Best Sega Emulator

[toasty]

Turns out my wife is a big Sonic the Hedgehog fan, so I'd like to put an emulator in my cab that will play some of those old Genesis games, and possibly some of the newer ones.  What's the current wisdom on the best way to go? 

Is it better to use something like MESS or use individual emulators?

BTW, I'd like to use something where the games can be launched via MAMEWAH, if possible...

TIA

[GGKoul]

GENS - http://gens.consolemul.com/

[LJHalfbreed]

My current favorite sega emulator is Kega Fusion...  mainly because it emulates the scary '32x connected to the Sega CD' option many other emus don't. It also emulates stuff on gamegear and such, so you can pick up a sonic game or two off of there.

As far as mamewah is concerned, there's a few different ways you can go about getting them all on the same list...

If you just want 'Sega' games, using Kega Fusion will probably be the best way to go... To keep it simple, make a new rom directory for just Sonic games, pop them all in there as a 'new' emulator, and it'll show up as a new list for you to pick from.


If you want *all* sonic games (Including the few on Mame, GBA, and other emulators for sake of completeness), you'll probably have to check out JCrouse and Minwah's testing and explanation of making game-specific INI files. What this means is you can have multiple games in the same list, but use different emulators to run them. This can be found here:

http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=49826&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1&vc=1&new=1137692933

It's referencing a different emulator (Zinc) but you can grasp the idea of how the ini's are set up, and where to create the 'games' folder, etc.

I'm planning on doing this for at least a few main characters that have tons of 'franchise' games (Mario is one, Sonic and Kunio-Kun are others) just because like you, I have family/friends that love games with certain characters. So... unfortunately I don't have any ini or gamelist files to post right now, but I'll post them as soon as I'm done.

HTH!

[toasty]

thanks much, appreciate the reply...

Pardon the noobish question that follows, but that's unfortunately where I'm at -- your message alludes to this but I'm not clear:  when using MAMEWAH with multiple emulators, do all the games that you have appear on one list, regardless of what program is used to emulate them?  Or is it a deal where you have to switch something when you want to play a game that isn't emulated by MAME?  Or something else?

Right now, I just have it set up for the mame games, but I'm planning on adding the sega games, and daphne.  I'm still trying to wrap my brain around all of this... 

[LJHalfbreed]

Generally speaking, mamewah is set up to use a single list per emulator, and use only one rom extension.

For instance, for your Mame roms, Mamewah is set up to 'know' to use the mame.exe (or whatever version of mame you're using) for all games in that list. It knows how many are in that list by checking the 'roms' folder. And, of course, it knows what files are roms by the extension you give it (in this case, probably .zip)

So what you might end up with is an emulator ini file that has this: (Trimmed down to explain... DO NOT USE as a real ini!)

emulator_title                            Nintendo   ((This is the name of your emulator, as it shows up on your layout))

### List Generation Settings ###
rom_path                                  C:\hypercade\NES\roms   ((Rompath and extension tell mamewah where the roms are, and what kind of file they are))
rom_extension                             zip
dat_file                                 
nms_file                                 
catver_ini_file                           
list_generation_method                    rom_folder  ((Tells mamewah to build a list according to the roms in the roms folder))

### Execution Settings ###
pre_emulator_app_commandlines     
emulator_commandline                      C:\hypercade\NES\fceu.exe [rompath]\[name].[romext] ((Tells mamewah when you click on a rom, send this first part followed by the rompath, romname, and extension:  C:\Hypercade\NES\FCEU.EXE C:\hypercade\nes\roms\supermario1.zip))
post_emulator_app_commandlines           
general_app_commandlines



Well, since *every* game on that list in mamewah will use this same ini file, you can't really stack it full of roms that don't work on your emulator!

What a game specific INI does is tell mamewah "Okay, disregard that INI, and use this one *just* for this particular game". So, technically, you could put mismatched roms in there (Roms used on different emulators) and just put in specific INI's for those roms that use a different emulator.

Make better sense now?

[toasty]

Make better sense now?

Thanks for the explanation.  I think I'm close, but there are still a couple of things I'm fuzzy on:

When you have multiple emulators, is there something in MAMEWah that allows you to switch between them when selecting games?  Or do you have to exit MAMEWah, reconfigure it and restart it?  Or something else?

For my cab, the vast, vast majority of the games will be emulated by MAME.  I'll probably have the full MAME Romset, a handful of Sonic games, and then a couple of Daphne games -- Dragon's Lair and Space Ace.  In the interest of presenting them in as cohesive a way as possible, am I better off just creating game-specific INIs for the few non-MAME games?  Would they all appear in the same list that way? 

My concern is that I would know that it was necessary to switch between emulators to access these other games, but my guests likely don't know what MAME, Daphne, or any other emulators even are, let alone which ones to use to play particular games.

[LJHalfbreed]

To be honest, I'm not sure exactly how it would work within a mame list, since rom list generation can be built a few different ways depending on how you like it.

For instance, my mame roms have the basic mame shorthand naming convention, so something like "Bloody Roar 2" is reduced to bldyror2. Then, the list generation method in my mamewah (v 1.619b) has rom_folder_vs_list_xml, which then 'converts' all the rom names into the full names noted within Mame and the mame.dat files, etc. So this means if you pop in a rom that's not in Mame, it probably won't get populated on the list, and therefore you won't even get it to show up.

By using a game specific INI file, you can basically tell Mamewah "Use the basic setting for all these games, but for <gamename>, use these settings instead." Since Zinc emulates a few games that Mame does (and much faster, at that), you can make ini's just for those games, and tell mamewah to use a separate emulator for them. Since the games are already in the list, they'll populate correctly when you generate a game list. Since you're wanting to have all games in one list, and because Mamewah generates lists for Mame in a non-standard manner, I think you'd be better off having a "mame" list and an "others" list.

This might help explain a bit... For just about everything *but* mame, I have the romlists generated through the 'rom_folder' option, which means anything in my rom folder with the right extension gets shown in the gamelist. What I did was put all my sonic games into a separate folder, and 'pretended' they were all Genesis games, setting up my ini settings for using my genesis emulator. For the games that were on non-genesis hardware, I put in those 'game specific INI' files just for them, which basically told Mamewah to use a different command line (and therefore, different emulators) to run those specific games. End result is that I have one uniform list of games that are 'themed', and although run on totally different emulators, it's transparent to the user and the games just run when played.

As for the separate lists, My setup has 2 buttons that are used to 'flip' through the various emulators/lists on the cabinet. My layout also has arrows and the buttons needed to flip. I'm thinking that you could possibly get away with having just two lists, and as long as you name them something self-explanatory, you could get away with people not being too confused.

For instance...


"Arcade" for mame list and "Toasty's Top Picks" for secondary list.
"Mame" and "<street name> Specials"

etc etc etc

I think the main problem here is the way that mamewah generates the romlist for mame.

Anybody else have any ideas?

[toasty]

   this is evidently more complex than I realized. 

I have a feeling this is going to be easier to understand once I actually load another emulator or two and try to get them up and running.  Without the files in front of me, I feel like I'm talking in the ethers.

What I'm hearing, though, is that there is a way for MAMEWah to create multiple lists that use different emulators, and cycle through those in an intuitive way within MAMEWah -- is that correct?

I should have all the software I need in the next week or so -- I'll plunge into actually doing it then.  Right now I feel handcuffed not being able to go in and actually give these things a try...

Thanks much!

[LJHalfbreed]

Heh... whoops!

Yes... one of the things I like about Mamewah is that emulators are inherently separate, and you can have your games easily categorized just according to 'hardware'. (Most other front ends have easy ways to switch between lists as well).

You can have buttons to switch between emulators (and therefore, their associated game lists) and buttons to switch between game lists for that emulator. Quick example:


Arcade <-----> Nes<----->Daphne ('flip' between emulators)

All Arcade 
^
|
V
Fighting Arcade
^
|
V
Driving Arcade
(flip between lists in an emulator)


So, you can have multiple emulator lists, and then multiple game lists for that emulator. For instance, I have special gamelists for each emulator that are 4-player-simultaneous games. Generating the emulator list is easy, since it's built in with the list_generation setting. Setting up game lists is a bit more difficult, since you  have to use a catver.ini or nplayers.ini (for Mame) or hand-edit your own (most consoles, since no true catver exists).

It actually all turns out quite well. In the current box I'm working on, it uses PSX controllers instead of arcade controls. I use two of the shoulder buttons (R1 and L1) to flip between emulators/systems (Mame to NES, for instance), and the other two (R2 and L2) to flip between game lists (1p and 4p, for example).  On my layout, it has the big labels for R1 and R2 to change systems (emulators) and the small labels to change Games (game lists). It sounds hokey on paper, but I haven't had any problems with non-technical people (and kids!) figuring it out really quick in front of the machine.


Going back to some of our original posts, what I was talking about was making a new (but bogus) emulator list for a group of themed games, such as 'all sonic the hedgehog' or 'All mario'. You'd create the files as normal, but you'd have special ini files (those game-specific INI files) as the ones mamewah would use to start the emulation.  It would be transparent to the user, but would use the various roms with the correct emulators to make things work right.

HTH!

[RayB]

What's the best one for DOS? Is it still Genecyst?

[Minwah]

Generally speaking, mamewah is set up to use a single list per emulator, and use only one rom extension.

Just a small correction...the latest beta versions can use multiple rom extensions.

Fusion has my vote for best Windows Mega Drive (Genesis) emulator too.