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If you've never heard of emulators before, they're diddy wee programs that let you run software from other platforms outside the native hardware. If you have, then you might still not have heard of Kega Fusion, a top little Mega Drive (AKA Genesis in the US) emulator that runs pretty much everything* perfectly, as well as offering support for Mega CD and 32x games. Here's a rough guide to using it, explaining why it is without a doubt utterly fucking class.
Anyway.
Part 1: Setting up and loading Mega Drive games.
1) download the emulator, and unzip it.
For the sake of this guide I'll assume you have it in C:\EMULATION\EMULATORS\MEGA DRIVE\KEGA FUSION\.
2) Download some ROM files. ROM files are basically the information from the original carts. They're either .bin or .smd files, but it's best to keep them zipped in a .zip archive, since Kega Fusion can unpack .zip files while it's running. Try www.planetemu.net for the roms. Save the roms to a seperate folder to keep everything nice and neat. Let's assume C:/EMULATION/ROMS/MEGA DRIVE.
3) Setting up the emulator
- Control: You'll need a decent pad to get the proper feel of the emulator. The Sega 6-button pad for the Mega Drive was evolved int the even better Saturn pad, which has a more solid feel and shoulder buttons. Sega did a USB reissue, which is hands down the finest PC games pad ever made. Play-Asia will sort you out. To configure controls, open the emulator and click "Options" then chose "Set Config". Click on "Controllers". For now keep it simple: choose which model of pad you want to use (you have "3 button", "6 button" or "Mouse". "Menacer" isn't supported properly yet), then choose the device you want to use to control it. You'll have "Keyboard", "Mouse" and a list of gamepads linked to your PC. Select the one you want to use, click "Define", and follow the on-screen instructions.
3) Opening the games: click "file", "load genesis/32x game" and then open the .zip file your game is in (say "Sonic2.zip"). There you are, emulation is go.
I'm too enthralled with San Andreas to finish this all now, so my next post will be on advanced features, like how to run Mega CD games. |
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