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You may or may not have heard about Exodus. Exodus is a generic and extensible emulation platform I have been developing for almost 9 years now, which aims to support cycle-level accuracy in emulation, combined with powerful debugging and development tools. Unlike other emulators which are statically compiled to support a particular set of systems, Exodus is open an extensible, with every emulation core supplied through plugins. The platform itself constructs systems from an XML definition of the connections between individual components in the system. This design allows the emulator itself to focus on managing the timing and interaction between the components, and allows the emulation cores to be totally modular and reusable in other systems that share the same components. A lot more information about this is available on the website.

On the 30th of April 2013 I released Exodus 1.0, with support for the Sega Mega Drive. The plugin SDK wasn't ready for use at that stage though, so I held off on the open source release until I could get it up to scratch. Since then I've had delays and setbacks in getting the next release out the door, but the long process is now complete. I'm pleased to announce that Exodus 2.0 will be released both as binaries, and an open source repository, on the 30th of April 2015. Developer documentation will also be published detailing the API. The code will be licensed under MS-RL, and the repository will be hosted on Bitbucket. Refer to the website for more information on how to build Exodus from the source, and how to contribute ideas or code changes to the project.

In terms of Mega Drive emulation, the main differences in Exodus 2.0 are as follows:
-Major speed improvements (average 90% on dual-core systems, 30%-40% on quad-core systems)
-Around 40% reduction in memory usage
-Completely redesigned user interface, with a very powerful docking system for window management.
-Gamepad/joystick support
-Lots of bugs fixed and new debugging features


The release will be made available on the official website at http://www.exodusemulator.com, so head over there for download links and more information about this project. I hope this emulator of use to some people out there, and I hope other people will be interested in contributing to this project, and helping me to expand it into other platforms.

Edit:
Exodus 2.0.0 has now been released! You can download the new version on the release page at http://www.exodusemu...current-release

For those of you who don't know, I've been working on an emulator called Exodus for the last few years. In fact, I've been working on this emulator since November 2006 if you can believe it. After years of work, I'm pleased to announce I'll be officially making a public release of this emulator before the end of April.

I've been doing extensive hardware testing since I began this project to gather the necessary information to make the most technically accurate Mega Drive emulator ever written. I performed and published results of my testing on the YM2612 back in 2008, and a lot of Mega Drive emulators now have more accurate sound emulation as a result. This testing was initiated to assist the development of my own YM2612 emulation core for Exodus. I've also done a lot of testing on the VDP over the last couple of years to build a cycle accurate VDP core, which is fundamentally more accurate than any other VDP core in existence, and can correctly respond to mid-line state changes. In fact, all of the emulation cores used by Exodus are written entirely by me, from scratch, relying primarily on direct hardware testing to confirm many aspects of their implementation. Accuracy has been paramount in the design and development of this emulator, and I hope it will become a new standard for emulation accuracy.

My efforts aren't just focused on the Mega Drive however. I've spent a lot of time working on the overall design and architecture of Exodus to make probably the most generic, flexible, and scalable emulation platform ever written. This emulator is fundamentally different to every other emulator I know of, in several critical ways. I'll publish more about that towards the time of release, but most importantly, Exodus is not a Mega Drive emulator. Exodus is a generic emulation platform, which allows systems to be assembled from individual components at runtime. Nothing related to a particular system is hardcoded. Exodus constructs a system from a set of discrete components, manages the communication between those components, and keeps perfect timing accuracy between each component. Other systems can easily be modelled without modifying or rebuilding Exodus, it simply requires emulation cores for each device in that system to be available. As more cores are available for Exodus to use, more and more systems can be modelled easily, as a lot of systems share common components.

With Exodus, I'm starting my emulation efforts with the Mega Drive, but I have my sights set on plenty of other systems, like the Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, and various Sega arcade systems. I've spent the last few years collecting a wide variety of hardware for testing and analysis, and I'm going to continue this project and expand it into many other platforms. I'm planning to continue advancing and leading this project, and I hope one day it will be able to rival even the biggest emulation projects such as MESS and MAME for system support, while providing a number of key advantages over other projects.

Exodus is also an extremely powerful debugging, development, and analysis environment, which I'm hoping will be able to serve as a very useful tool for communities involved in development, hacking, and reverse engineering, to be able to do more complex and thorough debugging and testing in software, where you can trust that if it runs properly in Exodus, it will run the same way on the real hardware, and vice versa.

Exodus will also be fully open source. This will happen shortly after the first release, after some further thought and discussion about licensing. An SDK will be provided which will allow any other interested developers to write and adapt cores for use in Exodus. Cores exist as separate DLL files, and can be compiled and released separately from the emulation platform itself, so individual cores can be developed and released on their own schedule, and don't need to be locked into the release schedule of the platform itself.



Exodus will finally see its first official, non-beta/preview release this month! On or before the end of April, no matter what, I'll be making the first release. Stay tuned for more information as the date draws nearer.

I don't have a lot of time, so I'll keep this brief. Dean Sitton (posting as DeanSatan), a former employee of SOA, and the guy who came up with the name "Ivo Robotnik", popped onto this forum awhile back. See this thread for details.

Dean had a variety of documents from his time at Sega, a number of them related to Sonic, including several versions of something called the "Sonic Bible". I bought them. They arrived today. I've started scanning them.

The Sonic Bible was an internal document created by SOA to provide a localised history and overall philosophy for Sonic and the Sonic universe. It is apparently not based on the Japanese history. According to Dean: "the bible was developed at soa in-tune with getting the game from soj - there was little to no exposure to the original japanese fiction at that time".

Enough blabbing from me. Here are the documents I've scanned in so far, in PDF form:
http://nemesis.hacking-cult.org/MegaDrive/.../SonicBible.pdf
http://nemesis.hacking-cult.org/MegaDrive/...BibleDraft1.pdf
http://nemesis.hacking-cult.org/MegaDrive/...BibleDraft2.pdf

And here are the source images:
http://nemesis.hacking-cult.org/MegaDrive/.../SonicBible.zip
http://nemesis.hacking-cult.org/MegaDrive/...BibleDraft1.zip
http://nemesis.hacking-cult.org/MegaDrive/...BibleDraft2.zip

I'm not sure about the correct names for these documents. Best as I can tell, I've listed them in order from oldest to newest. Some of the documents are missing some sections. What you're looking at is what I've got. More cool stuff coming soon.

I've just got my hands on some very valuble information for the YM2612. Trouble is, it's in Japanese. More info at http://www.spritesmi...topic.php?t=386

Is anyone here is able and willing to lend a hand translating some of this doc?

I just scored this little beauty:

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi...em=320203447708

This will make a nice addition to my collection. It's basically an official dev unit for the MegaDrive/MegaCD. It's not complete, but I should be able to make some use of it. I have no idea how useful it's going to be, or indeed if it's going to be useful in any way at all, but it will be interesting none the less. The MegaCD is supposedly multi-region too, which is in itself interesting. I'll check whether it's a multi-bios system, or if it's got a custom regionless bios, and I'll dump it if it's custom. I've got a small collection of undumped misc bioses/devices that I've dumped recently too (eg, both Sega Channels, XBand modem, Multi-Mega BIOS, etc) which I need to release sometime.

I really need to put all this stuff up on a site somewhere and publish some real information on it. I've still got that TeraDrive stuff I was going to scan/release months back. I've gotta figure out how to dump MegaLD games for the LaserActive too. And there's my emulator that I need to get ready for release. I wish I had more time to work on these things nowadays.