Show some love for Mednafen

idyll

Mednafen is the best emulator for playing GameBoy Advance and Virtual Boy games on Mac. Its PlayStation emulation is still being worked on, but it already boasts incredible compatibility. Until OpenEmu is ready for prime time, this is THE emulator to use for the 16-bit era and older. More people need to try this emulator!

Mednafen emulates over 15 consoles, impressively well, but is barely mentioned on this site. The News Roundup mentions it on occasion, but only the Nekolauncher frontend. The frontend is worthless without the backend and it's not posted on the author's site.

Another user and I have been posting Mac binaries on the Mednafen Forum for over a year. Check it out! Download the first zip file and give it a try. No command line knowledge required; just run the app in the download and you'll get a nice graphical interface. Playing a game is as easy as File --> Open.

Enjoy!

Squirrel

I use Mednafen for all my GBA emulation needs. It's excellent. But there hasn't been a non-WIP release in 3 years. I'm still happily using version 0.8.D. Is development active enough on this project to give us something noteworthy to put on the roundup more often?

mossy_11

I'll try to keep closer tabs on the Mednafen dev forum. Are you on any kind of release schedule? Or is it just a case of whenever there's enough improvements/new stuff to justify an update?

I'm putting a shout-out in the news roundup that I'm writing right now, with a little intro for anyone who hasn't encountered it before.

idyll

Squirrel: The PlayStation emulation is developing very nicely. I've had no issues running any of the games I've tried. I can't get it to run CDs from the drive, but CD images work fine. This may be an issue with the libcdio library and Mac rather than an issue with Mednafen. The only other contender for PSX emulation on Mac (that I know of) is PCSX-Reloaded, but it hasn't been updated in a long time (not officially anyway). Mednafen also has the best emulation of Virtual Boy that I've found on any OS. Yeah, I know that it's a crap console that burns retinas and induces headaches, but Wario Land is still a good game. :cheer: It's very playable once you turn off the 3D and switch the colors to gray scale.

mossy_11: I'll try to release binary updates whenever another update is posted. However, if I fall behind, I've also got a compile script attached to the post I linked to earlier. Anyone with an install of Snow Leopard and Xcode can run the script inside the zip and compile a binary for 10.6+ users. Compiling a new update should be as easy as replacing the "mednafen-0.9.29-wip.tar.bz2" with an updated source code file from the dev forum. Then double click the command file and wait for it to finish the compile. After that, it's just a matter of packing everything up in a zip.

Most of the releases lately have been bug fixes, changes to the PSX emulation and networking improvements. The updates usually come every few weeks or months. I haven't experienced any crashing or game breaking bugs with these WIP updates and the next non-WIP release could be a long ways away. I'm not saying that I want you to talk about Mednafen every time it gets an update, but it has been making big strides in PSX emulation and network connectivity. A mention in the roundup every once in a while and a spot in the emulators section would be nice. :)

Thanks for including Mednafen in your news roundup. I just want to get the word out.

MetalDragon

I just tried Mednafen for PS1 emulation. It works fine so far.
Had to google to find out how to set the controls (press alt+shift+1 while running emulation then press every button twice to set it). Now I wonder, is there something like the OpenGL Plugin in PCSX-R? Games look much better using that one. Mednafen seems to be set to OpenGL but it looks like "normal" PS1 pixel stuff. There are so many settings, I found some explanations to them (here: http://mednafen.sourceforge.net/documentation/09x/psx.html) but I have no clue on what I have to choose to get the result I want (or if it's even possible with mednafen)

oh and is it possible to load or convert .img/.ccd/.sub files?

idyll

I'm glad you gave Mednafen a try. The documentation you linked to is included in the Mednafen download I posted. Mac OS X uses OpenGL to display its hardware rendered 3D graphics, so I'd bet money that both PCSX-R and Mednafen use it. I don't know what you mean by

"normal" PS1 pixel stuff

and I don't know what result you're trying to get. Could you post a screen shot of a game in PCSX-R and Mednafen to illustrate what you mean? Shift+F9 will take a screenshot in Mednafen and put it in "~/.mednafen/snaps." I don't know if Mednafen can load CD images in CloneCD format, but I know that bin/cue files work. CD image support is limited by the libcdio library that Mednafen uses. You could give it a try and let us know. :) I'm not sure how you would convert the CloneCD format to something else using a Mac.

I hope that answers at least some of your questions. I would direct further questions about Mednafen to their forums. They know more than I do about it and tend to respond faster as well. Thanks for your interest.

menace690

OpenGL being used to display on screen does not mean OpenGL is used to generate the 3d graphics. You may think this is odd, but to get the most accurate emulator possible, you can't. Instead actually render the hardware directly in software, including the video card and associated ram and functions. Each screen rendering generated by the emulator is then displayed on screen through opengl.