MEKA v0.65

posted in Emulator Release by narvick on Jun 24th, 2003

It's been about 4 months since the last version of MEKA, but have no fear. There's also a linux port now called "MEKANIX". For those who don't know, MEKA is a great emulator for the Sega Master System and Game Gear as well as as several other Sega machines. By tradition, here's the changes:
  • Rewrote palette system in the attempt of reducing palette changes even more. As some people noticed, on some computers, the Windows version had terrible slowdown and incorrect colors at some occasion and especially in Game Gear games. This is due to some DirectX video drivers which force waiting for a screen refresh before each palette change. Problem is that some drivers do that and some others do not. Palette chanes in MEKA are now better grouped so that the wait should not affect gameplay in most cases. Please report if you notice any palette related problems in this version. Windows users, note that you can still get color flickering in some video modes. But overall, things should be much better
  • Rewrote hardware sprite collision emulation for video modes 1, 2, and 3 (used by SG-1000/SC-3000/SF-7000/ColecoVision software, mainly). Sprite collision is now processed line per line, for a very accurate result - at the cost of a slightly slower emulation. Although machines using those video modes usually can't poll for the current line, some software can manually do a similar job, making this precise value useful. This fixes "Froggy" and "Gold Miner" (SF-7000), and maybe more. Please report if you notice any collision related problems in this version
  • Fixed SMS/GG scanline counter to return accurate values
  • PAL/SECAM modes now hav 313 lines instead of 312
  • Fixed "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" (SMS) which in some cases had incorrect scrolling on the level score screen
  • Fixed palette switching in "F-16 Fighter" / "F-16 Fighting Falcon", colors were incorrect during one single frame after the title screen. This bug was introduced in a previous release
  • [Windows] Fixed screen capture (crashed with some DirectX drivers in v0.64c)
  • Added Chinese flag in the file loader and associated the early dump of Hokuto no Ken with it
  • Added and modified entries in the checksum and compatibility lists. Fixed a few inconsistent entries
  • Updated documentation
  • [UN*X] Released a quick & dirty GNU/Linux build, codenamed "MEKANIX". It is not perfect and I do not plan to completely support it, but I hope it can be useful to some people (some asked for it). Please read MEKANIX.TXT if you want to use it
Download the Windows and DOS versions at the Sega Master System/Game Gear Emulators page
The new MEKANIX is available at the Sega Master System/Game Gear Emulators for Unix page!