Project Lunar has launched!

[crazyteknohed]

https://modmyclassic.com/2019/12/28/...-0-has-landed/

Going to give it a go later today. Can’t wait to stick some of the USA games not featured on the Jp model which is the one I have.

Also there is an overclock feature which might help those with dodgy sound delay units... I can’t comment on that as my Jp model has zero sound lag fortunately for me.

[Knuckle Duster]

I have it up and running on my Mini. It's easy enough to manually load individual games. They just need to add Sega CD support.

I tried the SFT roms, Beggar Prince and Wukong. As expected they are broken and don't boot up.

[crazyteknohed]

I tried the SFT roms, Beggar Prince and Wukong. As expected they are broken and don't boot up.

I tried Sonic 3 Complete, Cave Story and some translation patched ROMs, all worked fine.

So far good points:

- Compatibility seems decent
- Interface is very simple and intuitive to upload games
- Games appear in stock UI
- Minor improvement to scanlines option
- Ability to overclock although I cannot comment on its efficacy as I do not have a laggy unit

Things that could be implemented:

- The hiding of original ROMs.

I have uploaded translated versions of Langrisser II and Rent-a-Hero to my unit but as there does not seem to be a way to hide the original ROMs like you can with Hackchi on the SNES Mini, I have two copies of each game appearing on the UI. In the meantime I will have to rename the patched versions to make it more obvious which ones to play but it’d be nice to hide the original versions. Would also be good to hide the other Jp RPGs that remain untranslated and that bloody quiz game too.

- On the stock UI there are two new ‘games’ on the shelf which are simply links to Retroarch and EmulationStation. Maybe there is a way to disable these that I’ve not yet figured out, but as I have no intention of using either I’d prefer to keep the UI as close to stock in appearance as possible.

All things said, this is a very exciting and polished product for the Mini and makes the Mini itself even more of a compelling purchase. I’m surprised there is not so much of a buzz on this board surrounding it, although perhaps that could be attributed to the fact it’s still holiday season.

[Boured]

I'm very glad that the Mini is now able to be opened up to emulate more now. Especially when a friend of mine was one of the testers and got Sonic 3 & Knuckles to work on it. Should be a good alternative to the real thing for people who want them on the cheap.

[CrossBow]

I added about 50 more to my Mini yesterday but some of the games listed as working 100% on the compatiblity list...do not work fully for me regardless of which roms I try and use. They all have the same similar issue...

Phelios...this is listed as working but just flat out only gives me the E4 Shutdown error. I've downloaded several versions of the rom and they all produce the same error. So no go on that one.
Hellfire does work for me, but no audio at all
Fire Shark is listed as working fully but like Hellfire I can't get the game to work with any audio.
Verytex is listed as working, but just like Fire Shark and Hellfire...no audio.
Have a freind of mine that also doesn't get any audio from Midnight Resistance. So I'm not sure if the compatiblity list was done using different versions of the Genesis Mini hardware but it isn't totally accurate from what I've seen.

Now another thing I've not seen mentioned yet and this is really a pain in the ass. If you have save states on any games. And then go back and remove any games and resysnc. Then you find out later that the games were removed and apparently the games were shuffled in the process. However, the save states do not get resyncd with the games! So as an example I had a save state for Smash TV. I then later removed hell fire since it wasn't working fully. When I powered the Mini back on, I was shocked to see that Smash TV's save state was now showing up as the save state for Sol-Feace?! And when I loaded it, sure enough it loaded up Sol-Feace. So do be aware of that fun nugget.

[GohanX]

I picked up a Mini on sale at Best Buy yesterday and did the hack. It's pretty cool so far. I did run into a couple of games that didn't work (NBA Jam TE wouldn't boot, Hyperstone Heist had sound issues) but overall it's been great, particularly for a first public release. I'm going to see if I can get 32x and Sega CD to run from a USB drive using RetroArch tonight.

I read somewhere that the save state thing is a known issue, hopefully it will be be resolved in an update.

[CrossBow]

I read somewhere that the save state thing is a known issue, hopefully it will be be resolved in an update.

Yes I was told this as well, but I didn't see anything about it in the FAQ and I'm not a member of any forums that deal with this stuff. I also see that from the list I was looking at yesterday afternoon, that they have now listed Phelios and Battle Brave (Barver) Saga as NOT working with the E4 errors I was getting. This was not how those two games were originally listed. They also updated it to show that Truxton doesn't have audio either and that is true and had forgot to mention it.

They still list Fire Shark as working fully and I can tell you it has the same issue that Hell Fire and TMNT and Truxton have. No Audio...

The save States thing is a pain but for now I'm going to get the games I'm likely to play on it most loaded up and then likely not touch it again for a while. I will just create new save states when I play those games.

I've also heard reports that even though you have about 150Mb of free space, that you should leave about 60Mb free to prevent issues? I'm guessing this is to accommodate the save states for your games since those are about 1mb each for most games? I've currently got 55Mb still free on mine and added about 50 games to it so that should be good. Many of the games I have loaded I'm not likely to use save states with much like the arcade ports.

Still this is really cool and I will keep a watch on future changes to it. But for what they have now, it makes the Genesis Mini more likely to come with me on travel trips than it would have been before.

[GohanX]

I dunno about the space issue. I loaded just about everything I wanted on the thing and I still have 140 MB left. No need to load the whole library on the thing. If anything, I'd throw the favorite games in the main GUI and have a folder on a USB drive that has the full set to be accessed through Retroarch. That way if you really needed to play Awesome Possum it's on there but not in the main menu.

[CrossBow]

I dunno about the space issue. I loaded just about everything I wanted on the thing and I still have 140 MB left. No need to load the whole library on the thing. If anything, I'd throw the favorite games in the main GUI and have a folder on a USB drive that has the full set to be accessed through Retroarch. That way if you really needed to play Awesome Possum it's on there but not in the main menu.

Well I've got loaded what I would want to play and only have about 48Mb left at this point. I haven't counted it up but I'm guessing I have about 100 total games on it now when you include the ones it comes with plus what I've added. Maybe less. Mine only had about 155Mb starting off so not really sure what was taking up additional space on mine to begin with since I'd rarely even played it other than to fire it up and check out the emulation on some of the games. Did make a few save states so I'm assuming that is what ate up some of the space.

[Pha]

...installed without any anomalies.

The Lunar project and its design is of high quality.

The proposed optimizations for the UI stock are effective:

-ultra-reactive button pressure
-on the other hand, switching to 1.3 ghz makes the system unstable under stock ui with the unit tested (the system stops...)
-there are problems with the management of the backups in UI stock (the loading tag sometimes corresponds to other games than the one already in progress...)

I compared the emulations between the Retroarch cores and the stock emulator "M2ENGAGE", so all the lag and emulation problems disappear with Retroarch...

M2ENGAGE generated severe incompatibilities with the innumerable games I tried and which are not all referenced because the task is so huge (error message in the emulation and Z80 synchronization relative to the sound part) and graphical anomalies too, which can explain many problems, for example hombrew roms claiming updates...

M2ENGAGE is an emulator with uneven characteristics depending on the games and is no less than 15 years late (KegaFusion does better in all points).


If M2ENGAGE sources are not open and if M2 doesn't react we'll get a bad quality stock emulator which is very annoying, despite the countless improvements, I understand that the LP team will try to launch games emulated by Retroarch but from the UI stock, to marry all the advantages between UI and emulation...

Edit : Project Lunar - M2ENGAGE Compatibility List

The file does not expose native lags, for example of Sonic 2 (absent in Retroarch with Pico/GS+) it would be necessary to create a column with cells especially to communicate on this type of major information...

[GohanX]

Yeah Pha, after playing around with my Mini some more last night I'd say Genesis Plus GX under Retroarch is considerably better than the stock emulator once it's tweaked. You can also tweak the audio and video settings to your preferences, and it was pretty sweet playing 32x (using Picodrive) and Sega CD on it. Using the other emulators also nearly eliminates the sound lag issue, good enough that I don't notice it (although technically, it's set to 64 ms.)

[CrossBow]

Well, I ran into issues last night regarding the space I was using so I did some experimenting. I uninstalled PL and set the console back to factory reset to wipe it as clean as I could. After that I went and did 2 save game states to each of the original 42 games. I then checked the memory storage and found that my hunch was correct. The Save States for the original games are in fact stored in that empty partition space. The empty space is 170Mb initially. Well, each of the original games will take up about 4Mb for all four save states.

The math on that comes out to a total of 168Mb needed for all of the original 42 games to have 4 save states. That means you can't technically add even one game to this thing and still have enough space for all 4 save states to be used with your games. There are lots of games from the original 42 that I'm not likely to play and certainly not wanting to use any save states for, so I've gone back and reinstalled PL and put about 30 games more into it. That should give me the ability to have about 2 save states for each of the games I'm actually like to play.

Also, something is up with the PL installer because the first time I did it I had like 155Mb out of the box. However after uninstalling PL and resetting the Mini to factory defaults. I made sure NONE of the original games had any save states on them. I then reinstalled PL and this time I only had about 123Mb starting off? So it seems once you do this, you will forever lose some of the extra space for whatever it is that PL adds. Even on uninstalling it, there is still some space being used from the previous installation the doesn't get cleaned up. That is more than a little annoying...

[Nightwolf]

Yeah Pha, after playing around with my Mini some more last night I'd say Genesis Plus GX under Retroarch is considerably better than the stock emulator once it's tweaked. You can also tweak the audio and video settings to your preferences, and it was pretty sweet playing 32x (using Picodrive) and Sega CD on it. Using the other emulators also nearly eliminates the sound lag issue, good enough that I don't notice it (although technically, it's set to 64 ms.)

Hi! How is the audio using Genesis Plus and Picodrive? I made my own comparison with real console vs mini, and of course the real one sounds far much better. Image quality I think is so-so.

By the way, I really recommend a good usb cable, specially if you overclock the mini as it solves lots of issues (black screen, etc)

[Greg2600]

This will work with a USB Thumb Drive (for the full collection)?

[CrossBow]

This will work with a USB Thumb Drive (for the full collection)?

Apparently yes. I've not tested this myself but I've spoke to others who stated they just loaded up the games onto a flash drive. PL apparently will see a flash drive installed into the second controller port and allow you to store the games to that.