Exodus - Cycle accurate Mega Drive emulation

[King Of Chaos]

Hopefully this is the right forum section for this, since it *is* programming related and can be very useful in game development. This was posted on the SpritesMind forums, Nemesis is finally releasing his Genesis/Mega Drive emulator!

For those of you who don't know, I've been working on an emulator called Exodus for the last few years. In fact, I've been working on this emulator since November 2006 if you can believe it. After years of work, I'm pleased to announce I'll be officially making a public release of this emulator before the end of April.

I've been doing extensive hardware testing since I began this project to gather the necessary information to make the most technically accurate Mega Drive emulator ever written. I performed and published results of my testing on the YM2612 back in 2008, and a lot of Mega Drive emulators now have more accurate sound emulation as a result. This testing was initiated to assist the development of my own YM2612 emulation core for Exodus. I've also done a lot of testing on the VDP over the last couple of years to build a cycle accurate VDP core, which is fundamentally more accurate than any other VDP core in existence, and can correctly respond to mid-line state changes. In fact, all of the emulation cores used by Exodus are written entirely by me, from scratch, relying primarily on direct hardware testing to confirm many aspects of their implementation. Accuracy has been paramount in the design and development of this emulator, and I hope it will become a new standard for emulation accuracy.

My efforts aren't just focused on the Mega Drive however. I've spent a lot of time working on the overall design and architecture of Exodus to make probably the most generic, flexible, and scalable emulation platform ever written. This emulator is fundamentally different to every other emulator I know of, in several critical ways. I'll publish more about that towards the time of release, but most importantly, Exodus is not a Mega Drive emulator. Exodus is a generic emulation platform, which allows systems to be assembled from individual components at runtime. Nothing related to a particular system is hardcoded. Exodus constructs a system from a set of discrete components, manages the communication between those components, and keeps perfect timing accuracy between each component. Other systems can easily be modelled without modifying or rebuilding Exodus, it simply requires emulation cores for each device in that system to be available. As more cores are available for Exodus to use, more and more systems can be modelled easily, as a lot of systems share common components.

With Exodus, I'm starting my emulation efforts with the Mega Drive, but I have my sights set on plenty of other systems, like the Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, and various Sega arcade systems. I've spent the last few years collecting a wide variety of hardware for testing and analysis, and I'm going to continue this project and expand it into many other platforms. I'm planning to continue advancing and leading this project, and I hope one day it will be able to rival even the biggest emulation projects such as MESS and MAME for system support, while providing a number of key advantages over other projects.

Exodus is also an extremely powerful debugging, development, and analysis environment, which I'm hoping will be able to serve as a very useful tool for communities involved in development, hacking, and reverse engineering, to be able to do more complex and thorough debugging and testing in software, where you can trust that if it runs properly in Exodus, it will run the same way on the real hardware, and vice versa.

Exodus will also be fully open source. This will happen shortly after the first release, after some further thought and discussion about licensing. An SDK will be provided which will allow any other interested developers to write and adapt cores for use in Exodus. Cores exist as separate DLL files, and can be compiled and released separately from the emulation platform itself, so individual cores can be developed and released on their own schedule, and don't need to be locked into the release schedule of the platform itself.

Exodus will finally see its first official, non-beta/preview release this month! On or before the end of April, no matter what, I'll be making the first release. Stay tuned for more information as the date draws nearer.

Website: http://www.exodusemulator.com/
Make suggestions and vote on others here: http://ideas.exodusemulator.com/

There's already requests for cheats (Game Genie and Pro Action Replay) support along with requests for various cheat search options. Can't wait for this to be released in three and a half days!

[Helder]

I love any new emulator with debugging features and I'm so looking forward to the other Sega Systems he will emulate.

[nolberto82]

Nice looking debugger.

[King Of Chaos]

It's out. :P

[Helder]

Nice! will have to give it a look.

Edit: Looks like its x64 emulator only no x86 support, man that sucks! I wanted to use it on my laptop that is 32bit.

[King Of Chaos]

I'm going to have to upgrade my PC hardware to get full 60 FPS in all games, hehe. :P

[Tony H]

Runs perfectly. All kinds of debugging options to explore. Sweet.

[Tony H]

Look at all the hacking goodness...

[OldSchoolGamer]

... I didn't realize the astronomical system requirements. But I realize it's necessary for such an accurate emulator like this one. I won't even bother trying it on my P4, 3.0GHz. Damn, I was really looking forward to this emulator for quite some time. It gives me even more motivation to finally buy a new computer.

[jpgilyard]

I...

I thought nemesis was dead, or had at least gone wholly off the grid?
hadn't heard any news from or about him in years.
good to know there is a new Genny emulator, shame i cant use it.
how accurate is it compared to regen or fusion?

[OldSchoolGamer]

how accurate is it compared to regen or fusion?

It's supposedly the most accurate Genesis emulator available.

[47iscool]

... I didn't realize the astronomical system requirements. But I realize it's necessary for such an accurate emulator like this one. I won't even bother trying it on my P4, 3.0GHz. Damn, I was really looking forward to this emulator for quite some time. It gives me even more motivation to finally buy a new computer.

Oh lord, it would crawl with me because my PC only has 2.1GHz Dual Core. And I have AMD processors so that only makes it worse. Only reason I use PCSX2 & Dolphin are for cheat making most of the time they are slow but my bro's copy of Brawl run's better than any other Wii game. Something bug's me about my processors though, Vista 32 bit/x86 came installed but my 2 AMD's say they have 64 bit support, does anyone think I might could run Win7 x64?

[Helder]

Run the installer from DVD and it will say if its compatible or not.

Edit: does anyone know how to configure a USB gamepad to work with the emulator? I try automap and none of the buttons registers, it would suck to play with the keyboard.

[47iscool]

Run the installer from DVD and it will say if its compatible or not.

I don't have an x64 disc right now but thanks, I will get one sometime later. Probably have to order it because the stores where I live don't sell it anymore sadly.

[King Of Chaos]

I don't believe USB gamepads are currently supported but somebody suggested it already.