Better Genesis/MD Emulator alternative?

Fellow GameShell users,

genesis_plus_gx is a great emulator for Master System and Game Gear titles. I presume it’s just as capable at SG-1000 titles too. But on the 16-bit fron, it’s sorely lacking in quality. Massive slowdown, poor sound sample quality, none of which is conducive to playing Sonic, or indeed Tanglewood (which is excellent, by the way).

By all accounts Picodrive is as useful as a chocolate teapot on the GS currently. At any rate, I’ve had zero success in getting that core to run any games at all.

My question is, do any of you have suggestions on an alternative? Is there a better build of genesis plus gx or picodrive? Or have any of you managed to find a good settings configuration to get Genesis Plus GX to work better?

Ive tried tinkering with the core settings, but alas, since the same core is employed for GG and SMS games, I cant change too much, or it will become incompatible.

what game are you trying to run?

I was ok with genesis_plus_gx days ago, it worked very well

any game, really. but lets take for instance, Streets of Rage. as the screen scrolls along, the performance labours. Music slows, image rendering slows, frame rate appears to drop. Even when there’s no on screen movement, its evident from the audio (title music, for example) that theres some slow processing going on. This was observed from the default settings and from setting up RetroArch in the manner set out in the Retroarch Megathread.

yeah, it’s true seems
not very well performance

I think it’s just needs to do more optimization on the arm platform for SEGA

having the same issues with genesis_plus_gx …isn’t there a better performing core ? sound crackling is annoying and i’m also experiencing frame drops in games like Altered Beast when there are too many things on screen.

The picodrive core you can find in the forums here works flawlessly for me

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Tried to play a sonic hack using pico drive core and it reset

Can confirm. Picodrive is NOT working for me with the latest build from index - powered by h5ai v0.29.0 (https://larsjung.de/h5ai/) BUT is perfectly working (and way better performing than genesis_plus_gx) with the build that is linked here:
Picodrive (standalone and libretro core) Mega Drive emulator - #19 by elefas

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Tou can try this one too

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I can not get any Genesis/Megadrive emulators to work, all i get is black screen. Some games have sound but just black screen.

I tried installing picodrive from the post here , And i’ve tried genesixs plus gx and picodrive within retroarch. Tried all the video plugins .

Maybe there is just poor Genesis support since it came shipped without a genesis emulator on. But others ive read have said picodrive and gens plus gx work fine for them.