BlastEm 0.5.0 Released

I am happy to announce the latest stable release of BlastEm, version 0.5.0. This release has been heavily focused on accuracy and I think I can now credibly claim that it is the most accurate Genesis/MD emulator overall (which is not to say that it is necessarily more accurate in every single aspect, just that it at least meets other emulators in the vast majority of aspects and exceeds the others by enough in some categories). It's the first emulator to properly run Overdrive 2 (some minor artifacts remain, but nothing that really detracts from the experience) and the second to run the hardware version of the original Overdrive (Genesis Plus GX was the first).

Some other highlights include initial SMS support (only emulating the Genesis/MD backwards compat mode for now so some titles will not work) and some limited support for the XBAND hardware (really just enough to get the menu running).

You can download it from the main page or from the changelog.

Just ran the Overdrive 2 demo on it, and it looked and ran great!

Thank you for all of your hard work and sharing!

The pleasure is shared, a except-norm emu for a except-norm demo...:p

Except-norm? What's that?

This is intriguing, I must have missed this thread up until now. Will this ever run on Android fully fledged? One thing I'd love is to play those 32X titles that have analogue controller support on my GPDXD. In the meantime I'll check out the PC version at some point.

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Originally Posted by cleeg

Will this ever run on Android fully fledged?

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Eventually, yes. The big obstacle for most users is that I have to port the CPU cores to ARM. There are x86 Android devices, but they're not terribly common and now that Intel has sort of given up on making parts for that market they are even rarer. Another big obstacle is that the current UI is ugly and doesn't have any facilities for editing the config. Telling the user to edit the config file is bad UX on desktop, but it's a complete non-starter on mobile. Other than that, it's just a matter of better supporting the Android app lifecycle and providing an option for touchscreen controls when a physical controller is not present.

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Originally Posted by cleeg

One thing I'd love is to play those 32X titles that have analogue controller support on my GPDXD.

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32X support is also absent at the moment.

The good news for all of the above, is that now that I've gotten general accuracy to a good place I can start turning my attention to those issues. The bad news is that some of the above is a fair bit of work. New UI will probably come first and then I'll start on some under the hood changes to make it easier both to port to ARM and to support new emulated CPUs like the SH-2 in the 32X.

All the very best with this endeavour, and thank you for answering my questions. Retroarch is nice on Android, but this could be much nicer as I feel the former is a bit fiddly. Any chance you could knock me up a 100% accurate and compatible Saturn emulator in your free time? I'm sure it's pretty straightforward.

"I'm sure it's pretty straightforward" lol

On a more serious note, mednafen is a serious contender for Saturn now =P

EDIT: we should make an Indigo-based UI for BlastEm :v

Proper UI is a thing that BlastEm needs the most (and means to supress OpenGL unavailability message).

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Originally Posted by TmEE

(and means to supress OpenGL unavailability message).

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This exists now. Set gl to off in the video section of the config file.

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Originally Posted by Mask of Destiny

Except-norm? What's that?

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Yes, well, "except-norm" (my translation) would be possible be simply replaced by "incredible!" but true... ;)

A "VGM log files" function is envisaged for soon ?

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Originally Posted by Pha

A "VGM log files" function is envisaged for soon ?

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It wasn't, but that's mainly because no one had asked for it. I'll add it to the list.

Congratulations and thank you for giving us this emulator. Any hopes of getting this as a Retroarch core?

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Originally Posted by Jadty

Any hopes of getting this as a Retroarch core?

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I don't have any interest in doing so myself, but I'd be happy to work with a 3rd party contributor to get the changes into my upstream repository if they want to do the heavy lifting of a port. There was an earlier attempt at this, but it was abandoned before it got to a truly usable state. That effort was probably premature as there wasn't a particularly compelling reason to use BlastEm over Genesis Plus GX at the time. Even now, the main things I offer oustide of debugging tools (which aren't really relevant inside RetroArch) are overclocking and running a couple of demos (Overdrive 2 being the most notable) that won't run in GPGX.

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Originally Posted by Mask of Destiny

I don't have any interest in doing so myself, but I'd be happy to work with a 3rd party contributor to get the changes into my upstream repository if they want to do the heavy lifting of a port. There was an earlier attempt at this, but it was abandoned before it got to a truly usable state. That effort was probably premature as there wasn't a particularly compelling reason to use BlastEm over Genesis Plus GX at the time. Even now, the main things I offer oustide of debugging tools (which aren't really relevant inside RetroArch) are overclocking and running a couple of demos (Overdrive 2 being the most notable) that won't run in GPGX.

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If it really is more accurate and better than GPGX, you should probably look into contacting the people behind Retroarch, maybe they would be able to help with the porting into a core. Also maybe your improvements could be implemented on other emulators as well. Collaboration is everything.

We have been in contact. While it seems like there may be interest, things aren't really to the level of concrete plans yet.