One of my biggest interests is computer and video gaming. Linux, however, does not offer the wide range of gaming options provided by “that other OS”, but Linux does provide quite a few options, including several gaming emulators for classic consoles. The Genesis/Megadrive (I’ll just refer to it by its name in the USA — “Genesis” — from now on for simplicity’s sake) is one of those, and while most distros have a commandline-only Genesis emulator (dgen), it does lack a bit in features and quality.
There is another Genesis emulator for Linux from the Windows world, called Gens; its problem, however, is that it is very slow due to it running in software mode and not using any kind of hardware acceleration to render it onto the screen. Fortunately, someone posted on the Gentoo forums here a version of Gens that uses hardware acceleration. The link provided at the beginning no longer works, since there has been an updated version (posted on page 3 of that discussion) available here (or at a mirror someone provided here ). As long as you have the proper development libraries installed, compiling should be very simple (though there may be some issues with GCC4; most distros have a way to install a 3.4 version of GCC; to build with it, use export CC=”gcc-3.4″ and export CXX=”g++-3.4″ before configuring).
The only problem I had with the default install is that Gens would not remember the last directory you opened a ROM from; I created a small patch that would do exactly that. It is available from my site here (backup site here).
Happy gaming!
