Any plans for Sega CD and 32X support?

I'd like to second Sega CD support. Any chance of adding support for 7-Zip compressed ROMs?

Sega CD & 32x support would not be like other "features": it would require writing (or porting) COMPLETE emulators for these systems. I don't know when and if this would ever happen.

7z support is clearly not a priority for me but shouldn't be hard to implement for someone with basic coding knowledge as it is already handled in other opensource emulators.

I am having difficulties with using the 32X roms section that the new GenplusGx? software is able to support, or at least that is my understanding after dwonloading it from hxxp://www.zophar.net/consoles/wii/genesis/genesis-plus-gx.html I can only get genesis and master system roms to load. Help please! Is there a particular file directory I have to load it into? I am using the genplus/roms right now. Thank you!

tsquare, no it doesn't support 32x. I'm hoping it will in the future along with Sega CD Support too.

Genesis Plus only supports genesis/megadrive roms. For master system roms, use SMS Plus GX (http://www.tehskeen.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4209)

Integration of Megadrive and Master System like KEGA would be cool

yeah, I already thought so but we would need a new name for the emu... any ideas ?

Surely naming is the easy part? lol Gen Sys GX? I really dont know but surely it must be the easy part

Many thanks for your amazing work here, I would say this is easily the best Megadrive emu I have used.

Just 1 question:

I'm having problems with trying to re-position the screen from the GUI. For some reason the option doesn't do anything, is there anything I can do about this.

What version are you using ? This should work fine in last revision. Better use the issue reporting for this kind of problem, it's easier for me to trackdown bugs this way.

Are you still planning to merge GenPlus? and SMSPlus? This would be great :)

When will you release the next official version of genplusgx, since the last official release is > 5 Months old and doesn't feature your new UI?

Besides, thank you for your great work! I'm a big SEGA Fan and really enjoy genplus :)

Yes, this is still planned. However, not exactly as you might think: I'm planning to add accurate SMS compatibilty mode support just as how it worked when you connected a Power Base Converter to the Mega Drive. It has tiny differences from a real Master System, which should be emulated (for example, the ability to switch back into MD video mode within a SMS program, not used by any commercial software though). No emulators actually do this so it should be a premiere, for what it's worth...

Official release is on its way and should happpen soon (it's actually more like ne year and a half since 1.3.1, the other one was not by me and did not bring anything worthless but cosmetic menu changes). I only need to finalize the new cheat manager menu (incl. PAR and cheat file support) then we are set.

Looking forward to the next official release!

Some questions for the upcoming official release:

-Do you plan on leaving the VI Trap Filter option set to OFF by default? Disabling it makes games look ridiculously better, though maybe there's a reason to want it on that I'm missing?

-Will you include a tutorial within the emulator for people who don't know how to get the Lock-On feature working? A small bit of text available from a "Help" or "Info" button that says what to name the ROM files and where to place them in the SD card, for example. The reason I ask is because a lot of people will be downloading the new Genesis Plus from the Homebrew Browser application, so they might miss out on how to get this working if you only include it on this project's Wiki page. It's an awesome feature, and it'd be a shame if lots of people missed out on it- same with the background music.

-Will people running the last official release receive an update prompt if their Wii is connected to the internet, or was that not incorporated? If not, do you plan on incorporating this for future updates?

Also, I'd like to second nintendonerd1889's comment. I've been following the emulator for a good while now via SVN updates, and it's really come quite a long way. I bet people who are still on the last official build will be blown away by the new GUI and additional features. =P

- It doesn't really matter imo since 99% of users won't even notice the difference or care for this option. This is enabled by default on the Wii (and probably the function is not available to most programs) so I thought of leaving this to ON by default too.

- If I do that for this option (which again will only be used by 1% people, who already know how this stuff works anyway), i'd need to do it for all options. This is a good idea though and I already thought about that when I first designed the new GUI but it would also dramatically increase the memory footprint of the program and I'm not very happy with that. It could eventually come in the form of offline files (HTML ?) that would be located on SD/USB and come with the emulator download. Anyway, it's not really a big priority, the PDF user manual will be updated according to the new features and it's up to the Homebrew Browser to include it as well (and up to people to make some effort and read it obviously).

- Online update were not implemented in the last "official" so no. Also, I'm not a big fan of automatic update (of any kind) so I probably won't implement this. In a general way, this is the kind of features that are boring as hell to code/debug and are not necessary for an emulator, since it have minimal benefits to the user. I think that after all the efforts I've put into this emulator, I have the right to expect minimal effort from users too ... ;-)

Besides the Master System, is there going to be support for Game Gear and SG-1000 games as well?

Master System, Game Gear and 7zip support would be great, yes. :)

Thanks for all your emulation work!

7zip support will never happen, to much instability and problems on a platform like the Wii, for very little benefits. Better clean up your romsets from all these variants/hacks/bad dumps that you are never going to play anyway. Storage space should also not be a problem nowadays.

Master System support is planned, Game Gear maybe (although is was not backward compatible on Genesis), it depends on how much memory is required when merging the two emulators, the Gamecube port already use 95% of the available RAM with the new GUI. For the time being, this is definitvely very low priority, use SMS Plus GX.

thanks for your work!!! I agree that 7zip support is unneded because zip is more compatible (standard). I've got all sms,gg, md good (!) roms in one 4 Gb SD zipped. You can buy this SDs for 5 € each. But it's a point of view only, i respect people who love 7zip or rar but i prefer rar than 7zip always and 7zippers put varius roms in one file 7z file, usualy and can be harder to add support for this. About hacks, bad dumps, overdumped, etc I usualy delete on my GOOD or TOSEC sets

It's not about the storage space, I just happen to have my rom sets in 7zip. But converting them to zip is not too much trouble, it can be done with WinRAR very easily. (Btw, I don't merge my ROMs or anything, just one file per archive.) I highly recommend the No-Intro sets since they contain no hacks, bad dumps or overdumps.

If you really should decide to support Game Gear someday, I'd propose a new name: useGX - unified sega emulator GX. ;)

Thanks again for all your great work!

"Will you include a tutorial within the emulator for people who don't know how to get the Lock-On feature working? A small bit of text available from a "Help" or "Info" button that says what to name the ROM files and where to place them in the SD card, for example."

How do you use the lock on feature? I have r475 and have been trying to rename and move the sonic and knuckles rom around but I have not been able to get it to work. Could someone possibly post how to do this before the official release .pdf?

In your SD:/genplus directory, place the following:

-Sonic & Knuckles ROM named sk.bin

-Game Genie ROM named ggenie.bin

-Genesis/Mega Drive Action Replay ROM (not Pro Action Replay) named areplay.bin

The .bin part of the filename is of course its extension, so make sure you're not doing something like "sk.bin.bin" or something like that (you'd be surprised how many people overlook this mistake)

I put sk.bin in the /genplus directory, and I put the lock on setting to sonic and knuckles, but I can't figure out what to do next. Is it supposed to lock on automatically when I start, for example, sonic 3? (cause it doesn't). I've tried opening sk.bin and then opening sonic 3 but it just opens them individually. I don't mean to be a pain, but I would really love to use this feature, but I can wait for official documentation.

No, you don't open sk.bin , you open the game that you want to lock-on. If sk.bin is properly installed, the game you load will automatically be locked on it. If you don't see Sonic 3 & Knuckles on title screen then it means something is wrong with your setup (if you use both SD and USB to load ROM files, be sure to put sk.bin on SD). As Icedus said, be sure to have windows setup "hide known file extensions" disabled and check the S&K file is properly named.

On a side note, for Sonic 2, you need the additional upmem chip that was inside S&K cartridge and place it as /genplus/sk2chip.bin

Make sure you're going to Options > System in the emulator and enabling your Lock-On type in the first place. The emulator won't automatically start loading games with lock-on just by having the right files in SD:\genplus.

so since genplus-gx is near perfect(if not perfect and possibly most accurate genesis/megadrive emulator currently),does this mean you'll pick up gnuboy-gx or smsplus-gx,i really hope so,ive really wanted a good gb/gbc/sgbc emualator for a while on the wii platform and too be honest the rin port for the wii isnt that accurate and VBA-gx's emulation of any of the original gameboy platforms isnt that good really,their mostly glitchy,personally i thought your port of GNUBOY too the wii is currently the most accurate of the gameboy platforms,its just kind of sad not seeing the port go further then it could have by this time,i understand your busy and i am not trying to force you nor rush you into to do it,i am just abit hopeful is all

I'm not gonna work on Gnuboy anymore, I'm not that much interested in GB emulation and the emulator already works fine imo, not sure what you mean by "going further", a more polished GUI maybe ? Sorry, it's not going to happen, too much work, not enough motivation.

Sms Plus GX might got a revamp but it is not a very high priority, I'd prefer integrating it with Genesis Plus GX.

It'd make more sense in my opinion to integrate SMS Plus GX into Genesis Plus GX but if one did that, wouldn't it be logical to rename the actually emulator to something like Sega Plus GX or something as such to reflect the changes.

This could allow some interesting things like hardware accurate emulation of the Power Base Converter (SMS games played through the Genesis) and playing SMS games through the Game Gear.

what i meant by "going further" with the emulator "Gnuboy-gx" is like maybe ironing out some of the glitches being caused by the imcomplete emulation of the orginal gameboys hardware,honestly i could care less about the gui,it would have been nice to have a fully fledged and near flawsless GB/GBC/SGB emulator on the wii but the likehood of this currently looks slim,too be honest the team over at the "Vba-gx" team arent even really working on the actually emulation side of any the gameboy(and gameboy advance) anymore so i mean relying on them to be honest is quite pointless in most situations as far i am concerned,but as said ill stay hopefull,also intergrating smsplus-gx into genplus-gx isnt at all a bad idea,that is if you do intend to do this in the future work of genplus-gx:)

I was interested in turning of the VI Trap Filter to check the difference in the video. Do I only need to alter the line "VIDEO_SetTrapFilter?(0);" in the default VI settings or are there other parts of the code that will enable the trap filter once I start it up?

Nevermind, that comment is outdated. I see that you added the option to change the VI trap filter in the Video options. Thank you.

for some reason I cannot get it to see the roms on my fat32 partiton, works on one wii and not the other. Different drives, but partitioned almost exactly the same....

Read the FAQ. USB compatibility issues are generally caused by not having IOS58 installed on your Wii or not having HBC using IOS58. You must first install IOS58 (use DOPMii or an official system update) then reinstall HBC.

Ifyou already have IOS58 but are loading apps from the USB drive in HBC, there is currently a little bug that prevents USB from being mounted when the application is started. Next version would fix this but until that, use SD in HBC to load apps instead or remove the <no_ios_reload> line in /apps/genplus/meta.xml.

Just an exemple for adding 7z support : If you have fullset roms in 7z format, a game file will contain all versions (J/NTSC/PAL,localisations,hacks and traductions) but the file size will be the same as if you have only one rom in it. However in a zip file, the size will grow as number of roms it contains. So a fullset roms of SMS and GG roms will be at least the double to 5 or 6 x initial size. I agree with you it's not possible to include all compression formats but this one is specially usefull to contain several roms files without growing archive size. Try to think about it...

I don't need examples and I don't need to "think aout it", my ochoice has already been stated.

I'm already aware of the benefits of 7z compression and its use for merged romsets. This is not the problem here, the problem is about adding something which I have no interest for, is not challenging at all and requires adding an external library (which means bigger memory footprint and potential stability issues or slowdowns) ,while not preventing anybody from using the emulator correctly.

Disk space might have been a problem 10 years ago but really, it is not anymore: the zipped no-intro ROM set fits in less than 2GB and you even have USB drive support.

If you need space, get ride of all the ROM variants you will never play anyway. Keeping all possible variants, hacks, localizations, etc, does not make any sense unless you are actually going to play them seriously, which I bet most people asking 7z support won't do anyway. The truth is that this kind of people only like the fact they have the whole ROM collection available, "just in case" you know. Good news is, I don't want to encourage this practice.

Ok, it was just a suggestion as others wii emulators have this feature without having any problem. Your work is great, continue like that and excuse me if I've appeared unpleasant to you.

Is there anyway to go past the 10MB limit? Sonic 1 Megamix clocks in at 13MB and it sucks that I can't play this on my console.

10 MB is the max. ROM limit supported by genesis memory map (without bank shifting) so there is no point of increasing that limit as NO GENESIS GAME reaches it.

The Sonic 1 Megamix ROM you are speaking about is a Mega CD ISO, increasing the size limit won't help as this emulator does not emulate the Sega CD !

There is a Genesis version though, you can download it here (look for 3.0 genesis version) http://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_Megamix

Is there going to be a channel installer? Just like VBA GX, SNES9X GX and FCEU GX?

Problem is, I have zero idea how to do this. If someone comes with a nice (and original) looking one, I might ask Tantric for his code and put everything together into a forwarder channel installer but I'm afraid I have currently no plan to design that thing myself.

I think there are already a few channels available anyway, I see no reason why they shouldn't work.

Thank you for the update and happy holidays.