Sega Genesis Emulator

I remember spending countless hours playing on my Megadrive as a kid, and I needed some low-level programming week-end project...So I started working on a Megadrive emulator for Playdate.
The 68k emulation is based off Musashi, sound does not work yet, but some games are running :slight_smile:
playdate-20230221-235516

playdate-20230222-000815

Source code will be available whenever I have it running on device :melting_face: and have cleaned up the messy parts of it.

11 Likes

This looks way too good to be true.
Looking forward to trying this out when it eventually releases!
How are you processing the colors?

For the color representation, I'm currently generating patterns based on luminance and existing surrounding luminance patterns during scanline rasterisation. I'm testing different variants, but all games are not equal on this.

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This is impressive.

It looks like how these games would look if they were ported to the ZX81 or a TI calculator!

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Have you had anybody try it on hardware yet?

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Not yet, hardware is pre-ordered tho. I'm quite confident I can get that running decently :slight_smile:

Looking forward to your optimisation tricks!

It will be quite a feat. The only other emulator I knowof is Game Boy which doesn't make full speed.

Impressive! I like how you did the color representation. If you need someone to test on actual hardware, let me know.

Thanks! I'm testing different error diffusions methods for color, but it seems there is not one solid rule that would work on all games. Depends on the patterns and the amount of movement.

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50 fps? This is very cool.

That's on the Simulator I think, not an actual Playdate. Will be interesting to see what happens on the real processor!

Exactly, that's where the fun will really begin :slight_smile:

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If you are willing to share the source code or a precompiled pdx, I could test on real hardware. I have sega roms from Steam.

Did your hardware arrive yet @octobinz ?