- Best Sega Genesis Emulator Retroarch
- Best Sega Genesis Emulator Android
- Best Sega Genesis Emulator Mac
- Best Sega Genesis Emulator For Pc
Sega - Genesis / Sega CD / 32X Emulators
CoolROM.com's Sega Genesis emulators section. Download the highest rated and most compatible emulator here. Play SEGA Games Online in the highest quality available. Play Emulator has the biggest collection of Sega Genesis emulator games to play. These SEGA games work in all modern browsers and can be played with no download required. Browse more Sega Genesis games by using the game links on this page. We collected the best Sega Genesis Games such as.
Popular Emulators
| Name | Description |
| Kega Fusion | Fusion is a Sega SG1000, SC3000, SF7000, Master System, Game Gear, Genesis/Megadrive, SVP, Pico, SegaCD/MegaCD and 32X emulator for Win9x/ME/2000/XP/Vista/Win7, Mac OSX(Intel), and Linux. |
Other Emulators
| Name | Description |
| Ages | Ages is a SEGA Genesis, SEGA 32X, and Sega CD emulator. Compare it to your favorite SEGA Genesis emulator and send your thoughts to the authors. This emulator has full sound, and has been built from scratch. |
| DGen | DGen has good sound, and runs well on a P2-233 and higher. DGen has pretty good compatability but is greatly out matched in quality by newer emulator suck as Gens and Kega compatibility. It also supports logging of .GYM files with or without DAC logging.Norwegian Translation of DGen v1.21This version has no sound. It's for people with P166s and slower computers who want to run DGEN.This is the freely available source code.German Translation of DGen v1.21Portuguese Translation |
| Genem | GenEm has poor sound, speed and compatability. It's just not worth it with much better emulators out there now. |
| Generator | Generator uses it's own custom 68000 processor emulation which is designed for dynamic recompilation, and uses techniques from this such as block-marking, flag calculation removal, operand pre-calculation, endian pre-conversion etc. There are approximately 1600 C routines generated by the first stage of compilation to cope with the 67 instruction families. These routines are used as a 'backup' when dynamic recompilation isn't supported on your platform or the recompiler doesn't support a particular instruction. The CPU engine is by all accounts very fast, whatever the mode. |
| Generator32 | This emulator was discontinued very early in development and runs VERY few games. Don't bother with this. |
| Genesis Plus | This is a new emulator from Charles MacDonald, the author of SMS Plus. It is an open-source emulator, which supports sound, joysticks, and other fun stuff. Note: The Windows version is significantly less-featured than the DOS version, it doesn't support joysticks or audio yet, and it only runs windowed on a 16-bit desktop. |
| Genital | Genital runs a decent amount of games if you have a PC with a Pentium processor or better. However, it's now discontinued and never got sound support. |
| Gens | Gens is a Win9x based emulator for the SEGA Genesis/Mega-Drive/Sega-CD/ Mega-CD/32X systems, it allows you to play games developed for these classic SEGA 16bit game consoles on your x86 compatible PC. Gens is developed by Stéphane Dallongeville and has been coded 35% in C/C++ and 65% in Assembler. It runs under Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP and requires DirectX 7.0 or above to be installed on your system. |
| Gens Plus! | Gens Plus! is a Sega Genesis / 32X / SegaCD / Master System / Game Gear emulator based on the Gens emulator that has added features. |
| Gens+ REWiND! | Gens+ REWiND! is a Sega Multisystem emulator which supports the following systems: SEGA Master System (SMS) SEGA Game Gear (GG) SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive (SMD) SEGA Genesis 32X (32X) SEGA SegaCD/MegaCD (SCD) With the current release Gens+ evolved with the following feature: Rewind Last update: 2010-01-01 |
| Gens/GS | Gens/GS is a version of Gens maintained by GerbilSoft. The main goal of Gens/GS is to clean up the source code and combine features from various forks of Gens. Last release: 2009-11-22 |
| Gens32 | Based on Gens 2.12a and Gens+ 0.0.3.39, Gens32 is a Sega Genesis/32X/SegaCD emulator for Win32. It allows you to play games developed for these classic SEGA consoles on your x86 compatible PC. It runs under Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP and requires DirectX 7.0 or above to be installed on your system. Gens32 is currently discontinued since the project evolved into Gens32 Surreal. Last update: 2005-07-01 |
| Gens32 Surreal | A revamped version of Gens32. It has a smoother frame rate and an advanced sound configuration system. Last release: 2009-10-14 |
| HazeMD | A Sega Genesis/SegaCD/32x emulator based on that portion of the MAME project. |
| Kega | From the author of the amazing DOS Genesis emulators KGen98 comes a brand new Windows Genesis emulators, Kega. It runs under Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP, has support for Sega CD, and requires DirectX8 or above to run. The KGen of today. It's either this or Gens. Note that the Lazarus Special Edition is the latest version of Kega, which had to be developed from version 0.02 due to hardware failure. We provide v0.04b on the author's request, in case Lazarus gives you problems. |
| KGen | This is the predecessor of KGen98 and Kega. It's not as good as either of them so you may want to skip this.KGen98 is basically a total rewrite of KGen. It's similar to Genecyst but with slightly better compatability and accuracy. Plus, with 8-bit graphics and no VSync, it's reported to be faster than Genecyst. Still, Gens and Kega are better so you may want to skip this too.. |
| Megadrive | Discontinued due to a hard drive crash (in pre-ZD times), this emulator is capable of playing Sonic the hedgheog very slowly with no sound and many glitches, and it can do very little else. This isn't worth the download. |
| Megasis | Megasis is a good Genesis emulator, however the speed leaves a lot to be desired. It features proper emulation of some games that other emulators may fall short on (e.g. Warsong). It also has decent sound emulation. If you have a fairly fast computer, you might want to give it a try.Portuguese Translation |
| RAGens | |
| Regen | Very good Sega Genesis/MegaDrive emulator runs many games with or very close to 100% compatibility. A Linux port is also available. Last update: 2009-05-18 |
| retroDrive | Formerly 'GenSX', formerly 'Vegas', this was the public's first 32x emulator ever. It also runs Genesis games very well. A Pentium II or better is recommended. |
| SEGAEmu | SEGAEmu emulates the Sg-1000, Sega Master System/Game Gear, Sega CD, and SEGA Genesis, but we will keep it here on the SEGA Genesis emulators page for now. Try it out, it might become one of your favourites! You can download plugins for the emulator at www.atani-software.netThe Emulator translated to Norwegian.The Emulator translated to French. |
| st0rm | st0rm is a primitive emulator that has a compatibility rate of less than 50%. There is no sound, and it's very slow.The source is now available, since the project is basically been discontinued. |
| VGEN | Virtual Genesis, or VGEN for short, is a decent Genesis emulator. It has both the PSG and YM2612 emulated, so it has pretty good sound support. It can run a decent number of games, but not as many as Gens or Kega. Some games are very glitched. This was also the first emulator with preliminary Sega CD support. You'll need one of the Sega CD BIOS images to test it out. It can only show the bootup screen. It has been discontinued. |
| Xega | Xega requires DirectX 8.0. It has sound and plays commercial games. Good support for Sega CD and 32X. |
Sega - Genesis / Sega CD / 32X Emulators on Other Platforms
Linux (8)BeOS (3)
Macintosh (5)
Amiga (1)
Consoles
-- Dreamcast (5)
-- Gamecube (2)
-- Playstation 2 (1)
-- Nintendo DS (2)
-- Game Park 32 (2)
-- Nintendo Wii (1)
Pocket PC (3)
iOS (iPhone/iPod Touch) (1)
Android (3)
DOS (1)
Windows
Linux
Macintosh
Consoles
iOS (iPhone)
Android
Windows Mobile
Others
Other Releases
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Hacks
Savestates
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Movies
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ROMs (Public Domain)
Frontends
Technical Documents
Extenders
Utilities:
General
Auditing
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Plugins
Affiliates
Game Hacking.org
While Genesis emulation on the DS isn’t as perfect as you can have on a PC, it has a level of quality that justifies the little trouble that it takes to set it up – depending on the games that you want to play on it.
jEnesisDS (by Lordus) is arguably the best choice for the DS at the moment, and it is likely to remain so. You may want to try PicodriveDS but it does not support sound and generally performs worse. Neither project has been updated since 2008: the PicodriveDS dev has stopped working on it and suggested people to use jEnesisDS instead . The developper of jEnesisDS has apparently worked for SEGA and is unlikely to continue work on the emulator.
jEnesisDS doesn’t scale the image to fit in the DS screen, which is annoying and can be very unpleasant in certain game – but it is without re-scaling that jEnesis DS achieves good performance in terms of speed and compatibility (compared with PicodriveDS which does re-scale).
Download jEnesisDS
For this guide I used jEnesisDS (v0.7.4), which you can download from here. This is the most up to date version at time of writing and it is very much worth using it over older versions – on top of performance improvements, it also offers a useful feature that can help you cope with the drawback of the image not fitting fully in the DS screen.
Best Sega Genesis Emulator Retroarch
Installing jEnesisDS
In any carts with automatic patching it is as simple as dragging and dropping a file to the memory card. If your cart requires it, you will need to manually patch the .nds file before moving it. This emulator doesn’t need to be placed on the root of the card.
- Extract and move the .nds into your cart.
Using jEnesisDS
When you run the .nds file on your DS (do this just like you run any other .nds such as games), the emulator loads reasonably fast. Ld player for mac os. The touch screen will show the folders and files you have on your card. Simply use the D-pad and buttons to navigate towards the ROM you want to run and select it.
The ROM will load. The touch screen will continue to give you some miscellaneous information, and you can pause or un-pause the emulation by touching it.
Although pause and un-pause works perfectly, other touch screen controls aren’t very responsive. From my experience with the emulator you will have to suffer through them to access some features:
1. You can access a “Configuration” menu by touching the “Pad” Icon in the top left of the touch screen. This brings you to several options that you can (fortunately) navigate with the D-pad. I haven’t fiddled much with the emulations settings as games run very well without doing anything. But for example, you can sacrifice some sound quality for speed by turning on the “Fake Z80”.
2. To use the save “STATE SLOTS” you need to touch them (the “I” and “II” in roman numerals in the bottom right). This brings up a sub-menu that can be then navigated (fortunately) with the D-pad.
Scrolling the Image to Fit The Screen
The image doesn’t completely fit into the screen. This is an annoying drawback of this emulator and to be honest it can ruin the experience in some games, but for others it can also not bother you at all.
There are some ways built into the emulator to cope with this:
- I usually turn on the “Follow DPad” setting which fits the leftmost or the rightmost part of the image into the screen whenever you are pressing that direction during gameplay (this is a new feature that became available with version 0.7.4). It is annoying that the emulator doesn’t remember your settings, and by default this option is off, so you will need to put up with the clunky touch screen to access the configuration menu and turn it on everytime.
- You can manually adjust the viewable area by using the shoulder buttons, at any time during gameplay (fortunately this always works, even if you have enabled “Follow DPad”).
- When the emulation is paused (touch the touchscreen to pause and un-pause the emulation) you can use the D-pad to scroll the image.
If you don’t adapt at all to this flaw then you have to do without jEnesisDS. Try Picodrive or don’t emulate Genesis on the DS.
Given the performance and compatibility of this emulator, it is still probably the best choice on the DS but you can also try the (no sound) port of Picodrive.
General Opinion
Best Sega Genesis Emulator Android
The games I tried on jEnesisDS were running quite decently at or near full speed, which is nothing to scoff off on the DS.
The emulation isn’t perfect at all, with some graphic glitches and the sound not being accurate in some instances, and also having occasional glitches (particularly when you use the state slots, although a bit after loading it will start sounding normal again).
Finally, ROMs larger than 3 MB aren’t supported at all (this includes, sadly, Sonic & Knuckles). This was supposed to be work in progress back in 2008 but obviously as it is currently nearly 2011 without a new release you shouldn’t count on that in the foreseeable future if at all.
Despite all this, in general the emulation is very good. The “Pros” list has 2 things but those 2 matter much more than the minor annoyances in the “Cons”.
Pros:
Best Sega Genesis Emulator Mac
- It emulates Genesis on a DS at very respectable speeds and with reasonable accuracy.
- Decent compatibility (pocketheaven has a compatibility list) http://www.pocketheaven.com/ph/wiki/JEnesisDS
- Supports save states.
Best Sega Genesis Emulator For Pc
Cons:
- The image doesn’t completely fit the DS screen.
- Doesn’t support the larger ROMs (over 3 MB).
- Touch screen controls for options are quite unresponsive.
- Some graphics and sound glitches