How Tos

How to play Mega Drive games on iPhone

It doesn't take ages

How to play Mega Drive games on iPhone

Sega has been farming out its App Store Mega Drive (and Genesis, for the benefit of our American gaming cousins) emulation steadily, with a couple of rather rough, by usable versions of your retro favourites.

It’s about to revamp that whole retro app scene with a free basic emulation package and downloadable content, which is an iPhone concept we’re quite into here at Pocket Gamer.

But some jailbreakers have already been sampling the delights of a Mega Drive on the go thanks to hacker ZodTTD’s Genesis4iPhone emulator available through Cydia.

Of course, there’s a grey area around ROMs, and we’re not going to tell you where to get them (please don't ask), but if your original Mega Drive collection is as extensive as mine, you’ll be keen to test this ‘other’ Sega emulator out.

Here’s how.

First you’ll need a jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch. Click here for more info on jailbreaking your device.
Once that’s done, open up Cydia and search for Genesis4iPhone. Install it.
Remember the other week we told you all about accessing your iPhone’s guts using SSH? Well, fire up your iPhone and log into it using your SSH client of choice. During the installation, Genesis4iPhone will have created a directory on the iPhone where your ROMs need to go. Navigate your way carefully through the iPhone’s directories until you get to this location: private/var/mobile/Media/ROMs/GENESIS/
Once you’re there, drop your Mega Drive game ROMs into this directory. It’s worth noting that the ROMs can be zipped, if you prefer.
Run the Genesis4iPhone app on your iPhone. You’ll see a library of installed ROMs for you to choose from.
You have a few options for how you want the games to run. Playing without sound makes the emulation smoother, and you’ve got the option of playing with separated controls (and a smaller game screen) in portrait mode, or going full screen in landscape orientation and using on-screen buttons. Test ‘em out, and find your preference.
You can take a memory snapshot at any time to save your progress, which is a nice feature that even the original Mega Drive didn’t have. Don’t expect too much from it (certainly on an iPhone 3G), but for a bit of random nostalgia you could do a lot worse.

And there you have it - Mega Drive games running on your iPhone, and running pretty well. Here's a glance at the sort of games you could be taking with you.



Spanner Spencer
Spanner Spencer
Yes. Spanner's his real name, and he's already heard that joke you just thought of. Although Spanner's not very good, he's quite fast, and that seems to be enough to keep him in a regular supply of free games and away from the depressing world of real work.