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- Written by: Nemesis
The first public release of Exodus is now available in the downloads section. This has been a very long time in the works, with countless hours spent getting it to the point it's currently up to. I hope you like what you see. There's a lot more planned for the future though, so keep an eye out for updates. If you have any feedback you want to give, or if you encounter any problems while trying to use Exodus, please contact me via the support forums, and I'll do my best to help. Also remember to check out the suggestions page if you have any great ideas to improve Exodus, or if you want to see and vote on ideas other people have submitted.
Thanks for your support.
- Details
- Written by: Nemesis
A number of people have asked me what the minimum system requirements will be in order to run Mega Drive games at full speed in Exodus. That question is a little hard to answer, since the speed at which Exodus is able to run does depend on the code itself that's being emulated. Code with very tight timing requirements is likely to execute slower than code with very simple timing requirements. I also haven't exhaustively tested performance on different hardware platforms or different games. That said, after gathering some feedback, here's my recommendations:
- Windows XP or above
- 4GB+ RAM
- 64-bit quad-core CPU
- 2.8GHz per core minimum. 3.4GHz+ recommended.
A dual-core won't really cut it here. Exodus is heavily threaded, and with the Mega Drive alone, you'll have at least 6 threads actively competing for processor time. Any quad-core will be able to run Exodus, but in order to pull full framerate in most games, you need a very fast processor. I have reports of all tested games running at full speed quite consistently on a Core i7-3770, which has a clock rate of 3.4GHz per core. On an old laptop I've used for a lot of the development on Exodus, with a Core i7-Q820, which has a 1.73GHz clock rate, I seem to average around 60% framerate. If your machine is somewhere between these two configs, expect your framerate to be somewhere between these two points.
- Details
- Written by: Nemesis
I thought for awhile there that I'd never get this place online, but here we are. This is the official website for Exodus, the soon to be released emulator. The release date for Exodus is the 1st of May 2013. I'm making what I hope to be the final, release-ready build right now as I write this article.
It's been a long road getting to this point. I first started working on Exodus in late November 2006, with a focus on the Sega Mega Drive. About 3 months later, I had an emulator capable of playing quite a few Mega Drive games, minus support for sound. I've released preview versions of this emulator several times in a limited capacity, but it's always been far from what I wanted it to reach, until now. Almost 7 and a half years after I began work on Exodus, I'm finally ready to make the first full release.
To this day, the Mega Drive is still the only platform there's currently support for, but I hope you'll be impressed with the high level of accuracy this emulator should achieve on the first release. I've spent countless hours performing exhaustive hardware tests in order to gather the necessary information to accurately emulate the Mega Drive hardware. I did a lot of work on the YM2612 sound chip in 2008, the results of which have improved Mega Drive sound emulation in many emulators. More recently, I've done a lot of work on the VDP, some of which I've published, and some of which I haven't. I'll write more about that later.
A lot of the time involved in the development of Exodus has gone into designing and developing the Exodus platform itself. Right now, there's 139,671 lines of code that make up Exodus, and every one of them was written by me, and modified, and rewritten twice more. There have been several major design evolutions along the way that I've had to make, in order to achieve the goal of being able to model complex systems entirely through XML. As my understanding of the requirements have increased, and as I've encountered difficult real-world problems, I've had to make enhancements and rethink major design elements in order to make everything work while avoiding any hacks. In the end, I've found the governing principle is simple: If you model the way the real hardware does things, you'll be able to make it work. If you depart from that, sooner or later, you're bound to run into problems. There are a few additional enhancements and new features I know I'm going to add to the platform in the future, but as it stands now, it's a very powerful platform. I'm hoping from here on, I'll be spending a lot less time working on the framework itself, and more time working on using that framework to emulate systems.
Anyway, I'll write more in the coming days. Stay tuned for the official release.