Gens

An exceptionally polished Sega Mega Drive/Genesis emulator for Win9x written by Stéphane Dallongeville. Gens is also aiming to provide Mega CD support. Although it is still lacking support for the more obscure MD peripherals and addons (such as the Menacer or the SVP chip), Gens boasts an outstanding compatibility record (the readme claims around 97%, but this figure was derived from a significantly incomplete ROM library). Sound emulation is near-perfect (DGen's is slightly less prone to glitches and has a seemingly more accurate emulation of the Yamaha chip). It is visual emulation where Gens really shines however, as it manages to recreate all the raster effects out there. The upshot of this is that Road Rash 1-3, the Out Run series and a number of other games using strange scrolling hacks (e.g. Earthworm Jim 2) work without a hitch.

Better yet, Gens rounds off this visual splendour with a selection of rendering modes, the last of which, 2xSAI, produces a remarkable smoothing effect giving some games a cel-shaded appearance. (Road Rash 2, for instance, looks amazing, as does Shinobi III - and as for X-Men 2...) This has the added benefit of making games with lots of cross-hatching look almost like animated Lichenstein paintings. (Maybe one day someone will work out a 'smart cross-hatching recolouration filter'. Or I could just play SNES games I suppose.)

There's not much negative stuff to say about Gens, bar the fact that it is a bit processor intensive and struggles a bit with some games when all the settings are cranked up to the max. And it has an amazing amount of trouble trying to run Animaniacs for some reason. The new benchmark for Mega Drive emulation, I reckon.

Regarding the previous writeup: DGen also manages a virtually perfect MD emulation for Windows (Road Rash aside). Genecyst had the same save mechanism as Gens uses (although Genecyst sucks at actually emulating the machine). And for the record, I once did complete Sonic The Hedgehog the traditional way. I can't believe it's been ten years...

In biology the Latin word gens, plural gentes, meaning 'clan' (see Webster below, and not to be confused with 'genus'), is used for the lineage of cuckoos through the female line that enables members of the same species to specialize in parasitizing different kinds of bird.

A number of cuckoo species show the well-known parasitic behaviour, though not all do. Within a single species, they can lay their eggs in the nests of various birds, each of which has strikingly different sizes or colours of eggs: that is, they don't just parasitize those birds that happen to have eggs resembling their own, but match their cuckoo egg to the host egg.

This is surprising if you think of mimicry as having evolved within the cuckoo species: you'd expect one species to have only one kind of egg. In fact egg type has continued to evolve within each gens. This is not a subspecies, because only females transmit gens membership. Daughters born in, say, a dunnock nest, belong to the dunnock gens, and like their mother they lay eggs only in dunnock nests. But a son has no gental affiliation and will mate with a female from any gens, which means the species doesn't split into subspecies based on their chosen host.

Clearly this mimicry of different eggs must be controlled by genes on the female-only chromosome. Birds generally have chromosomes analogous to the mammalian X and Y, but it's the female bird that has two different ones and the male that has two the same. So the female line can continue to evolve host-specific egg shape on her equivalent of the Y chromosome.

Gens (?), n.; pl. Gentes (#). [L. See Gentle, a.] Rom. Hist.

1.

A clan or family connection, embracing several families of the same stock, who had a common name and certain common religious rites; a subdivision of the Roman curia or tribe

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2. Ethnol.

A minor subdivision of a tribe, among American aborigines. It includes those who have a common descent, and bear the same totem.

 

© Webster 1913.