Welcome to the official website for Exodus, a unique and powerful emulation platform. Please use the main menu above to learn more about Exodus, and to gain access to support and downloads.
With the accelerating decline of Mercurial support in the industry in general, and the decision by Atlassian to drop Mercurial support from BitBucket in particular, it's past time for me to migrate the Exodus source repository to a new home. Although Exodus hasn't seen much love from me in recent years due to real life keeping me busy, I'm still here in the background biding my time until I can invest in this project again. To give the Exodus code a home until that happens, I've just migrated the repository over to GitHub. Although I have a fondness and personal preference for GitLab, GitHub has become the de-facto standard home for open-source projects over the last decade, and I see no reason to fight that trend. You can now find the Exodus source repository hosted under GitHub at https://github.com/exodusemulator/Exodus. Future development will be based from this location, and the website has been updated to reference this new home.
Exodus 2.1 is now available in the downloads area. Note that you'll need to install the Visual C++ 2017 x64 runtime too if you don't have it, which is available there too. There's quite an impressive list of bugfixes in this release. Job EX-303 in particular fixes a crash that could occur if you had a joystick or gamepad connected, which affected a fair number of people in the previous release. There's also pretty good performance improvements. I measure around a 30% speed improvement overall from Exodus 2.0.1, which is pretty substantial. I've made the VDP plane viewer a but nicer by making the window resizable and making the plane region zoomable, which is nice, but I'm particularly proud of this little nugget:
It's a pixel info dialog you can turn on via "Debug->Mega Drive->VDP->Debug Settings". Just float your cursor over any pixel, and it'll tell you exactly what caused it to appear there. This plays nice with layer removal, so you can peel off a layer at a time and see what's behind it if you want to, and where that pixel came from. It even works for CRAM writes during active scan. Being able to reverse the VDP render pipeline like this was relatively easy in Exodus because of how much info the VDP core holds on to, but it still took a bit of work to pull this off. Give it a spin and let me know what you think. It's great for diagnosing those mystery single line or pixel errors you can get while making something.
Here's the full list of user-facing changes in this release:
Enhancements:
Bug fixes:
After a long hiatus (over 3 years!), I'm finally returning to give this project some love. At the end of the day, this is just a hobby, and it has to move aside when real life issues require more of my time. Although I can't promise that won't happen again in the future, circumstances have changed, and I do find myself with the time to work on this project again. At this stage I believe this will continue to be the case, and I'll be able to consistently move this emulator forward.
I'm keeping things low key for now, but I'll be putting out a new release very soon, possibly in less than 24 hours. This release will include performance and usability enhancements, a few new features, and various assorted bugfixes. This is mainly a housekeeping release, to clear the decks for bigger work to come.
I've been pondering what I should be focusing on for new development over the last few days, and I feel to stay true to the goals of this project, that has to be accuracy. Although there are a lot of new cool features and enhancements I want to build, Exodus currently falls well short of where it should be in terms of accuracy, and this is primarily down to a lack of sub-opcode level external bus timing accuracy in the 68000 core. While no other Mega Drive emulator does this correctly either, they bend the timings of other system events to work around this limitation and make mainstream games run. I have deliberately avoided doing that in Exodus, and as a result there are numerous games I know of that don't function correctly as a result. This is where I'll be focusing the next development stages, aiming to get 100% cycle accurate M68000 and VDP interaction as a priority. You need to be able to measure accuracy though, so this process will involve hardware testing, and producing test ROMs. By the end of this process, I'll deliver some ROMs which can act as a regression test and a measuring stick, to compare timing accuracy between emulators and the real hardware. I already know roughly how it's going to work, and it's going to be pretty well impossible to bodge, so it'll be interesting to see the results. If you thought OverDrive 2 was brutal on emulators, just wait for this one.....
I'm pretty happy with the release of Exodus 2.0 overall, but as expected with only me testing the build prior to release, there were a few bugs in some areas I hadn't tested for awhile. There have been enough issues fixed to justify a patch release, so Exodus 2.0.1 is now available for download! Considering it was 2 years between the first two releases, I think 18 hours between these last two is a bit of an improvement. :)
Enhancements:
Bug fixes:
If you wish to make a donation to show your appreciation for this project, you can do so here. Your donation may go towards the hosting costs of the website, or equipment or reference hardware to assist in the development of Exodus. It may also go towards a bunch of flowers for my beautiful wife, to say thanks for your support and patience all those nights I stayed up late working on this project.