Emulating the Sega Genesis - Part III

• blastem

  12 47 0.0 C

  Upstream tracking repo of BlastEm, the fast and accurate Genesis emulator, with libretro specific changes

  

I also came across the BlastEm emulator in C, which has a builtin debugger. I was able to modify and compile a local version which dumps out the contents of VRAM at a specific point in a ROM's execution. With this, I could verify that the data in VRAM in Moa was correct and the DMA and transfer code was in fact working correctly. I ended up not digging into the BlastEm code much beyond this, but the validation it provided was extremely helpful.

• moa

  5 49 8.1 Rust

  An emulator for various m68k and z80 based computers, written in Rust. Currently it has support for the Sega Genesis, TRS-80, and Computie (my own project), with Macintosh support in the works (by transistorfet)

A few months ago, I wrote a 68000 emulator in Rust named Moa. My original goal was to emulate a simple computer I had previously built. After only a few weeks, I had that software up and running in the emulator, and my attention turned to what other platforms with 68000s I could try emulating. My thoughts quickly turned to the Sega Genesis and without thinking about it too much, I dove right in. What started as an unserious half-thought of "wouldn't that be cool" turned into a few months of fighting documentation, game programming hacks, and my sanity with some side quests along the way, all in the name of finding and squashing bugs in the 68k emulator I had already written.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• CLK

  22 886 9.9 C++

  A latency-hating emulator of: the Acorn Electron and Archimedes, Amstrad CPC, Apple II/II+/IIe and early Macintosh, Atari 2600 and ST, ColecoVision, Enterprise 64/128, Commodore Vic-20 and Amiga, MSX 1/2, Oric 1/Atmos, early PC compatibles, Sega Master System, Sinclair ZX80/81 and ZX Spectrum.

The Macintosh implementation didn't go as smoothly however. I did manage to find and fix a few bugs in the 68000, and I got far enough to display the Dead Mac screen, but I got stuck just before the end of the ROM's initialization where it opens the default device drivers. At some point, it attempts to write to a location in the ROM. In hardware that shouldn't have an affect, except that I have some code in Moa to raise an error when that happens, since it's likely a bug. Ignoring that error didn't make it get any farther. I couldn't for the life of me find out what was wrong, but at one point, using another emulator, I was able to confirm that if the ROMs ran on a system that didn't mirror the RAM and ROM address exactly as the hardware does, the ROM wont boot. facepalm Effort went into making sure the Macintosh was not cloned like the IBM PC, so I was fighting against those effort as well. After a while I decided to give the Genesis a try again.

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