Console emulation in Linux: Sony & Sega
29/04/2009Welcome to part two of my article series on console emulation in Linux. In the last article we were discussing emulating the various Nintendo systems, anything from NES to Nintendo DS and even the legendary VirtualBoy. If you haven’t read that article, or have no clue what emulation is, I suggest you take a quick look at that one first. This time we’re going to shift our attention from Nintendo and instead take a look at some systems from SEGA, as well as the Sony Playstation. 
Summary
SEGA
SEGA is a multinational software- and hardware developer from Japan. Well, that’s not completely true. SEGA was born in the ’40s in Hawaii, under the name of Standard Games (and later Service Games) in order to make coin-operated games for the American soldiers stationed there. It wasn’t until 1951 that they decided to up and move to Japan, and thus SErvice GAmes of Japan was born. For the next 40 years to come, SEGA would kick ass as a developer of arcade games (that includes the hardware), and then suffer greatly during the American video game crash in the beginning of the eighties, until it was finally bought by the Japanese and resurrected with the release of the Sega Master system in 1986 - which is where we begin our journey.
Sega Master System & Game Gear
Shortly after the NES was released, SEGA released its SMS. While it was technically pretty much on par with the competition, it lacked the third party support and had few major titles. Unlike most consoles the SMS had two input slots - one for cartridges and one for cards. The cards were about the size of a credit card and were used to distribute smaller, more basic games at a lower cost than games released on a cartridge. There was also a special card in the form of 3d-glasses that - yeah you guessed it - added 3D effects to certain games. When the remodeled Sega Master System II was released, the card slot was dropped due to high production costs and lack of interest from game developers. All in all, the SMS sold 13,4 million units - a lot of them in Europe and Brazil. 
The reason I’m including the Game Gear with the SMS is because that even though the Game Gear wasn’t released until the early ’90s, it was basically a portable SMS with upped graphics. Thus most SMS emulators also emulate Game Gear games.
MasterGear
MasterGear is actually not a free emulator. I can’t believe someone actually has the balls to try to get money for emulating roms, but this guy obviously does. However, he’s nice enough to release the Linux and Maemo version for free! So far it’s only available for Ubuntu, but it works great here, and you don’t have to install any packages - it’s in a self-contained binary. Sadly there doesn’t seem to be a GUI though, but running it from the command line isn’t very hard.
./mg32 name-of-rom.sms
The emulator itself works alright though. It supports save states, alternate keyboard bindings, and even netplay - although I’ve never tried it. I’ve encountered some very minor graphic glitches, but it’s really not a problem. If you don’t have a problem with using command line, closed source software, give MasterGear a try. Oh yeah, did I mention that the MasterGear actually runs the Sega Master System, Game Gear and pretty much every SEGA console released before the SMS? 
Installation
Just download the binaries from the official site, run them and you’ll be playing Sonic in no time. The manual can be found here, you will need it.
Meka(nix)
Before I say anything else, let me say this: Meka is getting old. It was last updated for Linux in 2005, and you can kind of tell. For example, I’m not getting any sound because it only recognizes two sound devices: Linux Voxware and silence. Now that last one I’ve heard of, but the other one I have no idea what it is. It’s a bummer, but it’s not enough to keep me from kind of digging this user interface. Sure, it looks like when you enable the theme “extra contrast” in Ubuntu. In other words, it looks like shit. But I kind of like it, just because it looks so bad. It’s like the ugly ties that your father used to wear on christmas - completely tacky, but a little bit funny nonetheless. Except for the sound issues, the emulator works fenomenally. It’s easy to use, the games work great, it features every feature you can imagine (with the exception of a built-in cheat manager) and it’s just awesome. Just like the previous emulator, it can emulate all the SEGA consoles that were released before the Master System, plus the Game Gear. If you enjoy using the goofy GUI, I recommend using Meka. If you’re on Windows, you should definitely try it. I don’t know whether or not it works in Vista, but I remember using it in XP like 5 years ago - working great. 
Installation
Download the binaries from here, give yourself permission to run meka.exe and then run it. (./meka.exe in the terminal).
Osmose
Osmose is a Sega Master System and Game Gear emulator only available for Linux. Previously it was a command line only application, but recently an OpenGL GUI was released. The GUI version is still in beta, so expect some weird stuff happening. I haven’t figured out how to set the key bindings yet, and I’m not sure you even can. However, once you figure out the controls, the emulator works perfectly fine. The sound works, save states work, full screen support is great - in short, everything works great. On the website it says it has support for around 96% of all Sega Master System games and 98% of all Game Gear games, which means it’s going to work with any game you throw at it. 
Installation
Installation is a breeze. Just download this .zip-file, unzip it, make the executable executable and run it like you would any other executable (I like saying executable).
Mega Drive / Genesis, 32X & SegaCD
The Mega Drive (or Genesis as it was called in North America for legal reasons) was released in 1988 in Japan, 1989 in the US and 1990 in Europe, and belongs to the fourth generation of home video game consoles. It was competing with the TurboGrafx-16 and the SNES, yet it was the most successful console that SEGA ever released, with over 30 million sold units and a loyal fan base that even to this day develops indie games for it.
Then along came the SegaCD and the 32X. The SegaCD was like a huge cancer growing out from the side of the Mega Drive (in other words, an add on) that allowed the game developers to make games containing over 600mb of crap for the console, instead of the 6 or 8 mb that the original cartridges would allow. Then in 1994 SEGA decided to turn the promising console 32X, which was currently in development, into another add on for the Mega Drive. By doing this, they added two 32-bit CPUs and a 3D GPU. However, they also added another cancerous bulge to the already tumor-ridden console.
If you were to buy all three “consoles” you’d have to shell out a lot of money (almost as much as if you were going to buy a PS3), and this was just one year before the Saturn was going to be released. Needless to say, only 200.000 kids worldwide were dumb enough to ever buy the 32X, even after the price dropped to $19.99.
Gens
I don’t care what you say, I’m absolutely convinced that Gens is Jesus reincarnated as a Mega Drive/SegaCD/32X emulator to save us from eternal damnation and allow us to forever spend our days playing Sonic 3D, Streets of Rage and Shining Force II - without suffering through frame drops, poor sound or glitchy graphics.It was originally released for Windows under the name Gens32, but then some guy who’s very name is too awesome to write down here came along and decided to port it to Linux. So now even we freetards can enjoy perfect Mega Drive emulation, and almost perfect Sega CD and 32X emulation. The emulator has a nice looking GUI, support for everything (yeah, everything), including full screen support, save states, game genie support, netplay etc. The only downside is the relatively tricky installation (trust me, it’ll get a lot worse as we go forward in time). 
Installation
It’s officially distributed in an uncompiled form, so you’ll have to install it from source. Now, this isn’t supposed to be all that hard. You just run three commands and bwamh! - a fully working emulator. But for some reason I can’t even get through the first step with this one. If you still want the source, go here. For precompiled .debs and .rpms, check out this forum post. I’m running Jaunty, but the Hardy->Intrepid package worked fine for me.
Sega Saturn
The SEGA Saturn was released in 1994-95, right around the time that the Nintendo 64 and the Sony Playstation were or were about to be released. It was the first of SEGA’s consoles to support the use of CD-ROMs without any additional add-ons. Thanks to some great marketing over in Japan, it was hugely successful there. However, over here in Europe, and in the US as well, it never really caught on. Most people were just too busy playing Super Mario 64 and Rayman to ever even notice this little guy. And you can kind of tell from the game line-up that the Saturn never really made it; some of the best games this console has to offer are Shining Force III, Magic Knight Rayearth, Panzer Dragoon Saga and House of the Dead. Still, the games weren’t half bad, and the console itself was pretty powerful. However, it was a nightmare for third-party developers to work on. For example, the console had 2 CPUs and another 5 processors. At the time, using multiple processors wasn’t something you’d see every day. Using both cores to properly utilize the console’s speed was a very hard task - one that few programmers could handle. The second hurdle to overcome was the fact that in order to get any kind of speed at all, the games had to be written in assembly code. If you weren’t hardcore enough to do that, you could write your game in C - but considering that it ran 2-5 times faster in assembly, that wasn’t really an option. Apparently, writing a proper emulator for the system is almost as hard…
Yabause
Yabause stands for Yet Another Buggy And Uncomplete Saturn Emulator, and that’s exactly what it seems to be. Before doing research for this article, I had never emulated any Saturn games, and now I know why; emulating Saturn games must be pretty fucking hard!
Just like with a lot of newer emulators, you first need to get hold of a copy of the console bios. Not only that, but you need to find the right bios according to the game you want to play. For example, if you want to play a Japanese game, you need the Japanese bios. Now, that’s absolutely fine with me. I know it’s inevitable due to legal reasons (which is why I can’t link to it).
After publishing this article I got an email from Guillaume Duhamel, one of the authors of Yabause, correcting me on some things. As of version 0.7.0 you don’t need the BIOS to run the games. Using real BIOS instead of emulating it can improve compatibility, but a number of games run even without it. This means you can play Saturn games on your computer 100% legally! That sounds absolutely great! I so wish that the authors of other emulators would do this also (although I’m sure it’s probably quite hard with newer systems), as the BIOS not only can be a bitch to find, but it’s also a pain in the ass to even have to do it.
Secondly, the BIOS you use don’t have to match the region of the game you’re trying to play. Don’t ask me what black magic is used to do this, but if you enable “auto detect” in the Yabause preferences, most games will run without the correct BIOS.
However, game compatibility isn’t all that high, many don’t run at all - and extremely few run without glitches. In fact, I only ever got one game to work (show below) which is why I’m hoping one of my beloved readers will help me out and write me an email detailing their experiences with Saturn emulation. I will publish the review here, and link to your site (if you have one). If you want to see what games have a higher probability of working, you can check out the (fairly outdated) compatibility lists here and here.
In the mean time, all I can say is that the emulator has support for save states (although I haven’t figured out how to use them) and… That’s pretty much it, from a user-standpoint. Still, it’s the best we Linux-users have, for now. 
Installation
Luckily the installation is pretty straightforward. There are two ways to do it (three if you count compiling from source, but we’re not going to do that). You can first try to check your repositories. I’m on Ubuntu 9.04, and my repositories have Yabause 0.9.8 which is pretty new (the last release was 0.9.9). Or you could go to the official website and download an autopackage which downloads a crapload of stuff for you and installs the emulator automagically. Just note that this won’t resolve any dependencies, so you might have to look out for that. Just run yabause from the terminal to see what package is missing.
While you don’t absolutely need them, proper BIOS could improve compatibility. For legal reason I can’t link to the files you need, but I’m pretty sure our good friend Mr. Google will have some answers for you if you, for example, ask him about Sega Saturn BIOS. All you need to do next is fire up your emulator, click yabause -> preferences in the menu and select the appropriate alternative in the drop down menu to select whether you want to run an ISO or a cd in your cd drive, and last of all you enter the path to the ISO or optical drive where your game is located, in the input field below the drop down list. Now just click yabause -> Run and hope for the best!
Dreamcast
The Dreamcast was to be SEGA’s last stab at a home video game console, but at least they went out with a bang! The DC was released late 1998 as a successor to the Nintendo 64 and the Playstation - over a year before the Playstation 2 was to be released! At the time it was technically superior to both the N64 and the PS1, and it displayed some truly innovative features (like online console gaming capabilities). Some great games were released for the console, like Sonic Adventure 1/2, Marvel vs. Capcom, (my all-time favorite RPG) Grandia I/II, Resident Evil 2/3/Code Veronica, Dead or Alive 2, Grand Theft Auto 2, Mortal Kombat Gold, Street Fighter Alpha, Phantasy Star Online and a whole heap of other awesome games.
On release day the console sold 325.132 units, which was enough to set a new world record. In the following 2 weeks 500.000 copies were sold in North America alone. In total, 10.9 million units were sold worldwide. Considering the great reception it got on release, you would think that it would have sold better worldwide, but the release of the Playstation 2 completely stole the spotlight from the DC, causing the sales to slow down considerably. In 2001 offical support was dropped, but commercial and indie games are still being developed to this day. The last commercial game to be released was DUX, which was released in 2008. Six online games are still playable, including Phantasy Star Online.
lxdream
lxdream is (as far as I can tell) the only functioning Dreamcast emulator available for Linux. Supposedly it has pretty good support for a lot of commercial games, even if they run quite slowly and with quite a lot of graphical glitches. However, the games cannot be run on Intel integrated chipsets. Guess what I have? That’s right, an Intel integrated chip. So once again I will have to ask for your help. Install lxdream and try it out on your systems and shoot me an email telling me if it worked or not. Your review will be posted here along with a link to your site, if you want. I’m going to see if I can’t get it running on another computer, but for now it seems I can’t give you a fair review.
Installation
The installation is fairly smooth. With a little luck you can find lxdream in your repositories. If not, go to the offical download page and download a package to your liking. You can also download the source code directly and compile that yourself. As far as I can tell, no menu entry is added, so in order to start the emulator, just run the command lxdream in a terminal. Before you can start gaming, you need to get two bios files. Again, I can’t link to them, but of course good ol’ Google knows where to find them. You need to find one file called dc_bios.bin and one called dc_flash.bin. Once you have them, go to Settings -> Paths… and enter the path to dc_bios.bin in the first entry box and dc_flash.bin in the second. Then you should be ready to roll!
Sony
Sony is a multinational electronics conglomerate based in Japan , that makes just about anything; cellphones, DVRs, DVD players, TVs, monitors, music players, computers, and yes, gaming consoles. However, it all started out in 1945 as a radio repair shop in a bombed-out building in Tokyo, under the name Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K., which translates in English to Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. The founder moved to the US, heard about the transistor and got a license for it. With this piece of technology TTKKK (that’s my own abbreviation) built the first commercially successful transistor radio, thus securing its place in the Japanese consumer electronics market for many years to come.
Playstation
The Playstation was released in 1994, thus belonging to the fifth generation of video game consoles. Among its competitors were the Nintendo 64 and the Saturn. Out of the three, the PS was definitely the most successful. So much so that it was even the first video game console to sell 100 million units. And really, I can certainly see why, with games such as: Final Fantasy VII/VIII/IX, Crash Bandicoot 1/2/3, Gran Turismo, Tony Hawk, Spyro, Wipeout, Jet Moto, Tekken (1?)/2/3, Tomb Raider, Castlevania, Grand Theft Auto 1/2, Resident Evil, Twisted Metal and Metal Gear Solid. Plus a whole bunch of Japanese RPGs (I’m a sucker for games like that)!
It also had one of the best controllers to date, only rivaled by the newer Xbox 360 ones. According to me, the layout and the amount of buttons was just fantastic! The joysticks weren’t great. After a while they got kind of tired and weren’t all that responsive, but you didn’t really need them except for a couple of games (Ape Escape comes to mind).
Nevertheless, it was an excellent system with some of the best games ever produced (if you’re an RPG fan).
PCSX-df
PCSX-df is a fork of the now discontinued PCSX project to create a free and open source Playstation emulator able to emulate almost all Playstation games. Perhaps it does not do so perfectly, but it manages. First of all I have to say that the GUI is great. It’s responsive and it follows the GTK theme, which a lot of emulators don’t, for some reason. However, for some reason the file selector uses what seems to be GTK1 - and it looks awful! Why would anyone make a great GTK2 theme for the whole application, and then use GTK1 for the file selection?! I just don’t get it.
That aside PCSX-df is very simple to use, and it runs your games just fine. If you like the pretty logo and the fact that it uses GTK2 for the most part, try it out.
Installation
I lucked out and saw that it was in my repositories. Hopefully it is in your too. If not, you can grab it from the very sleek looking official website. There are instructions on there on how to install both the development version and the regular release. However, heed the words of the developers before installing the development version:
The development version of PCSX-df may be completely broken, segfault at important locations, not play games, or otherwise ruin your day.
After installing the emulator you of course need to get the neccessary BIOS. I’m not sure if there are multiple BIOS files depending on your region, but the NTSC one is called SCPH1001.bin. As usual, I can’t link to it. But it’s not very hard to find. After you’ve set that up you’re pretty much ready to go.
ePSXe
ePSXe is definitely the most popular Playstation emulator out there right now. Why? I don’t really know. Because it looks like ass. As you can see, it uses GTK1 for its menues (all of them, unlike PCSX-df). It also requires you to download a whole bunch for plugins just to be able to run it (video, audio, input + bios). Not only that, but if you install it in Linux, there are probably a bunch of unresolved dependencies begging to be solved, since it’s not installed via the package manager. And even after setting all these things up, I don’t get any sound, and my controls don’t work properly. Great! I think I’d rather use PCSX-df…
Still, I know a lot of other people have used this emulator and couldn’t recommend it enough, so if you don’t care about looks or having to fetch a bunch of plugins just to get it going, ePSXe is worth a try. On the Windows side, it’s hailed as king and almighty führer of Playstation emulation, and I know that it works great over there. Give it a try and see if it works for you! 
Installation
Like I said before, the installation is a little bit tricky. First of all you need to get the emulator from the website, unpack it, make the binary (simply called epsxe) executable, and then you can try running it. Most likely it won’t start, and complain about some library not being found. Browsing the ePSXe forum I found this thread with instructions on how to install and configure ePSXe. I highly recommend going there for great instructions on how to set it all up. Worked like a charm for me! Just note that the downloads for the plugins are broken, so go directly to the homepages of the plugins instead.
Playstation 2
The Playstation 2 was released in 2000 as a successor to the smash-hit PS1. Like its predecessor the PS2 also broke a world record - it was the fastest console to ever reach the 100 million units sold mark. Unlike the Dreamcast, the Playstation 2 lacked online capabilities out of the box. However, a modem was sold separately, and was later built in to the redesigned slimline model.
The console is backwards compatible, and can play pretty much every Playstation 1 game, effectively doubling its game library, which was already strong to begin with, with titles such as: Grand Turismo, Grand Theft Auto: (3?) Vice City and San Andreas, Final Fantasy X/XI/X-2/XII, SOCOM: US Navy Seals, Kingdom Hearts I/II, God of War I/II, Resident Evil 4, Persona 3/4, Suikoden III, Okami, Devil May Cry, Ratchet and Clank, Guitar Hero 1/2, and Metal Gear Solid 3,
PCSX2
Congratulations, you guessed it: this is from the same people who made PCSX (not -df, mind you!). I think the people over at the offical website describe the project pretty well:
The project has been running for a little over four years now, and since it’s initial release has grown in compatibility. From initially just being able to run a few public domain demos, it’s current state enables many games to boot and actually go in game, such as the ‘famous’ Final Fantasy X or Devil May Cry 3. PS2 Emulation is a complex task, far worse than emulating a console from the previous generation (PlayStation1, N64, Saturn), simply due to the CPU power required to get ‘playable’ speeds from a PS2 game under emulation. Whilst speed can be improved via various ‘recompilers’ (eeREC and vuREC, Emotion Engine recompiler and Vector Unit CPU recompiler respectively), you will still need the latest and most powerfull machine you can get your hands on to even break the 30 FPS mark.
With this in mind, my laptop just isn’t going to cut it. In fact, I never got the plugins to work correctly, so I never even got into the main GUI (and there’s no screenshots of it on the website). However, there are some screenshots of emulated games. If you have a super great computer and want to try it out for yourself, go ahead and install PCSX2. Just be sure to let me know if it works for you! 
Installation
There’s a self contained archive at the offical website. All you need to do is untar it and run the file called pcsx2 to start the emulator. However, you need to configure all the plugins before you can actually get into the GUI. All instructions needed are available at the forum.
Closing
Wow! This feels like the longest post I’ve ever written, and it’s defintely been the most exhausting one. What I’ve learned from trying to emulate these systems is that first of all, emulators for less popular systems are not as good as those for more popular ones. For example, Saturn is pretty much on par with N64 and the Playstation, yet emulators for N64 are way more complete and have a lot more features than the one(s) for Saturn. The second thing I’ve learned is that the newer the console you’re trying to emulate is, the more work you (not just the developers) have to do in order to get it working - there are plugins, BIOS and whatnot that you have to get before you can even have a quick peek at the games. Hopefully this will change as the emulators mature. I guess only time will tell.
That’s the second and probably the last part of my series (can you even call it a series if it only has two parts?) on console emulation in Linux, unless someone requests that I take a look at some other obscure system. So thank you for reading. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and that you’ve learned something or that I’ve at least tickled your curiosity for a bit.
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Disclamer
If you think I’ve missed listing a great emulator for any of the above mentioned systems, please do send me an email containing a link to it. Optionally you could also include your review of the emulator - just remember to keep it short. Also, if you are the author of any of these emulators, or the copyright owner of any of the images used, and want them removed, my email address can be found at the very bottom of this page.
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