I remember when it came out there were complaints about how bad the sound was and it was well BAD. Was it lazy programing or is it an issue with the Dreamcast hardware it self? Back in the day I was told it was the latter.
The sega smash pack series used an emulator based on an early circa 1997 genesis emulator called KGen. The genesis has multiple sound cards, and I think around the time of the DC smash pack, it still wasn't understood how to emulate one of the sound cards, so you wind up with the awful and incomplete sound
Kgen was a great dos emulator and they did in fact use it for the PC release of Smash Pack, but did they use it again for the DC? I ask because the sound was great on a PC (except that I did notice in all Sonic games whenever you collected a ring, you heard the ring sound effect but it cut out one of the audio layers for the music)
I don't have the exact quote at hand, but when he was asked about Virtua Cop 2 being out for the Dreamcast, AM2 producer Yu Suzuki didn't even know this one was even happening - never mind that it was already available. He genuinely was quite surprised, explaining that it wouldn't have otherwise been released without his prior approval (there's no doubt he'd have requested more than just a quick port of the PC version). Obviously the powers that be within Sega were already keeping him out of the loop this early... and we all know how that ended!
I remember playing this back when I was a kid and being totally unaware of the sound issue since the only genesis game in the list I owned was Sonic. It was bad. But not as bad as the emulated intro for Scooby Doo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weHFbWPSl5U That was terrible.
FM Synthesis was notably very difficult to emulate for years, but thanks to many efforts to properly document it, it's emulated rather well these days. SegaGen was a pretty crappy effort all around, though, and at this point it's barely even worth mentioning considering that the legal SegaGenesisPlus DC is vastly superior.
The japanese Dreamcast had a good selection on it's Mega Drive emulator but they needed to be downloaded for a fee. Saying that, you could download any ROM and play it for a limited time without paying. The emulator was part of Dream Passport 3 and had shit sound. People never talk about the PC Engine emulator of Dream Passport 3 though. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one in the world who knows about it. That emulator seemed to work fine. Yakumo
ODCM talked about it in a little blurb. Precursor to the VC YEARS ago I downloaded a PC Engine Emu on disc for my DC and never seemed to get it to run
I ran Mega Drive Emulation on my PS2 for a short time and while some games did crash I didn't notice any sound issues.
Before the Wii, the Dreamcast was my favourite machine for emulating other older machines - even if DreamSnes ran like shit in many instances. The smash pack did have that "AM Radio" type of out-of-tune sound, but I didn't have a Genesis as a kid, so I just chalked it up to the absolute superiority of the Snes and moved on. Still, I wish there had been a way to play Sega CD and PCE CD games on those emulators. Hell, it'd be cool today on the Wii.
What's funny to me is that NeoGenesis for Xbox still outperforms any other Genesis emulator for consoles (especially commercial ones!) Full Sega CD/32X support and I believe it even has SVP and UMKT support at this time. Between this emulator and my non-TMSS Genesis/Model 1 CD combo, I have concluded that I will never foray into shitty Backbone emulators again.
I still have the emulator but I no longer have the roms on disc since I got my laptop 2 years ago so I can't really compare.
Probably Kalisto at that point. Echelon didn't come around until September 2000 or so. (Ill never forget the days of downloading games at 25kb/s or so if that.)
Echelon released the Segagen loader, later Lemec released a version with a nicer menu, easier to read font.
As I recall the DreamCast Smash Pack emulator sound sucked and was worse than Genecyst on my old Pentium 100mhz. I'm not sure if there was any way to describe it other than it sounded bad. I don't think Genecyst was perfect or anything, but since I'd been used to hearing Genecyst and REAL Sega Genesis consoles, the Smash Pack sound was intolerable.
Actually that text file was aimed at Echelon and there's evidence to support this claim. First off the DC version of Smash Pack was released in 2001 and by that time Kalisto was long gone and Echelon was considered the #1 DC release group. Second the text file that had the info on how to get roms running in the emu is named ECHELON.TXT which is pretty much a dead giveaway as to who the author of the emu was refering to with that text file which in this case would be Echelon.
