BlastEm 0.6.2

Description

BlastEm has the goal of being an extremely accurate Genesis emulator while still running on relatively modest hardware by using advanced techniques.

Currently it meets neither my accuracy nor performance goals, but those goals are pretty high. Speed and accuracy should be sufficient for most purposes. It runs at full speed on an old first generation Intel Atom and can run Sonic 2 at around 600 fps on a Haswell desktop using a single core. To my knowledge, it is the only emulator besides Genesis Plus GX that can properly display the "TITAN 512C FOREVER" portion of Titan's Overdrive demo, and the only emulator besides Exodus that passes all 122 of the tests in Nemesis' VDP FIFO Testing ROM and can properly display "Direct Color DMA" demos.

Requirements

BlastEm requires a computer with an x86 processor running Linux, OSX or Windows. There is experimental support for x86 Android devices like the Nexus Player, but due to the rough state of that port I am not providing pre-built binaries at this time. The current version depends on SDL 2, GLEW and OpenGL 2. On systems without OpenGL 2 support, BlastEm will fallback to using SDL 2's render API. You may be able to use it on other Unix-like systems if you're willing to compile it yourself.

Features

savestates
integrated debugger
GDB remote debugging
joystick/gamepad support
Mega/Sega Mouse support
save RAM and EEPROM support
Sonic & Knuckles lock-on
turbo and slow modes
configurable low pass filter
single pass GLSL shaders (though there are no interesting ones presently)

Changelog

New Features

Zipped and gzipped SMD ROMs are now supported

Accuracy/Completeness Improvements

Fixed timing of a few instructions in Z80 core
Added optional emulation of YM2612 imperfections (aka "ladder effect")
Fixed some unintentional extra precision in some FM LFO calculations
Added a 1 sample delay in some FM operator results when used as modulators to match hardware

Bugfixes

Fixed regression in NBA JAM TE and possibly other 32MBit Acclaim mapper titles
Added code to handle controllers that have their d-pads mapped as buttons or axes
Removed some problematic SDL2 game controller mappings
Fixed crash that occurred when releasing mouse too clickly when loading a ROM
Fixed SMD ROM support
Fixed handling of audio contexts with more or less than 2 channels
Fixed off-by-one error in IO device selection UI
Fixed regression in GDB remote debugging support on Linux and OS X

Other Changes

MegaWiFi hardware can now be enabled by a header string (still gated by config)
Tweaked the style of checkboxes in the Nuklear UI to hopefully make the on/off state more clear