Friday, November 12, 2010

Requesting Icons

O hay again :).

So I was compiling stuff and just realized how ugly and uninviting the default executable icon is in Windows. So, requesting if you have, or can make, a good Nintendo64 and/or Sega Saturn icons (vector would be preferred but don't really care), kindly let me know either via the comments or through email.

stay safe,

AamirM

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Emulation WIPs

Haven't updated this in a while so lets see.

1) Regen
I haven't touched it for a while now. The plan is to fix some remaining bugs and add a few features to it (like GG and PAR ROM support). There are a few tiny bugs in the VDP that need fixing but nothing really major or show stopper. I already have done some work so that Regen's internal interface is wrapped around SEFE's interface. There are somethings that still need to be done for it to be complete (debugging and some controller related stuff among other things) but it's not a high priority. The current Windows release of Regen, 0.972(D), is very good so any new update won't probably be visible or useful to 99% of the users. On the other hand, the Linux port is not very good. One of the major thing it is lacking is the gamepad support, which I did added, but never got around to releasing. If enough people care (which I doubt), I can make a release available with gamepad support and probably with updated emulation core. Also, I did try to make a x64 build of Regen, which although successful, crashed for whoever tried to use it and since I don't have a 64bit CPU, I can't fix it. So you'll have to just be happy with the 32 bit build for now. =P

2) Turbo Engine
Haven't touched this really much too. Mednafen author ( :| ) and tomaitheous have been conducting many tests and reversing engineering a lot of things at the speed that is comparable to a millions times of that of light so basically have to keep up with them. I will try to put out a release of this before the end of this year but don't count on it =P. Also, as per being against tons of ROM formats, I have removed the ability to use bit shuffled ROM support from TE. These ROMs are incorrectly dumped and I added it because I didn't want to hear people complain. A converter will instead be provided which will "in-place" convert the file so that it can be used in any emulator (like Mednafen). Another thing on the radar is to completely remove the ISO+OGG/MPC/MP3 etc.. support for CD games. That is because a lot of people plainly use a incorrect rip and we, the emulator authors, should be supporting a single CD image format. Future versions would probably only support plain ISO, BIN (CHD anyone?) or similar "lossless" image formats.

3) Satronic
Did some little simple optimizations on the VDP1. As a result, BIOS runs almost fullspeed. Well, about 35-40 FPS to be exact but with automatic frameskipping, its quite usable. Also added some interlace mode support so many games render correctly now. Also fixed a VDP1 bug in distorted sprite and polygon commands (which are basically same btw) where "cracks" would appear between two contiguous ones under certain cases. Speed is still a massive issue though. Although VDP1 performance improved somewhat, Saturn really is a 2D system and so almost all games still run at miserable speeds. The new renderer is still being worked on but it's still a long way to go before it is complete. Also, I would REALLY love any help regarding the SCU DSP. Don't point me to the official leaked Sega manuals. If you have any other technical information (which is not wrong <_<) just shoot me an email (given at my homepage).

4)Reality0x40
As I had written in my previous blog post, I lost a fair amount of code that I had written for R0x40 due to a hard drive corruption. Well, the good news is that this past week, I have rewritten almost ~75% of it. In fact, I added a few things I already that I didn't before (different types of ROM loading). So all in all, I am targeting to boot off some games within this week or next (since it involves days of addictive tracing of target code and fixing stuff). After it is able to boot games, I will move on to the R4300 and RSP recompilers.

So yeah, this was an update on the emulator progress. I think I missed some stuff but meh.