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Gens4Dreams
Gens4all v4.3, RC3: Shangri-La, released 2/3/2023

changelog

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The original Gens emulator was developed by Stéphane Dallongeville and was a mainstay of the emulation scene for several years until KEGA Fusion dethroned it for ease of use and performance. Before that, however, Daniel Lancha would come along and provide us with a port of the emulator to the Dreamcast. All these years later, TapamN in our community has transformed this emulator dramatically. There's no reason, aside from Virtua Cop, to ever touch Sega's own Smash Pack again. And at version 4.2c, with improvements to Z80 and VDP across the board, plus working raster and zblanks, this is the best yet.

Created and curated using the 2012 GoodGen dump, this release contains over 630 retail games, some Japanese games with translations applied, all tested and expected to work with minimal issues given what the emulator is capable of. It also includes 34 homebrew titles, 15 romhacks for the Sonic series, and 18 quality-of-life romhacks for a number of games. This is currently the best curation of Genesis and Mega Drive games available for the Dreamcast community.

If you'd like to know what games are and are not included, you can check the Google Docs page I have here. It is set to comment mode, so you can also submit your test results as you go along!

• Known issues
• Some games may exhibit resolution issues over composite (Phantasy Star IV is known to do this)
• Certain games using raster graphics may show visual defects
• Games may have issues loading if played from a CD-R (this should be fixed with a disabled watchdog, we will see)
• A number of games have sound or palette issues that may or may not be fixable at this time.

• TO-DO
• Continue to update variables for games needing fixes and controls set
• Create a new PVR for GDemu users
• Test multiplayer more thoroughly

All games have been tested and working using Gens4all v4.0, and some were re-tested with 4.2c to deal with bugs. All testing was done using a VA1 NTSC Dreamcast using a GDemu on a 64GB SD card, using VGA for video output. Further testing and confirmation will be necessary, and is requested, to identify issues with games loading using CD-R, or playing over composite or RGB.

Download the pack now!

RC3: Shangri-La Released 2/3/2023, contains ISO & CDI

Salvo RC 2 Released 1/30/2022
CDI for burning & GDemu
ISO for Dreamshell


Once again, I want to give thanks to TapamN for all his work on this. It's possible to play a majority of the best and worst of Sega's 16-bit behemoth on the 128-bit legend of a console that we enjoy all the time, and this release is thanks to him. I also wish to thank Ian Michael, who is the reason I took up the effort to test all these games originally with Gens4Good back in October. I'm excited to see more from everyone in the community, and I hope to improve this package as time goes. This is a community effort, so please, enjoy, and give feedback!

Holy shit nice release! Thanks so much to you and TapamN for this! We truly are in a new golden age of Dreamcast homebrew and emulation and the future looks brighter than ever! Hopefully one day Ian can get his version of the SNES emu running as well. Ian did push it pretty far though so it can not be understated what his work on SNES emulation has been thus far.

Gens4Dreams or Gens4All?

Is this a more upto date Fork etc?

Gens4Dreams is what he is calling this pack, it is still based on Gens4All port by TapamN.

Thx for this great release!
Are you looking to build an update soon with the game list and hacks applied?

MastaG wrote:Thx for this great release!
Are you looking to build an update soon with the game list and hacks applied?

That is the reason this is a release candidate. That and more will need to be done. I need the community to assist me, especially regarding bugs in cases where I didn't test a game thoroughly enough. Furthermore, I want to continue to add to the game list. In cases like romhacks, I couldn't possibly sit down and test every different version of a Street Fighter romhack, could I?

The gamelist thing is going to require some research. I am not a software developer, just an avid computer user and gamer. I never got the KOS toolchain to work on Linux. Ian was a tremendous help when I released Gens4Good, luckily TapamN started posting the plainfiles, but without Ian, there would be no Gens4Good or Gens4Dreams.

Anthony817 wrote:Holy shit nice release! Thanks so much to you and TapamN for this! We truly are in a new golden age of Dreamcast homebrew and emulation and the future looks brighter than ever! Hopefully one day Ian can get his version of the SNES emu running as well. Ian did push it pretty far though so it can not be understated what his work on SNES emulation has been thus far.

Once I have a grasp on Gens4Dreams here, I might commit to this same thing with SNES4all. But I wanna be sure this one is going well first.

I'm still working on snes4all please dont use the old release made big improvement over it..

Anthony817 wrote:Gens4Dreams is what he is calling this pack, it is still based on Gens4All port by TapamN.

I'm sticking with MoeFoh's dub Gens4Good lool TapamN's Genesis to Dreamcast never gonna be better than this

Any idea if F-117 Night Storm would work? I tried the F-22 game and it ran really well. Seriously never thought I would see the 3d games working well on Dreamcast but it runs super amazing. Even Duke Nukem is blazingly fast! Super awesome seeing how fast this is in person finally. Castlevania, Rocket Knight, Desert Strike. Even the homebrew Wolfenstien port. Everything ran amazing! I didn't even have to run in overclocked mode like I used to have to do to run this emulator.

mistamontiel wrote:

Anthony817 wrote:Gens4Dreams is what he is calling this pack, it is still based on Gens4All port by TapamN.

I'm sticking with MoeFoh's dub Gens4Good lool TapamN's Genesis to Dreamcast never gonna be better than this

Depends if it's using 4.2c rev1