16^th March 2001

Thanks to everyone who sent us e-mails about the Gens Manual, so far we've had a very positive response and only one 'blooper' has been spotted - it's on the Introduction page if you're interested, I typed Genecyst instead of Genesis in one section! I wonder how many other people spotted that one - Stef, DezE and myself all missed it and my spell checker is trained to recognise Genecyst as a 'proper' word (for obvious reasons!) I hope everyone finds it useful and if you haven't already got your copy feel free to grab it from the Gens Manual page.

Now for the main update I finally finished rechecking the C's and added another of the missing reviews (Chinese Chess).

Updated Compatibility notes: Cadash, Cal Ripkin Jr. Baseball, Captain Planet & the Planeteers, Castlevania Bloodlines, Champions World Class Soccer, Chaos Engine, Chester Cheetah, Clayfighter, Clue, Coach K College Basketball, College Slam, Comix Zone, Conquering the World 3, Crack Down, Cutthroat Island.

I rechecked a few games with the new version of Gens (0.95a), and updated Compatibility notes for: Afterburner 2, A Q Renkan Awa, Australian Rugby League, Ball Jacks*, Ballz, Batman Forever, Body Count, Boxing Legends of the Ring, Breath of Fire 3, Budokan - The martial spirit⁺, Bulls v's Blazers, Bulls v's Lakers, Time Killers, Zoop.

*You no longer need Ball Jacks (JE)[h3][x] for Gens.
⁺Budokan - The martial spirit ()[c][!]  now works in Gens.

For those of you interested in that sort of thing here's a 'league table' showing the results so far for each emulator:

Emulator	Games Working Perfectly	Games Working with Minor Problems	Total
Gens	165/176 = 93.7%	6/176 = 3.4%	171/176 = 97.6%
KGen98	129/176 = 73.3%	24/176 = 13.6%	153/176 = 86.9%
Genecyst	104/176 = 59.1%	39/176 = 22.2%	143/176 = 81.2%

The figures aren't quite final as there are still a couple of alternate dumps/hacks to check out, particularly with KGen and Genecyst, but they are fairly representative. As you can see Gens has become the clear leader in the compatibility stakes coming in almost 11% higher than it's nearest competitor KGen, with an astounding 20% lead when it comes to 'perfect' status. As I've said many times before if your computer is fast enough you really should be using Gens as your main Genesis/Mega-Drive emulator now, in fact it's almost reaching the stage where you don't need anything else. 

The Game Genie .PAT files are also ready for the C's, you can download them from any of the Game Genie pages (in the C's). Note: you only need to download them once, the file contains all the codes from the C's. Many of you have probably noticed that .PAT files are also available from our affiliate site Sega Forever and Darkwolf & I have now teamed up to try and get all the Game Genie Codes converted a little quicker for you.

Also I did some more minor tidy up work in the T's and X-Z's and finally got around to animating the Game Genie, Manual and Sonic's Secrets icons which is something I'd been meaning to do for a while.

Red5

2^rd March 2001

The main update for this week is something I've been working on for quite a while, a proper manual for Gens!

I sent one of the late Beta's to Stef last week and he has been kind enough to give it official status, he also sent me a beta of Gens because there are a few changes to the GUI in the new release, and sent me some extra info for some of the more technical sections (thanks Stef.). As you can probably imagine it's been a hectic week trying to get all the new elements up to date in time for us to release the manual at the same time as Stef releases the new version of Gens. One other area where you will notice some changes is in the System requirements section, you'll find that the figures quoted are different from those in the TXT file which comes with Gens (unless Stef updated it!), this took quite a lot of discussion before we (Stef & Red5) settled on the final numbers but I think the figures quoted in the manual are a little more realistic (hopefully Stef does too). Also there are a couple of changes in Gens 0.95 that aren't in the manual because I only got them from Stef half an hour ago!

I (Stef) have made some more changes to Gens:

• Rom format (SMD/BIN) detection modified.
• 68000 timing modified (68000 is now overclocked to 1.4 KHz instead of being underclocked at 1.3 KHz in NTSC mode.).
• Modified the Z80 timing again, now speech is the same as a real Genesis (not really great) but this fixes the sound in some games (voices in Zombies.)

These will of course be added to the manual next time I update it.

The manual comes as a self contained EXE file which should run on any Win9x installation and you can download from this page, once you've got it just double-click and enjoy...

And don't forget to go to the Gens Homepage to get the latest version of Gens (0.95) which Stef has now released.

On a sad note many of you will have noticed that Genesis Power closed their doors this week, apparently for the last time. The Genesis Project staff wish them all the best in the future and thank them for the hard work they put in to release 553 Genesis redumps over the lifetime of the site, they will be sadly missed by the Genesis emu community.

Now for some other site updates:

Rescanned the 0-B reference roms using the latest version of GoodGen, the following names were changed (but not the roms!)

Addams Family Values (8)	Addams Family Values (8) [!]
Another World (Out of this World) (EUROPE)	Another World (Out of this World) (EUROPE) [!]
Arcus Odyssey (U)	Arcus Odyssey (U) [!]
Asterix and the Power of The Gods (8) (Eng-Ger-Fr-Sp)	Asterix and the Power of The Gods (8) (Eng-Ger-Fr-Sp) [!]
Brian Lara Cricket 96 (E) [x]	Brian Lara Cricket 96 (E) [c]

Tidied up the Table of Contents for E-F, I-T and X-Z. All the contents pages are now in the 'new' format so it should be a little easier to navigate your way around the site.

Made a minor adjustment to the layout on the Sonic's Secret files for Air Diver and Alien 3.

Fixed a minor layout problems on the A Q Renkan Awa, Art of Fighting, Batman & Robin, Battletoads and Double Dragon, Beauty & the Beast - Roar of the Beast, Beyond Oasis, and Budokan pages.

Fixed broken links to: Street Fighter II Special Championship Edition Game Genie Codes

Red5