Generator emulator

Generator is an open source emulator designed to emulate the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive console, a popular games machine produced in the early 1990s. It is a portable program written in C and has been ported to the Amiga, Macintosh, Windows and even pocket PCs such as the iPAQ and Cassiopeia. Natively it compiles under unix for X Windows with either tcl/tk or gtk/SDL, for svgalib and even cross-compiles to DOS with djgpp/allegro.

Generator uses it's own custom 68000 processor emulation which is and uses compilation techniques such as block-marking, flag calculation removal, operand pre-calculation, endian pre-conversion etc. There are approximately 1600 C routines generated by the first stage of compilation to cope with the 67 instruction families. These include two versions of every instruction - one that calculates flags and one that doesn't, so that unnecessary flag computation is avoided.

Generator was first released in August 1998, although my first attempt at writing a Sega Genesis / Mega Drive emulator dates back to 1996!

Features Main emulation Unique portable 68000 emulator Video support Comprehensive emulation - all layers including window All DMA modes including DMA processor suspension Interlace mode - bob, weave, weave with vertical filtering 100%, 200%, Full-screen support (platform dependent) H/V retrace video border emulation Cell and raster based plotters NTSC and PAL modes Manual and automatic per-frame frame skip Sound support Programmable sound generator (PSG) Frequency modulation (FM) Z80 sound co-processor emulation Component on/off support Low-pass single-pole configurable filter AVI output Raw uncompressed 24-bit RGB bmp JPEG compressed (configurable quality) 24-bit, so-called MJPEG Configurable framerate (6-60fps) Game Genie Convert to and from encoded format Genecyst load/save patch file support Patch file manager Sound logging Genecyst GYM logging (without sample data) Generator GNM logging (with sample data) Multi player Configurable keyboard controls Split-screen interlaced support Joystick support Save-state Extensible block-based file format Supports different z80 cores