Dega

Throughout the years, consoles and video games have greatly evolved from pixelated graphics to near photorealistic environments. If you want to relive the past glory and nostalgia of console games with punishing difficulties there's a high chance you're not going to find such consoles on the market anymore. However, emulators like Dega bring this to your desktop for an enhanced experience.

Dedicated to Sega Master System and Game Gear, you'll only be able to load a few roms, namely SMS and GG. A simple search over the web and you're sure to find all of your favorite games. No installation is required, neither for the application itself or games you want to play. You can keep it on a removable disk drive along with a few games to play with your friends.

There aren't many options or settings to go through, thus encouraging you to dive directly into the once glorious pixel gaming world. A few entries are found in the menu bar, which let you manage general and regional options like PAL, Japan or FM Chip, video output quality and overlay, as well as a function to take a screenshot.

If you happen to own a joystick or game pad, you can plug it in for an authentic experience. Sadly, neither keyboard and joystick input methods can be configured so you need to spend some time figuring out controls, but we can take the liberty of mentioning that Z, X and C along with arrow keys are default ones.

What crucially differentiates this experience from the original is the ability to save. Back in the day, you knew you only had a limited number of shots to finish the game, but you can easily save to continue later on through dedicated options. These refer to the console state itself, meaning you can save at any given moment ant start right from that specific point.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Dega is somewhere along the middle on the road to success. It's a straightforward emulator with little variety in terms of configurations. Games perfectly load and although the number of formats it supports is limited to SMS and GG, it's not the application itself that counts, but the overall experience of the game.