Paprium

Today's gameplay and commentary session is all about Paprium, the beat 'em up developed and published by WaterMelon for the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis. Paprium was designed by Gwénaël Godde and was first announced back in 2012, before finally releasing worldwide on December 16, 2020, after roughly eight years of development. During that long wait, the game became one of the most talked about examples of vaporware in the retro gaming space, so getting hands on time with the finished product is a genuinely notable moment for Mega Drive fans.

For this session we are running Paprium through the Paprium_MegaDrive_MiSTer core, a community built MiSTer FPGA core made by developer MisterPezz82. This is a fork of the MiSTer Mega Drive core that adds support for the Everdrive Pro style version of Paprium, including nuked-md audio handling and MD+ CDDA music playback. The project builds on years of prior community reverse engineering work, including Krikzz's mega-ppm project, Genesis Plus GX contributions, and prior MAME research into the game. It is an unofficial, fan made core, it does not include the ROM or the WAV audio files, and it is not affiliated with WaterMelon or Sega.

If you are new to the channel, this is where we sit down with games like this, play through them properly, and talk through what makes them interesting as we go, whether that is the history behind the release, the hardware running it, or just what is happening on screen. If that sounds like your kind of content, stick around, there is more retro gaming, FPGA cores, and commentary style playthroughs on the way. A subscribe helps a lot if you want to catch the next one.

MiSTer FPGA core details https://github.com/MisterPezz82/Paprium_MegaDrive_MiSTer.