October « 2007

Archive for October, 2007

High-resolution rendering in fMSX

Monday, October 29th, 2007

Hi-res rendering (for screens 6, 7 and 80-column text) in fMSX is proving to be less useful than I assumed it would be. The difference is mostly noticeable in the detail of text in text mode 80 – except for the occasional absence of jaggies, the difference in modes 6 and 7 is almost indiscernible – see example below:

High resolution rendering demo (both images are rendered 4:3 scaled) – to the left are low-res images (alternating columns are drawn, for a horizontal resolution of 256 pixels); high-res equivalents are to the right (horizontal resolution of 512 pixels, pre-scaling).Screen 7 images are at the top, text 80 at the bottom.

Of course, there is an added performance hit – the emulator can no longer maintain 60 fps during the hi-res modes at 222 MHz with vertical blanking enabled (it can at 266, however).

At this point, hi-res rendering is most likely to be optional, and disabled by default.

Special thanks to http://msx.jannone.org/ for providing the handy MSX Screen Conversor

Posted in fMSX | 1 Comment »

Media Engine

Monday, October 29th, 2007

I’ve been spending some time researching the Media Engine processor lately, to see how it can be incorporated into any of the current emulators. The gist of it is that the sound engine would be running in a separate process on another processor, freeing the main processor to do other tasks.

Gut feeling suggests that in the case of Handy, the emulator would run at full speed at 333MHz (since at that frequency, performance is almost borderline already — for most games, anyway).

Ultimately what makes programming the ME a challenge is a) interprocess communication (which can quickly become a nightmare), and b) lack of good documentation. Here’s to hoping.

Tags: Handy, me
Posted in Development | No Comments »

Future of fMSX

Wednesday, October 24th, 2007

If you’re a fan of the fMSX (my personal favorite) emulator, you might be interested to know what the future plans are.

Since the emulator’s recent speed boost (and various new tweaks in the PSP library) has vacated several million CPU cycles, the short-term plans are to compile the emulator with MSXAUDIO and MSXMUSIC support, and make it possible to toggle the emulation on and off while the emulator is running. Currently, fMSX needs to be explicitly compiled with support for the two, and there’s no way to turn any of them off.

Longer-term plans are to implement proper 512-column display for screens 6, 7 and 80-column text mode (the current version simply renders every other column). Plans are also in place to implement FDD (floppy disk drive) and keyboard (CAPSlock, etc…) activity indicators.

Of course, the ultimate plan would be to add adhoc wifi support to the emulator (as well as all the other emulators). Unfortunately, this is currently impossible, as I only have one system.

Tags: adhoc, future ideas, hi-res video, msx audio, msx music, wi-fi
Posted in Update, fMSX | 3 Comments »

PSP “Slim” binaries added

Monday, October 22nd, 2007

PSP “Slim”-compatible binaries have been added for all my emulator ports. Visit the specific emulator’s site and click the ‘Firmware version 1.00 and 2.00+’ binary link to download EBOOT’s compatible with older 1.00 firmware as well as the newer custom firmware.

Many thanks to the administrator of pspslimhacks.com for his help in testing.

Also, please note that I don’t have access to the “Slim” PSP model for testing. If any of the binaries don’t work, let me know.

Download

Posted in Atari800, ColEm, Handy, NeoPop, Release, SMS Plus, fMSX | 4 Comments »

New emulator? Yes, of course

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

Continuing the proud tradition of new PSP emulators is Handy PSP, the popular Atari Lynx emulator. Here are some of the features:

Various orientation modes (90, 270 degree rotation, vertical flip for all rotated modes)
Better sound support than the current PSP Lynx emulator–though not perfect still
Compressed save states

Etc, etc…

Download

Posted in Emulators, Handy, Release | 5 Comments »

Open-source emulator ports

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

While porting an emulator, often times it’s helpful to see how authors of other ports handle certain challenges. Over time, a number of small issues have prompted me to look for possible answers in other applications.

Quite often, source code for a similar port is freely available. Too often, however, it’s not. The surprising thing is that the people who hide the source code aren’t the authors of the emulator – it’s the authors of the port.

As someone who works off of open-source (not necessarily by any official definition) projects, I welcome all private developers to use my code and learn from it–my only request is that copied code is given proper credit.

I would like to see all authors that port open-source software release their code. This is especially relevant to the PSP subculture, as the availability of documentation is relatively scarce. Your work will help others, and will gain your port more popularity, as others will acknowledge your contribution.

Hiding code for a pending “cleanup” (which frequently, never happens) shouldn’t be reason enough to hide it. Even kludgy code is better than no code.

Tags: cleanup, closed source, open source
Posted in Rant | 2 Comments »

Emulator Popularity

Sunday, October 14th, 2007

One of the advantages of using a detailed visitor reporting service, like Google Analytics, is the ability to get a better idea of the popularity of specific sites with specific countries.

For those who are interested, here’s a breakdown of various emulators, in order of popularity, then by country (top 5):

Neopop (Japan, U.S., France, Germany, U.K.)
fMSX (Japan, U.S., Singapore, Spain, Germany)
SMS Plus (U.S., Japan, France, Singapore, Germany)
Atari800 (U.S., Germany, Singapore, U.K., Poland)

ColEm is by far the least popular, even edged out by the listing page (psp.akop.org). Some of the odder trends (at least in my opinion):

fMSX is the second most popular emulator in the U.S. (it was barely released here, and is virtually unknown)
Singapore appears in the top 5 for 3 emulators
Russia is in the number 7 spot for Atari800. Judging by the emails I receive, quite a few of the users are Russian. I first came across the Atari 130XE in the former Soviet Union, where it was quite popular at one point

Perhaps the least surprising trend of all is that Japan and U.S. are usually the top 2 countries for visits.

Of course, this doesn’t take into account the number of people who download emulators directly from other sites, such as dcemu.co.uk

Tags: country, google analytics, popularity
Posted in Emulators | No Comments »