gens cvs 20070625 (2.13alpha), linux, command line, success!

I never was too impressed with dgen on Linux (for emulating a Sega Genesis, 32X, SegaCD). It was simple to setup and worked with a lot of roms, but not enough of them. I never could get Sonic the Hedgehog 2 to work, nor ANY of the 32X games, even with the appropriate BIOS files. However, because of the simple setup and flexible command line, integration with MythTV's mythgame almost required it.

I wanted to move because I wanted 32X support (and I had the BIOS files), plus better compatibility for games like Sonic 2. I started to research gens, which was supposed to work better, but the more common sources and rpms were older, without the necessary patches to make a command line setup work. For example, the escape key was linked to pause the emulator, not exit it. Boo. Everything on the web points to "gens for linux - mythgame edition" (found at http://mythtv.wbond.net/gens_for_linux_mythgame_edition/). This release also includes patches for GCC4. It compiled fine, but had a weird quirk with gens' double winows and fullscreen mode. Gens runs one window for the emulation and another for the menu. When applying --fs from the command line, it enters fullscreen, but the menu window cancels that until you click or ALT-TAB to focus the emulation window. Again, boo.

I stumbled upon this Ubuntu forum thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=290008. This is gens 2.13 alpha aka gens CVS 20070625. You can browse it on SourceForge here: http://gens.cvs.sourceforge.net/gens/Gens-MultiPlatform/

Follow the links for the RPM, or compile from source if you insist. Beware of the ads and the popups, but don't worry, the download is there. Make sure you delete your old configs in ~/.gens because this version uses a slightly different format. Also, running gens on the command line without a config in ~/.gens will result in a segfault. How do you get the gui to do the basic config? Feed gens a rom file on the command line like: gens /path/to/rom/game.bin so that it'll start a rom and bring up the gui. Best part about this release is that it's a single window now and fullscreen works. I'm using the following as my command line for MythTV:

gens --rompath / --quickexit --fs "$1"

I've got that in a shell script wrapper, because I also call qjoypad to integrate the escape key to exit the emulator.

enjoy.