The Sega Megadrive was released in the 90's in Japan, the USA and Europe and went to become one of Segas most succesful consoles.Sega really have not managed to top the popularity and the sales of the Megadrive.The Sega Saturn and Dreamcast are both decent consoles but have not captured the imagination of the public like their 16 bit offering.Its main rival was the SNES.Technically the Megadrive was inferior to the SNES but it cost less and still had many great games released for it.The games were also cheaper and, in the UK at least, there seemed to be more of them.
This was the first console that I bought and was the one that started me on gaming as a sort of hobby.My friends had the NES but it did not really grab my attention.However after seeing Sonic the Hedgehog for the first time I was amazed at the speed and the colours of the system.Sonic might not have had the depth of say Zelda or Final Fantasy 3, but it was a great game just for the fact that it was instantly playable and looked amazing for its time.This was the game that made me and millions of others by a Megadrive.I was hooked ! I don't know exactly how many cartridges I bought but I played a hell of a lot of games.Eventually I stumbled across one game that really took my breath away.This game was Shining Force 2 and is without a doubt my favourite game of all time.It was the first RPG I had played and after I finished it I hunted down every RPG I could find on the Megadrive.
There are a number of different Megadrive emulators available on the internet .The two I use are KGEN98 and GENS.KGEN98 is a DOS emulator.It is very fast but sometimes the graphics can be corrupted and some games do not work on it.GENS is a Windows only emulator.It is not as fast as KGEN98 but has better graphics and sound and I find more games are compatible with it.Also GENS is still being updated today whereas work on KGEN has finished. You can download both below and there is also selection of Megadrive ROMS that I think are worth playing.
KGEN98 (DOS) The fastest emulator
GENS (WIN) Slower but superior graphics/sound
