 |
|
|
| Magic Engine A Turbo Grafx 16 emulator for Windows reviewed on 8/7/2009 by Wesley Pollow. |
|
"MagicEngine is the premier TurboGrafx-16 emulator. It's one of the only emulators good enough to pass for a retail product. I guess that is why it costs $20. Does the product justify the price? Yes, but let me tell you why."
MagicEngine is a fairly full featured TurboGrafx-16 emulator. It is capable of running TurboGrafx and SuperGrafx HuCards, as well as CD-ROM, Super CD-ROM, and Arcade CD games. Hunting for obscure BIOS files is completely unnecessary with MagicEngine. The emulator already has custom-made system BIOS card ROMs included. To tie up this extremely capable package is an extremely user-friendly UI, which includes full gamepad control. It's always nice to not have to jump back and forth between the mouse and gamepad. I won't waste too much time on game compatibility and performance. I threw every game I could at it, including SuperGrafx and CD games. I found only one game that has a minor audio glitch. In terms of game compatibility, MagicEngine is excellent. The base requirements to run MagicEngine include a 600Mhz processor, 256 megabytes of ram, and Direct X 7 capable video card (i.e. Geforce 2 series or Radeon 7500). As if the requirements weren't low enough, the older 0.9.9 version of MagicEngine has even slimmer requirements while maintaining most of the features found in the more recent 1.0.0 version. The UI is extremely simple. In fact, I'd say it's so simple it doesn't even fit in with most of the rest of the emulation scene. Everything is right at your finger tips. Superfluous options are tucked away. The more useful options are presented in a nice readable layout that can be easily navigated with keyboard, mouse, or gamepad. The gamepad navigation is a nice touch. Another pleasant oddity is the visual save state system. When snapping a save state, it puts an actual viewable picture of what you saved in a small window. This way when you save or load a state, you know exactly what you are dealing with. This prevents accidentally over-writing a save you want to keep. As of now, I have yet to see visual save states in any other emulator for any platform. MagicEngine keeps things simple on the more technical side of things, too. As previously mentioned, only the practical features are represented in the configuration menu. All of the features you'd normally dig for are quickly accessible. Vsync, aspect ratio, resolution, full screen mode, bilinear filtering, zooming, etc are all present and accounted for. A particularly useful feature is the controller mapping dialog. Normally, you would map the emulator to the gamepad you use. This keeps you guessing sometimes about which button belongs where. MagicEngine does the opposite. You map the gamepad to the emulator. You are presented with an image of a 6 button TurboGrafx pad and a list of your PC gamepad's buttons as the computer sees them. This almost takes all of the guess work out of mapping a gamepad. The only real downside is most TG16 games only use two face buttons (I and II). It seems silly to worry about the extra four buttons. It would have been nice if you could change the controller image to the earlier two button design. Though not necessarily a bad thing, I'd have preferred the turbo fire buttons actually do the turbo firing. As it is, they toggle the main face buttons to turbo fire. There is no way I am aware of aside from testing each button to see if turbo fire is turned on or off. I mentioned earlier that MagicEngine costs $20. It's hard to argue with that price. Not only is MagicEngine excellent by console emulation standards, but it shows that emulators don't need to be overly complex. The UI and compatibility are outstanding. Not only is MagicEngine the finest TurboGrafx-16 emulator, but the UI makes it one of the best emulators in general!
|
 |
