notaz
Certified Guru
Background
Picodrive is yet another Megadrive / Genesis emulator. It was originally written by Dave from finalburn.com (site seems to be dead now) for Pocket PC back in 2004. There were also some ports for other systems (Gigadrive/Genadrive) based on the same code, which were done also by Dave. They were not very accurate and didn't emulate sound. There was still a lot to do, but Dave abandomed his works, including unfinished Cyclone core. Fortunately Dave released the source, so then (as far as I understand) Reesy used it as a base of DrMD(x).
In the summer of 2005 I saw a port of PicoDrive on my mobile, but it was very inaccurate, had no sound and was unable to run any of my favourite games. DrMD's source was not available, so I took Dave's code and started fiddling with it. The project was slowly moving and reached the state it is in today.
[CUT]
So why to make PicoDrive, when we already have DrMd(x)?
* it can handle mid-frame palette changes, because it does 16bit rendering (water in Sonic).
* it can do shadow/hilight modes also because of 16bit rendering (check Skitchin' menus, Toy Story intro images, ...)
* it can emulate window plane nearly properly (check GRIND Stormer, Mercs, ...)
* it can render interlace mode2 (Sonic2 and Combat Cars 2 player modes)
* it can emulate serial SRAM chips (Megaman - The Wily Wars, Wonder Boy in Monster World, NBA Jam, many other EA sports games, ...)
* it can emulate custom banking of 4-in-1 and 12-in-1 ROMs
* one of few emus which can run some protected unlicensed games like Super Bubble Bobble, King of Fighters '98.
* one of few emus which can boot Virtua Racing and run it's 2d stuff.
* open source
But of course it has it's weaknesses, default renderer seems to be slower than DrMd's. There are also some sound problems. The menu is very minimal (but that's the style I prefer). You can think about it as a tech-demo, which has a purpose to improve MD emulation quality. Reesy can use the code if he wants, but in that case I suggest him to release his source too.
Download
Source code
Edit: updated links to the new files because had to delete the old ones.
[/CUT]
Picodrive is yet another Megadrive / Genesis emulator. It was originally written by Dave from finalburn.com (site seems to be dead now) for Pocket PC back in 2004. There were also some ports for other systems (Gigadrive/Genadrive) based on the same code, which were done also by Dave. They were not very accurate and didn't emulate sound. There was still a lot to do, but Dave abandomed his works, including unfinished Cyclone core. Fortunately Dave released the source, so then (as far as I understand) Reesy used it as a base of DrMD(x).
In the summer of 2005 I saw a port of PicoDrive on my mobile, but it was very inaccurate, had no sound and was unable to run any of my favourite games. DrMD's source was not available, so I took Dave's code and started fiddling with it. The project was slowly moving and reached the state it is in today.
[CUT]
So why to make PicoDrive, when we already have DrMd(x)?
* it can handle mid-frame palette changes, because it does 16bit rendering (water in Sonic).
* it can do shadow/hilight modes also because of 16bit rendering (check Skitchin' menus, Toy Story intro images, ...)
* it can emulate window plane nearly properly (check GRIND Stormer, Mercs, ...)
* it can render interlace mode2 (Sonic2 and Combat Cars 2 player modes)
* it can emulate serial SRAM chips (Megaman - The Wily Wars, Wonder Boy in Monster World, NBA Jam, many other EA sports games, ...)
* it can emulate custom banking of 4-in-1 and 12-in-1 ROMs
* one of few emus which can run some protected unlicensed games like Super Bubble Bobble, King of Fighters '98.
* one of few emus which can boot Virtua Racing and run it's 2d stuff.
* open source
But of course it has it's weaknesses, default renderer seems to be slower than DrMd's. There are also some sound problems. The menu is very minimal (but that's the style I prefer). You can think about it as a tech-demo, which has a purpose to improve MD emulation quality. Reesy can use the code if he wants, but in that case I suggest him to release his source too.
Download
Source code
Edit: updated links to the new files because had to delete the old ones.
[/CUT]