Roommate got us a Sega Genesis Mini

[xabin]

Long story short, early Christmas visit was crap, but we got money for our own Christmas dinner, which my roommie used to get a Sega Genesis Mini. He knows I've been wanting one for a while, having grown up with the system, and he's been wanting to play it to see how playing on semi-original Sega hardware is like. We're thinking of possibly hacking it to add in some more choice games (though we dunno how many games we can fit on it without compromising stuff like save state space and whatnot), and I'm thinking - if I get some money but not enough to pay for a new gaming chair for my desk - using some of the money I get to get a pair of 6-button controllers.

 

The only game we really tested on there was Sonic 2, its 2-player mode, and my god, dunno if it's the emulation being crap or the system, or the rom is just that bad, but the slowdown for it in certain spots was so unbearable. I honestly don't remember it being that bad for the game on actual original Sega Genesis hardware.

 

So, that's 3 classic mini consoles down. Likely not going to get any others, since we've still got a modded slim PS2 we can use to play PS1 games (so no need for the PS1 Mini). I'm curious how you guys think of the system, and what advice you'd give us for modding it.

[+GoldLeader]

Just curious what other Minis do you have?  I'd be guessing NES/SNES but maybe you got the Turbografx Mini...Just wondering.

[xabin]

Just the NES and SNES minis. The only other Mini we've seen available that we don't have was the PS1 mini, and we're not planning on getting it.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

4 hours ago, xabin said:

Long story short, early Christmas visit was crap, but we got money for our own Christmas dinner, which my roommie used to get a Sega Genesis Mini. He knows I've been wanting one for a while, having grown up with the system, and he's been wanting to play it to see how playing on semi-original Sega hardware is like. We're thinking of possibly hacking it to add in some more choice games (though we dunno how many games we can fit on it without compromising stuff like save state space and whatnot), and I'm thinking - if I get some money but not enough to pay for a new gaming chair for my desk - using some of the money I get to get a pair of 6-button controllers.

 

The only game we really tested on there was Sonic 2, its 2-player mode, and my god, dunno if it's the emulation being crap or the system, or the rom is just that bad, but the slowdown for it in certain spots was so unbearable. I honestly don't remember it being that bad for the game on actual original Sega Genesis hardware.

 

So, that's 3 classic mini consoles down. Likely not going to get any others, since we've still got a modded slim PS2 we can use to play PS1 games (so no need for the PS1 Mini). I'm curious how you guys think of the system, and what advice you'd give us for modding it.

Sonic 2 actually does play pretty slow in parts on the actual hardware in the 2 player vs mode so that is pretty accurate. That game is one of the showcase games to use for demoing the difference an overclocked Genesis can do.

 

As for adding games to the Mini...you are more limited than you know. There is extra space on the internal flash drive where the games are stored, but all that extra space is for each game to have its save slots. So what will happen, is when you add more games to the Mini, the save slots will still be present, but you will find that you might not actually be able to save a game because there isn't any space left on the internal storage for it. I can't recall exactly, but I want to save each save state requires 4MB of storage. What is ironic about that is that in many cases, the save state is larger than the rom of the game itself. 

 

I got tired of tracking how much space I was using vs the saves and decided to ho the Hakchi method on mine and use a small 16GB low profile USB flash drive in the player 2 port. This is where all of my games are now stored plus save states for each. Yes, I can't play 2 player games but I've been told you can still get it to work using a powered USB hub.

 

[xabin]

5 hours ago, -^CrossBow^- said:

Sonic 2 actually does play pretty slow in parts on the actual hardware in the 2 player vs mode so that is pretty accurate. That game is one of the showcase games to use for demoing the difference an overclocked Genesis can do.

 

As for adding games to the Mini...you are more limited than you know. There is extra space on the internal flash drive where the games are stored, but all that extra space is for each game to have its save slots. So what will happen, is when you add more games to the Mini, the save slots will still be present, but you will find that you might not actually be able to save a game because there isn't any space left on the internal storage for it. I can't recall exactly, but I want to save each save state requires 4MB of storage. What is ironic about that is that in many cases, the save state is larger than the rom of the game itself. 

 

I got tired of tracking how much space I was using vs the saves and decided to ho the Hakchi method on mine and use a small 16GB low profile USB flash drive in the player 2 port. This is where all of my games are now stored plus save states for each. Yes, I can't play 2 player games but I've been told you can still get it to work using a powered USB hub.

 

Huh, interesting.

With the hacking of the console, I've read somewhere that if you load it up with over 100 extra games, it'll start to glitch out, so I guess that's the limit for the game options for dumping roms directly into it.

[Austin]

You can load more than 100 games onto it without issue. You do have to be selective about what you put on though because of space limitations.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

8 hours ago, Austin said:

You can load more than 100 games onto it without issue. You do have to be selective about what you put on though because of space limitations.

Not if you plan to actually use any save states you can't. I posted the details of my findings on this back when it was first released. But to sum it up, the extra space that is left in the flash is pretty much all the space needed if you wanted a full set of save slots for each game. If you only want 1 or 2 slots, then do the math on it and you can add a few more games without issue as long as you are okay with some of the save slots not actually working. In my case, it was easier to just load up all the stuff I wanted with additional emu cores to run SegaCD and 32x and store it all on my flash drive. This way, I don't even have to hook up the mini to add games etc.

 

[xabin]

51 minutes ago, -^CrossBow^- said:

Not if you plan to actually use any save states you can't. I posted the details of my findings on this back when it was first released. But to sum it up, the extra space that is left in the flash is pretty much all the space needed if you wanted a full set of save slots for each game. If you only want 1 or 2 slots, then do the math on it and you can add a few more games without issue as long as you are okay with some of the save slots not actually working. In my case, it was easier to just load up all the stuff I wanted with additional emu cores to run SegaCD and 32x and store it all on my flash drive. This way, I don't even have to hook up the mini to add games etc.

 

How do you do that, get the games read from a flash drive? We have a thumb drive we can use for that, but we dunno how to get the files to run on the mini from there.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

I used the version of Hakchi to do this sometime back. I can't recall the exact steps, but Hakchi's firmware that is writes to the Mini allows it to look to the controller ports for storage devices. It has been a long time since I did it and I don't know what the current versions of Lunar and hakchi offer, but at the time hakchi was what I preferred between the two options.

[xabin]

Hmm. We know about the diminishing space for save states if we put in more games, we've hacked our SNES and NES Minis before. I do have all of the Genesis and 32X game roms on my computer, so we'll just have to pick and choose which games to put on there.

 

My boyfriend noticed, when comparing the audio lag with Sonic 2 on the Mini to the audio on the Genesis collection on Steam, and he noticed the same lag with both, so...

[xabin]

On 12/22/2020 at 5:24 PM, -^CrossBow^- said:

I used the version of Hakchi to do this sometime back. I can't recall the exact steps, but Hakchi's firmware that is writes to the Mini allows it to look to the controller ports for storage devices. It has been a long time since I did it and I don't know what the current versions of Lunar and hakchi offer, but at the time hakchi was what I preferred between the two options.

Interesting. The files have to be uncompressed on the thumb drive, or...? Just curious, because we do have a thumb drive that we can use for that, and we've used Hackchi before, so...

[+-^CrossBow^-]

That is a good question, now that I think about it, I believe the games can be left in zip format still to take up less space.