I was watching Digital Foundry's review of the Mega Sg and something came up that I hadn't really thought about before - test ROMs. Once upon a time Acid3 was a good means of testing whether your web browser was up to spec - you could take screenshots and point out how IE didn't follow web standards. I'm thinking it might be a good idea to replicate something similar for emulators, or specifically, to gage exactly how broken the AtGames systems are, and whether Sega's upcoming Mega Drive Mini is as good as they claim. As I'm not an emulator developer I've never bothered to look into this subject, but are there preferred methods of testing Sega emulators? Nemesis' test ROM exists which is a start, but is it good enough to "standardise"? Do we need more (aside from other Sega systems of course)? I don't think we could reliably gage performance or sound, and the idea would be to test the emulation, rather than the television or monitor hooked up. It would also need to be something we can easily take screenshots of and have failures which are obvious. And obviously it's pointless if it doesn't work perfectly on original hardware.
There's a few of them out there, especially for Nintendo consoles. They're typically made as byproducts of emulation development. For the GameBoy there's the Blaarg GB tests, for the SNES there's the Blaarg SNES tests, and for the NES there's a whole lot of them here. For the Saturn, SEGA released some Saturn test discs meant for programmers as well. That's about it, though. For the Master System, I found ZEXALL (which tests CPU opcodes) and SMS VDP TEST. There does not seem to be a lot of good ones for the Mega Drive, from what I could find. I might not be looking hard enough, though.
