A good Genesis / Megadrive Emulator with Overclock, for PC?

[BIL]

Hey all. I've been looking for a way to scrub the item-crash slowdown from Castlevania: Bloodlines. Is there a PC Genesis emulator that allows virtual CPU overclocking, similar to MAME / Nebula? From a quick look around, Gens and Kega Fusion don't seem to... just wondering if someone more knowledgable than me knows of such an emulator.

[Ed Oscuro]

I don't know anything either. I wish Gens 2.11 and Steve Snake's Kega Fusion 3.51 allowed better CPU handling - they made the Celeron computer I used to emulate on heat up enough to start the fan when they should have lots of idle time between frames.

MESS or a hacked version might be able to do it, but, y'know, it's MESS.

[BIL]

After a bit more looking about, I found that AGES allows you to mess about with the M68K and Z80 speeds (but it's kinda fiddly... involves altering the hex values in the INI file). Thanks for the tip about MESS, I'll give that a look. Actually, after playing through Bloodlines again, it's not all that big a deal. But as the most nonstop action Castlevania, I think it'd look cool to blow up everything on the screen at a constant 60fps. ^^

It seems there's a GENS hack for Xbox that makes the process much easier, so that might be of some help for modded Xbox-having people (I'm not one, sadly). Saw it mentioned in a thread on the official GENS forum.

[nZero]

HazeMD is based on MAME and uses MAME's cheat engine, so it should let you overclock (disclaimer: haven't tried it yet)

[worstplayer]

Gens Surreal has "fast" mode, which could be exactly what you need.
Just tried it with first Sonic (which was total chop-fest IIRC) and it seems to run at constant 60fps.

EDIT: It doesn't work too well, still skips when there are too many rings.

[BIL]

HazeMD is based on MAME and uses MAME's cheat engine, so it should let you overclock (disclaimer: haven't tried it yet)

Thanks so much, this is just what I was looking for. Just finished a full run of Bloodlines with both CPUs at 200%, not even the slightest hint of slowdown at the most screen-overloading of times (and I was trying, too). The one side-effect is, the "dramatic" slowdown during boss demises is gone too, so their death screams are a bit comical-sounding, but that's all. Otherwise everything stayed perfectly smooth and in sync, Bloodlines really plays like a dream now. Thanks again!

[Ed Oscuro]

I'll give HazeMD a shot as well.

Any other emulators based on MAME code worth looking into?