9/30/21 - DGEN - Sega Genesis/MegaDrive Emulator With Pre-configured Xbox 360 Controller Support For Intel Mac OS X 10.4.x

[alex_free]

I ported this Sega genesis emulator to Mac OS X 10.3.9+ PowerPC last year. The problem with DGEN is there are no assembly optimizations available for Mac OS X, PowerPC OR Intel. This means the emulation cores are all in C and not as fast as the assembly codes that can run on Linux. So the PowerPC release requires a very fast G4, or preferably a G5.

After getting an Intel Mac mini recently, I decided to revisit this emulator. On that late 2006 2.0GHZ C2D, a native Intel release works perfectly. And most importantly, I perfected a configuration for using Xbox 360 controllers with https://tattiebogle.net/index.php/ProjectRoot/Xbox360Controller/OsxDriver so you can play all your favorite games in a more correctly feeling way, compared to a keyboard.

I also updated libarchive to the latest version so there is even better compressed ROM support.

And lastly, I made Dgen.app completely portable. You can run it from anywhere, not just from within /Applications.

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/dgen-mac-os-x

Web page will be up soon as well.

 

[joevt]

The assembly codes that can run on Linux are for x86 and haven't been ported to Mac OS X even though Mac OS X also uses x86? Or you did get the assembly to work on Mac OS X or it doesn't need the assembly because it runs fine on the slowest Intel Mac without the assembly?

Is the Xbox 360 controller not a HID device? If it was a HID device then it wouldn't need a driver? Or if it is a HID device, what does the driver add?

My favourite site for emulators for MacOS was emulation.net https://web.archive.org/web/20061021122857/http://emulation.victoly.com/index.html
but that site disappeared more than a decade ago.

 

[alex_free]

The assembly codes that can run on Linux are for x86 and haven't been ported to Mac OS X even though Mac OS X also uses x86? Or you did get the assembly to work on Mac OS X or it doesn't need the assembly because it runs fine on the slowest Intel Mac without the assembly?

Is the Xbox 360 controller not a HID device? If it was a HID device then it wouldn't need a driver? Or if it is a HID device, what does the driver add?

My favourite site for emulators for MacOS was emulation.net https://web.archive.org/web/20061021122857/http://emulation.victoly.com/index.html
but that site disappeared more than a decade ago.

There is no assembly optimizations for macho (Mac OS X), just ELF 32/64. I did try to enable them but there is nothing to enable as it does not understand macho. Sure they could be ported, even to PowerPC as was done last century with DGEN 1.1.7 for Mac OS 9. Doing so however no nothing about.

With the Xbox 360 controller, you definitely need a driver to use it. DGEN can use any SDL 1.x compatible controller, but I had to figure out the driver’s button layout by trial and error as there is no info on it.