Genecyst

The best Sega Genesis emulator around. Written by bloodlust software, makers of the popular NES emu, Nesticle.

While Genecyst is indeed a very good, user-friendly emulator, it does have weaknesses. It does not correctly play certain popular Genesis games, such as Phantasy Star 4, to the point of crashing, and is only available as a MS-DOS binary. Since it is no longer being developed, keeping another, supported emulator on hand is highly recommended.

Genecyst is a partially complete emulator of the Sega Megadrive / Genesis system for MS-DOS. Although it has numerous shortcomings, it has lots of nifty features that you can't find in any other G/MD emulator. The final version is able to turn on and off sound channels and graphic layers on the fly, view and record all sound output, record gameplay, and take screenshots. You can also save the memory state (to ten hotkeyed slots), change the speed of the emulation (Toejam & Earl, for example, benefits from a boost up to 90fps if you want to play quickly through the first few levels), use battery backup, and enter game genie codes. The downside is that the emulation is significantly less accurate than KGEN98, in particular the sound is very poor. Games which try to do anything out of the ordinary don't run well (e.g. Road Rash), and with it being DOS based, you don't get much in the way of nifty graphics options (filtering, scanlines, etc).

It is effectively rendered obsolete by KGen98, DGen, and Gens.