This is… awesome! From gizmodo its a port of MAME, the multiple arcade emulator to google chrome via it’s NACL or ‘Native Client’ interface.  As we look at the year 2012 and what is around us, its pretty clear that the 80386 CPUs descendants have basically won out the world, with the ACORN ARM eating up the mobile world…

So click here with google chrome, and install this 30MB extension (thats how big it is standalone anyways) and get ready for some gaming!

From what I’ve found is that multizip files wont work… but single zip contained run great!

I’ve tested this with Altered Beast, which I actually own the system16 board for.. Although I’ve got to get around to cleaning it up (its dirty as hell) and converting it to a JAMMA and booting it up.. but thats for another retrohardware day.

So a little bit of googling around lead me to this great interview with Christian Whitehead, which lead to the discussion of his iPhone Retro Engine and Retro Engine Development Kit. Basically he took the PC port of Sonic-CD and was able to extract the levels, sprites, and also the scripted logic.  Then he was able to take all of that and build his own re implementation of Sonic-CD.

Which in its own is interesting as the PC version of Sonic was done via some translation as mentioned by Neil Harding here.

… I had to write a 68000 to C converter for Sonic 3D (from the Genesis to the Saturn & PC)….

I would imagine that the ‘unpacked’ work of the PC version would lead to something far easier to reverse, then say the original 68000 code, although that too has been done.

According to early reviews, it is simply awesome!  Simply put this is *not* just a bundled SEGA-CD emulator along with the CD-ROM, but instead the video has been greatly cleaned up, the game start is logically broken down like a good iOS (when I hear IOS I always think of cisco’s IOS but I know….) application for your iPhone/iPad with nice menus that just wouldn’t be the same for the old Sega CD platform.  Clearly Christian Whitehead has done some fantastic work here!

So first off this uses the Apple Game Centre.  I’ll never understand why so many games do *NOT* use this.  In our little ‘app connected’ world you’d think more things would be driven for the ‘achievements’ and ‘world wide leaderboards’ but the only two games I have that use this is angry birds & Sonic CD.

So how does it look?  Pretty much just like the real thing, except it’s been rescaled so you see more of the screen, instead of squish o vision… For example here is the real Sonic CD:

And under emulation:

And here is the start with the Sonic CD IOS application:

As you can see things like the lives left have been moved to the top so you can actually see them, and the display screen is wider so you can see more of the scenery.  Clearly a lot more went into this than the 68000 emulation.

Another cool thing is that you can change soundtracs from the American & Japanese versions.

So for those of you who love ‘Sonic Boom’ can relive the 1990’s.

I should add that in addition game play is GREAT.  Now don’t get me wrong I love having a physical Genesis along with a model 1 CD drive to play the ‘real thing’ but at the same time, this is the ‘hand held’ version to get!  And at $1.99 USD it is simply a STEAL.

The Sonic CD app page.

So while not emulation, its the real thing, I was really excited to buy some $50 worth of misc SEGA genesis bits, and to find there was a model 1 CD player in there!  It didn’t want to spin disks, and I hope I didn’t break the tray loader trying to look inside, but it now plays discs!!!

So I know it isn’t much but I’ve been busy getting killed in Sonic-CD.  Speaking of which I kept on hearing that its going to be released for iOS but I haven’t seen it yet.  But no matter, I have the real thing now!