higan vs Mega-Pi

higan is a free, standalone multi-system emulator for Windows, macOS, Ubuntu Linux and FreeBSD. It focuses on accuracy, preservation and configurability, and emulates systems including Famicom, Super Famicom, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Mega Drive, PC Engine, MSX, ColecoVision, Neo Geo Pocket and WonderSwan. Official releases are available through the project’s GitHub releases page. Automated nightly builds are also listed for Windows, macOS, Ubuntu Linux and FreeBSD, but those builds are untested. The distribution includes icarus, a game library importer, along with the libco, nall, ruby and hiro components. The project was originally developed by Near. higan is free software under the GNU General Public License version 3 or a later version. The license states that the software comes without warranty. For community support, the project links to a discussion forum and a Discord chat. Its standalone format is listed as an emulation format, and the supported desktop systems include more than the general Linux, macOS and Windows platform listing.

Mega-Pi is a free, bare-metal Sega Mega Drive/Genesis emulator for Raspberry Pi hardware. It targets Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 and runs without an operating system such as Linux, which the project associates with near-instant boot and very low input latency. The emulator uses the Picodrive core and Circle bare-metal C++ framework, assigning orchestration, video, audio, and input work across four ARM cores. It scans .bin, .md, and .gen Genesis or Mega Drive files, plus Sega CD/Mega CD .cue files with .bin tracks and compressed .chd files. Sega CD emulation includes the Sub-CPU, PCM audio, CD audio, and rotation/scaling graphics hardware. Video uses 2× integer nearest-neighbor scaling to 640×480, with 44.1 kHz stereo through the Pi PWM sound engine. USB gamepads and keyboards are supported, and save states reside on the SD card. Running it requires a FAT32 card, boot files, a kernel image, game files, and USB input devices; Sega CD also needs regional BIOS files.