Written on Nov 22nd, 2007 by Dave

Posted In: Sony PSP Games, Sony PSP Hacks, Sony PSP News

Sega Mega-CD Emulator for the PSP - PicoDrive

Those of you who love nothing more than using your Sony PSP to play a few retro games from your favourite system/console/computer via the use of an emulator will probably be jumping for joy at the news that there is now a Sega Mega-CD emulator for the PSP, called PicoDrive.

While the Sega CD never really took off in the UK (it, quite frankly, sucked), I can see the appeal of playing some of those old games once again, even if it is to simply prove once and for all that NightTrap is indeed the worst game to ever grace a gaming console.

Here are some notes from the author of the PicoDrive Sega Mega-CD emulator:

There seemed to be some demand for Sega CD/Mega CD emulator for PSP, so after doing the Gizmondo port I decided to port PicoDrive, my Genesis/MegaDrive/Sega CD/Mega CD emulator, to PSP.

Well I don’t really like how it performs (it still needs a bit more work), but I’ve decided to move to another project, so I thought I better release it as is, then keep it around untouched for months.

There is nothing fancy about this emulator (no dynarecs/asm cores), but it’s still able to run many Genesis games fullspeed with no frameskip (including some CD ones), and others with some skipping. However there are some CD games which won’t run too well (although situation can be improved by tweaking some options). This emulator uses hardware MP3 decoding via audiocodec library in PSP.

Note that this emu may need some option tweaking to get certain games working. Be sure to check the readme for details.

Finally, I feel I need to give credits several people whose code I used for this release:

* Chui for FAME/C (which is based on C68K by Stéphane Dallongeville, Gens fame)
* NJ for CZ80 (which was also based on Stef’s code).
* MAME team for YM2612/SN76489 cores.
* fDave for the original PicoDrive, and Stef again for releasing Gens source, something to base my work on.
* ps2dev.org people for all sample code (cooleyes for libaudiocodec one).

You can grab the files from the DCEmu link below. Note, you will need to obtain a bios dump from the Sega Mega-CD to use the emulator.

Via DCEmu