Genesis Emu for Gamecube News

March 8th, 2006, 20:03 Posted By: wraggster

Honkeykong posted this news:

Just like every other place where I post, I’m starting to get the feeling that I’m neglecting this place. So, in order to try and make up for that, I thought I would post about something that I’ve been working on these past couple of days.

As an excuse to collaborate with Softdev, and also as a means of breathing new life into the somewhat stagnant Gamecube scene, we have started a porting and improvement project on the Genesis Plus emulator.

“Hasn’t this already been ported to the Gamecube?” - Yes. Unfortunately, the current port is sorely lacking in areas that could make it much better on the platform, such as proper display and sound code.

Sure, the author complied with the GPL, but only as far as he had to. Since he used a library that isn’t easily accessible to aspiring console developers, it’s pretty much useless.

What we are doing, is bringing the emulator over to a set of tools and libraries that are accessible to anybody who wants to use them, DevkitPPC and libOGC. After all, what’s the point of working on an Open Source project if the community can’t contribute back to it? It goes against the whole Open Source philosophy.

Yes, we are fully aware of the original porter’s laborous 18-month development cycle to get his emulator where it is today. Really though, I guess I can see where that would just be a damn shame. I mean, I’d be angry too if I spent 18 months developing a piece of software, only to have two people who co-operated in producing similar software surpass it in only two days of work. (Oops, did I just say that? Oh well, don’t take my word for it, I wouldn’t want to unnecessarily step on anybody’s toes. Give it a go for yourself and you can be the judge.)

Of course, as we want to make this a true community project, we are handling it in a fashion that will probably be seen as unorthodox to the Gamecube community at large. Throughout the project, we will not be releasing binaries, or a ROM injector. What we will be doing, however, is releasing full source code for the emulator as it’s being worked on. If you would like to become part of the project, all you need to do is download the source and build it for yourself. The source code should compile fine with the latest DevkitPPC (Which you can find at the DevkitPro link on the right navigation bar of this page), and the latest CVS version of libOGC, which can be compiled and installed with the aforementioned DevkitPPC Gamecube Development Kit.

If you’ve managed to get far enough to build the emulator and get it running on your Gamecube, then congratulations! You now have a fully capable Gamecube Development Kit set up, and ready to help us take on this project! Feel free to test it with some of your favorite games, and see if they are as accurate as you remember them being on your original Sega Genesis hardware. Of course, as you do that, it’s inevitable that you will probably find some inaccurate emulation. What to do, what to do? Well, you have the source code to the emulator sitting right there in front of you. Why not tinker with it and see if you can fix that little bugger? That’s what the community is all about, isn’t it?

There are 1 comments - Join In and Discuss Here