crater

crater is an emulator for the Sega Game Gear, written in C.

Why?

While the internet is full of emulators for retro game systems, writing one is nevertheless a fun learning project.

Crater is named after 31 Crateris, a star that was – for a short time in 1974 – misidentified as a moon of Mercury. Mercury was Sega’s codename for the Game Gear during development.

Installing

Only OS X and Linux are tested. You’ll need a decent compiler that supports C11 (gcc, clang) and SDL 2. Using Homebrew, you can brew install sdl2; using apt, you can apt-get install libsdl2-dev.

Run make to create ./crater. To build the development version with debug symbols (they can exist simultaneously), run make DEBUG=1, which creates ./crater-dev.

Usage

Running ./crater without arguments will display a list of ROM images located in the roms/ directory, and then ask the user to pick one, or enter their own ROM path. You can provide a path directly with ./crater path/to/rom.

Add or symlink ROMs to roms/ at your leisure. Note that they should end in .gg or .bin.

./crater -h gives (fairly basic) command-line usage, and ./crater -v gives the current version.