE emulators, on the Dreamcast, in addition to the arcade emulator, MAME. He also planned DC Movie Player, to run on the Dreamcast more formats than DCViewer could, such as AVI, MOV, RM, MPEG1, 2 and 4 video, as well as audio formats such as MP1, 2 and 3, PCM and others. He also created documentation for the console, such as step-by-step guides on using the HyperTerminal and TeraTerm Prode tools for transferring data and debugging on the console, a guide on how to develop software for the console, as well as two documentations involving LinuxSH, a project to run Linux on the Dreamcast, the first being access to the GD-ROM, which is the reading of Dreamcast games, for the process of altering/creating games, and the second being to adapt the XFree86 window system of X Windows to LinuxSH. He was in charge of the site until around 2004.

Source Forge and SDL for Dreamcast Websites and the Minimal wxWidgets App Program

In 2001, he created an account on SourceForge, where from 2002 onwards, he developed three pages, the first to post his ported games (Quake and Hexen), which he updated until 2004, the second posting programs and games ported and developed by SDL for Dreamcast from 2002 to 2003 (this one gaining its own page on SourceForge, outside of his personal account), such as the NScripter interpreter and executor, ONScripter in 2002, and the ports of the multimedia, SDL and audio libraries, SDL Mixer in 2003, and games, such as Rise of the Triad in 2002 and Duke Nukem 3D in 2003, and the third the wxD software for creating portable interfaces built with the D programming language, a variant of C++ programming, and auxiliary programs for it, between 2005 and 2011. Outside of SourceForge, he contributed to 2002 for the KallistiOS library, developed for creating games for Dreamcast.

Emulators:

MasterGear (PC-9801) (1997), Master Station (1997), FCE – Family Computer Emulator (1998), FPCE – Free PC-Engine Emulator (1998), FPSE – Free PlayStation Emulator (1999)

Programs (PSX):

MP3 Player (1999)

Documentation (PSX):

Not Yaroze (Programming Without Official Tools) (1999), How to Play Dojin (Person) Software on PlayStation (1999)

Programs (Dreamcast):

DreamRip (2000), sfd2mpg (2000), pvr2bmp (2000), ifpvr (2000), pvrsrc (2000), adx2wav (2001), wav2adx (2001), hack (Patch CD-R) (2001), ippatch (2001), makecip & scramble (2001) DCViewer (2002), SDL_mixer (port) (2002), SDL for Dreamcast (2002), Midi-Instrument (2003), ONScripter for Dreamcast (port) (2003)

Documentation (Dreamcast):

Step-by-Step Guide (TeraTerm Pro) (2001), Step-by-Step Guide (HyperTerminal) (2001), Cutting Edge GameConsole Development (2001), Linux/Dreamcast GD-ROM Device Driver (2001), XFree86 for SH4 -Linux (2002)

Game Ports (Dreamcast):

Quake I (2002), Quake II (2002), Hexen I (2002), Hexen II (2002), Doom (2002), Heretic (2002), Descent 1 (2002), PrBoom (Doom) (2002), Aleph One (2002), Rise of the Triad (2002), Duke Nukem 3D (2003)

Programs (wxD):

wxD (2005), atomic gc (2005), boehmGC (2005), wxWidgets (2007)

Charles MacDonald

SMS Plus

Charles MacDonald was an important emulator developer and creator of video game console documentation that helped many developers over time. Charles was born in 1979, in California, USA. His first emulator was SMS Plus, created in 1998 for MS-DOS. It ran SMS and GG games and was released in 1999. In 2000, he rewrote the emulator from scratch and also ported it to PSX. In the same year, he created the YM2413 emulator (also compatible with YM3812), and added it in June to SMS Plus, improving the emulator's sound. He updated SMS Plus until mid-2000, when he dedicated himself to other projects. It returned in 2003, updating it in 2004 and closing it in 2007. Its emulator gained several ports, for systems such as GameCube, Wii, Dreamcast, Gamepark 32, Xbox, Sega Saturn and others, and even integrated RetroArch for a time. It was also at MESS and Mednafen.

TGemu

Sega System 16 Emulator

Sega System C2 Emulator

At the same time as his hiatus from SMS Plus in 2000, he developed the Sega System 16 Emulator, for the Sega board in question, to emulate only the game Shinobi. The project was closed in the same year. In the same year, he began to take care of David Haywood's project, Sega System C2 Emulator, for the Sega arcade in question, releasing it soon after. His documentation was also released at the time. The project ended in the same year. At that time, he released the documentation for the Master System and Mega Drive hardware, built through his knowledge of SMS Plus from SMS and System C2, which had the same hardware as the 16-bit console. In 2000, he also built the documentation for Sega System 24. TurboGrafix Emulator, the PC Engine's TGemu, was released in 2001 for MS-DOS with a single version, running only the games on the console's HuCards. The emulator has been ported by third parties to BeOS, Windows, MacOS and GamePark GP32, and was part of the GuineaPig multi-emulator.

Genesis Plus

Sega System 24 Emulator

In 2001, it was time to release the documentation for the Sega System 16 and PC Engine, and in 2002 for the Sega SC-3000 and Sega Saturn. Also in 2002, he created the Genesis Plus project for the Mega Drive based on the documentation he had already created. It all began in 1999, when he decided to learn more about Sega's hardware. Its first release was for MacOS by Richard Bannister, and its official release for MS-DOS and Windows took place in 2003. The project only had three versions released and also ended in 2003. It had ports for Dreamcast and GP32, but the most important of them occurred in 2005 for GameCube, the Genesis Plus GX. This project added emulation for SMS, GG and SG-1000, as well as Sega CD and Sega Pico. Genesis Plus GX gains important ports, such as for Windows, Nintendo Wii, PS3 and PS Vita, in addition to being part of the multi-emulators OpenEmu, RetroArch and Bizhawk.

Docs de Hardwares: SMS/GG, SC-3000, Sega Saturn, Sega System 32/24/18, TurboGrafx-16, Sega Pre-System 16, Atari GX, Sega Genesis, CPS-2, Sega System C-2, SNES, Sega X-Board e GameCube

In 2003, it was Charles' turn to release documentation for Sega Pre-System 16, Sega System 18, Sega System 24 and Super Nintendo. In the same year, he created another emulator based on one of his documentations, the Sega System 24 Emulator, also ending in the same year. In 2004, he released some information about the GameCube hardware, in addition to documentation for the Sega X-Board and Sega System 32 arcades. In 2004, he also began dumping games from several Sega arcades, such as System 16, 18, Out Run, X-Board and Space Harrier HW. At the time, he even created documentation on how to make these rips that involved conversions that required specific knowledge.

GCM Tool, Smdutil, System 16 Sound Player e GymPlay

Charles also created important software, such as System 16 Sound Player in 1999 to play music from some System 16 games, GYMPlay in 2000, to play music from games recorded by the Genecyst emulator, SMD2BIN in 2000, to convert .SMD games to .BIN, SMDUtil (Super Magic Drive Transter Utility) in 2001, to extract games from SMS and MD, SatUtil, Pro Action Replay programming (cheat) and BIN2ASM, a binary file to source code converter, both in 2002 for the Sega Saturn, SatSND in 2003, a sample program for playing SCSP sound on the Sega Saturn, and GMC Tool in 2004, for extracting GameCube games, and several programs for testing color, palette, sound, processor, sprites, resolution, frames, shading, layers, joypad, transparency, interface, bugs, polygons and related for Sega Saturn, SNES, SMS, GG, SC-3000, SMD and PCE. In 2007, he created the documentation for the CPS-2, and in 2011, for the Atari GX2. From 2011 onwards, he worked specifically with ROM ripping/dumping. His website had a hiatus from 2014 to 2017, when he no longer updated it.

Websites Charles MacDonald's Home Page e Techno-Junk

Charles also contributed for some time to the MESS project. In 2000, he added PC-Engine / Turbo Graphics-16 to the project, rewriting drivers from scratch exclusively for the project. Most likely these drivers were used in his TGemu, released a few months later. He also rewrote the SMS video driver, as well as rewrote drivers he had created for SMS Plus for SMS and GG and included them in the project. And in 2006, he made improvements to the PCE emulator.

MAME Project

In 2003, he joined the MAME project, which he continued for many years. In the project, chronologically in 2003, he brought sound to the PC Engine and in 2004, he made several updates to the Sega System 16 and 18, both thanks to his knowledge of his emulators. In 2005, he made the Namco NA-1 board use the real bios and performed many repairs on the PCE. In 2005 and 2006, he made repairs to the 68k microprocessor. In 2007, his information helped rewrite the Neo-Geo drive. In 2008, he helped with improvements to the CPS-1 board and made improvements to the PCE. In 2010, he made corrections to the PC Engine. In 2011, he made implementations to the Sega System 24 and ST-V boards and the Sega Saturn and corrections to the Sega System E board, thanks mainly to his documentation. In 2013, he made updates to the CPS-1. And in 2014, he gave more help to the M68k. In addition, he added games such as Out Run, Wonder Boy III, Columns, Jackie Chan, Super Hang-On, Bandit, Tetris (Sega), Super Monaco GP, Flash Point, among others to the project. He continued contributing to MAME until 2019.

GitHub

In 2020, he returned to posting documentation, now on his GitHub, created in 2014. Among them, we have the Sega ST-V, from the Sega Titan Video arcade hardware, JAMMA, a basic arcade hardware standard created in the 80s, allowing only the fitting of a new motherboard with new games, used in titles such as Double Dragon, Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, TMNT, The Simpsons, Final Fight and Golden Axe. In 2022, the documentation of the NEC V Series, about the NEC V60 processors, used in the Sega System 32 and Sega Model 1 boards, NEC V70, used in the Sega System Multi 32 board, and NEC V80, used in NEC SX Series supercomputers, such as NEX SX-3 and SX-4. And finally, the documentation of the Free Kick game released in 1987 for arcade, and its Sega Gigas arcade, and the NEC PC-FX computer. At this time, it also launched the HD6805 Reader in 2021, a tool used to read data from the Hitachi HD6805V microcontroller (derived from the Motorola MC6805), used in old devices, such as the Sega SP-400 printer, through a hardware called Arduino Uno.

Essai and Google websites

In his professional life, he studied computer science with a degree in electronics and computer technology at Chabot College Community College in Hayward, California, from 2004 to 2007. From 2009 to 2015, he studied computer engineering with a degree in mathematics at San José State University in San José, California. Also at the same university, he completed a master's degree in computer engineering, specializing in systems design and verification, from 2015 to 2017. In 2017, he joined Essai, a company in the San Francisco Bay Area. There, Charles worked as an embedded hardware engineer, working with electrical machines, devices, and materials. He remained there until 2018. In 2020, he moved to Mountain View, California, to work as a software engineer for Google. Charles specializes in hardware, digital electronics, Windows and Linux systems, assembly language, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Excel, C and C++ programming, technical writing, among others.

Emulators:

SMS Plus (1998), SMS Plus (for PSX) (2000), YM2413 (2000), Sega System 16 Emulator (2000), Sega System C2 Emulator (2000), TurboGrafix Emulator (2001), Genesis Plus (2002)

Programs (Others):

CVTest (Source & Binary Colecovision Emulator) (1999), Delace (Join Parts of Interleaved File) (2000), HD6805 Reader (2021)

Programs (Sega System 16):

System 16 Sound Player (1999)

Programs (Mega Drive):

GYMPlay (2000), SMD2BIN (2000), Scrolling Examples (2000), Shadow/Hilight Demo #1 (2000), Shadow/Hilight Demo #2 (2000), Shadow/Hilight Demo #3 (2001), SMDUtil (2001), STA (SMS Plus Save State Viewer) (2001), WBug (Window Bug Example Program) (2001), Win (Interactive Window Test) (2001), Win1 (Interactive Window Test Mode 1) (2001), Win2 (Interactive Window Test Mode 2) (2001), V Counter Test (2001), Memory Test (2001), Z80 Music Driver (2001), VRAMPack (2002), MD Trans (Transparencies Example) (2002), Raster Test (2002), GenCom (Interface Test) (2003)

Programs (SC-3000/SMS/GG)

Sprite/Priority Test (2001), Palette Test (2001), Scroll Test (2001), V-Counter Test (2001), 6-Button Pad Test (2001)

Programs (PC-Engine):

Memory Viewer (2001), MPR Editor (2002), PSG Register Editor (2002)

Programs (Sega Saturn):

SatMem (SH-2 Memory Map) (2002), Minivader Emulator (2002), Use The Back Screen (Tutorial) (2002), SCU Timers 0 And 1 (2002), VDP1 To Render Polygons (2002), SatUtil (2002), VDP1View (2002), Bin2ASM (2002), SatWin2 (NBG0-3) (2003), SatSND (SCSP Sound Playing) (2003)

Programs (SNES):

SNESSpr (Sprites Config) (2003), SNESil (Display Mode) (2003)

Programs (GameCube):

GMC Tool (2004)

Documentation:

2000: Sega System C2, Sega Genesis, Sega System 24, Master System, Mega Drive

2001: PC Engine, Sega System 16B

2002: Sega SC-3000, Sega Saturn

2003: Sega Pre-System 16, Sega System 18, Sega System 24, Super Nintendo

2004: Sega X-Board, Sega System 32

2006: FD1094 Game Conversion

2007: CPS-2

2011: Atari GX2

2020: Sega ST-V, JAMMA

2022: NEC V Series (V60, V70 & V80)

2024: Free Kick/Sega Gigas, NEC PC-FX