Main » Emulation » 32X CRAShTEST: the mushroom of doom strikes back! » New reply
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    tomman I'm now aware of the fact that Ares has a working 32X emulation core, and that it's assumed to be reasonably accurate, so expect an update for this crashtest in the not so immediate future.

    Sadly my initial impressions were not great: my hardware is simply too weak for it - at best I get ~35FPS and heavily distorted audio :/ But on the flip side, it passes the infamous Mars Check Program with flying colors! So this gonna be fun...
    tomman By popular demand Because I could finally afford to pay for webhosting and a domain again for the first time in years, my junk is back online, where it belongs!

    https://mi.tsdx.net.ve/32Xbench/

    Yes, we now do SSL at this house. But don't worry, I do not intend to force SSL on dinosaurs - this URL works fine on Win9x and other less terrible computers :)
    CaptainJistuce The power of so many X'es in one place has been unleashed... but is the world ready for it?
    tomman [insert here Spongebob-themed "4 YEARS LATER" titlecard]

    Somehow I ended looking at a PicoDrive fork that really impressed me:
    https://github.com/irixxxx/picodrive

    Looks like someone WAS reading my crashtest results and decided to do Something™. And oh well, Something™ was done, and done well!
    All the problem games on my test now run flawlessly on irixxxx's PicoDrive 1.99, technically bringing PicoDrive to a perfect 10 (at least on the 32X section) - not only matching Fusion but even surpassing it (as it doesn't have the DMA PWM audio issues on Linux, and it can boot ALL retail games... including the infamous Surgical Strike 32X CD, which Fusion can't). This is nothing short of impressive - hell, even the Mars Check Program passes ALL tests with flying colors! (and to make things more incredible, irixxxx just wanted to learn about recompilers... and ended deep into the rabbit hole fixing countless bugs on PicoDrive's SH-2 cores!)

    Too bad the rest of PicoDrive is basically "well, we need something fast for ARM toys", so there are still unaddressed problems with its Genesis underpinnings (run the Overdrive demos for a example) and you should stick to the good stuff (BlastEm, Genesis Plus) for your base Genesis needs, but if you need a multiplatform 32X emulator that can run on modern computers, this is it, look no more because you have no other options. As a bonus, there are now recompiler cores for ARM64 and even RISC-V!

    Forget about MAME (it's still unusable dogshit). Forget about Gens too (it's deader than Yuyuko). And now it's time to send off Fusion on a well deserved farewell too.
    Braintrash René (or Voultar) did help, so I guess it's fine.
    tomman Oh, it also doubles as a Gen/MD flashcart? Now that's some great value for the price.

    Wonder how they took care of the "thou shall not expose 3.3V Flash ROM to 5V bus without safe measures" bit, as even Krikzz himself sometimes misses that part. Aside of that, I would love to see some hardware tests on that thing.
    Braintrash The Mega SD seems pretty neat. It is a FPGA solution which seems accurate. It is even said that some respectable maniacs (FirebrandX and René) have helped its development in order to avoid the same problems they had on the PC Engine extension, which is a solid selling point to me. Kevtris himself ordered one and I did too.

    I had a Mega CD and I LOVED it. Final Fight CD was incredible on it (I never touched the Super Famicom port after this one) and Sonic CD remains my favorite one (wouldn't have been if I had the US version with its horrible butter kusai soundtrack). I played it to death, honestly, even Anet Again, mind you.

    This said, I hoped for a nice solution for the Mega CD and this cart is really answering the prayer. I didn't buy yet a Krikzz cart, so I don't mind the price, since it does replace a Krikzz cart and add the full Mega CD compatibility. And if you bought a Krikzz cart, you can sell it in order to soften the price.

    Now, I just saw their PC Engine extension is sold out, I do hope they will make a new run, maybe a new edition, because I will instant buy it, although in a perfect world, Analogue would finally release their Turbo Nc and Terraonion would release an updated cart for it based on their PC Engine extension.

    BTW, GDEMU could be done on the Mega CD, but since this hardware is being heavily scalped on the market and also the units are very fragile and need a lot of refurbishing care, it wouldn't be worth the effort. And I say that while LOVING the first Mega Drive and the first Mega CD, so cool design...
    tomman Something like a GDEMU, perharps?

    However, the idea is sound, as the supply of SCD consoles is quite small and finite. The problem as usual is accuracy, considering that to this date the SCD is not fully emulated. I'm unaware of compatibility lists for emulators released in this decade, and all recent emulation attempts only try to get the Genesis base right (as this is a much more attainable goal). Doing it in hardware... well, good luck to those guys.

    Also, regarding the GDEMU: I don't know how feasible it would be a similar device for the SCD. On the DC, it was quite easy as the GDROM drive was a self-contained unit... except for VA2 motherboards where Sega integrated the GDROM drive brains on the main motherboard. But then the same guy did a similar device for Saturn consoles, and on those the CDROM controller IS integrated on all but the earliest motherboards. So maybe it is doable after all (from what I can remember, the SCD CDROM block is made mostly of off-the-shelf parts)
    KingMike I've heard the same people that last year(?) made a flash cart replacement for the Turbo CD have announced one for the Sega CD.
    That is, a Genesis flash cart which includes a Sega CD emulator, I believe.
    I think it's been said it does support being added on top of an actual 32X. So... that's getting a step closer to a 32X-CD emulator.

    I had been asking for a Sega CD flash cart replacement but now that I see what it'll actually cost is quite a stinger. 250 euros.
    What's that, like 300 dollars?

    What I wondered is it was possible to somehow put something in the port between a Genesis and Sega CD, like a replacement BIOS to otherwise use the actual SCD hardware but load from flash instead of the CD. Wonder if that would've been cheaper than emulating the entire CD unit itself. (since as I have heard, the TurboCD was largely just a CD reader but the Sega CD had a more significant hardware upgrade)
    tomman You can always add more madness to the mix.

    Let me remind you that cart-based software CAN access the MCD side (Flux, region converter carts, Sonic Winter Adventures, and IIRC there was a CD-enhanced version of Pier Solar). Combined with the mushroom of doom, noone says you can't slap, say, a 21MHz ARM3 CPU on a cart to make a 6-CPU abomination :D

    And if you're MAD ASS CRAZY, you can bring in your favorite FPGA, add some analog/overlay video mixer, and add two or three extra planes and a few spare polygons/s. Once again Sega does what Nintendon't.

    But then, if Higan ever implements this unholy trainwreck of console/accessory "mating", I guess I'll play all four discs of Slam City like a NBA star.
    KingMike Says byuu:
    You're out of your damned mind if you think higan is ever going to run this 5-CPU, 23-channel, 10-plane, 260K polygons/s abomination.

    I'll give it a couple weeks before the perfectionism in byuu strikes.
    tomman Found this interesting place with 32X game reviews, cheats, and other stuff:

    http://rq87.flyingomelette.com/RQ/32X/1.html

    Important information regarding region locked software: http://www.segakore.fr/index.php/2013/11/30/modify-your-mega-drive-genesis-32x-pal-ntsc?page=3

    Also, I just realized that there are other undumped Euro 32X releases: they're all CD games (yuck!), basically all of them except for Fahrenheit (this combo release never went outside 'murica) and Surgical Strike (which ended being a Brazilian exclusive for whatever reason, after a last minute cancellation at USA). Europe did got all of the Digital Pictures Full Motion Vomit releases on the enhanced version, but none of the Sega-made ones. The existing rips are all USA/NTSC releases (remember: unlike ROM carts, all SCD games are region locked). Fun.
    Found rips for those Euro CD games. I'm not testing those ones for now, sorry :P

    Fortunately Japan got spared from the SCD32X disaster, as SoJ was too busy messing up with the Saturn.
    CaptainJistuce
    Posted by tomman


    D'OH!



    tomman
    Posted by Screwtape
    Looks like you've got the MAME and GENS logos switched at the top of their respective columns.


    D'OH!

    Fixed, thanks!
    Screwtape Looks like you've got the MAME and GENS logos switched at the top of their respective columns.
    tomman Managed to find a way to take the junk that Excel 2003 tries to pass as "HTML" (thanks to HTML Tidy and this C# snippet), and now I've updated the ol' plain HTML version on my site.

    Still required some massaging on a editor, mainly to simplify some of the resulting CSS mess and to properly add the links to the bug screenshots this time. Most likely this won't pass the HTML5 validation and will make those Silly Valley VC kids to weep because I'm not using hundreds of megabytes of Javascripts, but the 32X is a suitable punishment for that :D

    CaptainJistuce
    Posted by KingMike
    Posted by tomman

    Fun fact: the Japanese version of Virtua Racing has SRAM backup save (for record times?). The export versions lost that feature (most likely as a cost cutting measure). But hey, at least they did changed the main menu colors (which were quite unreadable on the JP original), and the "VIIIIIIRTUA RACING!" chant (the JP one is lazy as hell).


    You'd think for a game that reportedly retailed for $99US at launch, a couple more bucks for RAM and a battery wouldn't have broke them. :P
    Hundred bucks was for the Genesis version, not the 32x version. The coprocessor jacked the price up.
    KingMike
    Posted by tomman

    Fun fact: the Japanese version of Virtua Racing has SRAM backup save (for record times?). The export versions lost that feature (most likely as a cost cutting measure). But hey, at least they did changed the main menu colors (which were quite unreadable on the JP original), and the "VIIIIIIRTUA RACING!" chant (the JP one is lazy as hell).


    You'd think for a game that reportedly retailed for $99US at launch, a couple more bucks for RAM and a battery wouldn't have broke them. :P
    Broseph
    Posted by tomman


    In my testing, PicoDrive ran Virtua Fighter just fine (I'm not good at fighting games overall, so I just endured like the first 3 fighters), with the only broken thing being the win animations you get after finishing with each fighter: you're supposed to get a fancy animation with "WINNER" on top, but instead all you get is a mostly static frame with a corrupted model of the winner.

    As for the 32X Virtua Fighter being a decent arcade port, that's because Sega's AM2 did the port themselves, which makes sense. In the case of Virtua Racing, it seems the home console ports were done by a different team.

    Fun fact: the Japanese version of Virtua Racing has SRAM backup save (for record times?). The export versions lost that feature (most likely as a cost cutting measure). But hey, at least they did changed the main menu colors (which were quite unreadable on the JP original), and the "VIIIIIIRTUA RACING!" chant (the JP one is lazy as hell).


    Just got Virtua Fighter 32x it to work.

    I was/am using the libretro port of PicoDrive and didn't noticed before there's a dynamic recompiler on/off option (it was on by default). Turning it off solved the crash issue.
    CaptainJistuce
    Posted by tomman

    (read "SRAM" as "battery-backup save RAM", not "Static RAM").

    In fairness, battery-backed RAMs are usually static RAMs due to the lower power draw.


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