Posts Tagged ‘future ideas’

RACE! PSP news, future ideas, new poll

Friday, September 12th, 2008

Flavor recently posted news that he considers RACE! PSP the official PSP port of RACE, and that he doesn’t plan on continuing another port. He also mentioned a new undocumented button (not present on the consumer handheld) discovered by FluBBa, the author of an NGPC emulator for GBA that enables hidden debugging features in several NGP games (namely, Card Fighters’ Clash, Card Fighters’ Clash 2, and Dokodemo Mahjong); this feature will be added in the next release of RACE! PSP; ideally, with the ability to save state.

For a while now, I’ve been seriously considering utilizing PSP’s Media Engine (ME) processor in fMSX PSP, to (potentially) enable full-speed emulation with MSX Audio and MSX Music enabled. Currently, enabling any of the two requires emulation at 333 MHz, while enabling both makes the emulator near-unplayable. Of course, utilizing the ME opens up a whole new slew of issues, not the least of which is the challenge presented by parallel programming. If fMSX/ME succeeds, Handy may be finally coaxed to run full-speed.

RACE! PSP was one of the emulators I reported to be working on; another one is still in the initial stages. If things pan out, there may be another pre-release riddle, which should give you an idea of which system it will emulate. Thankfully, I received my replacement video card yesterday, so I can finally continue work again.

Finally, I’ve added a new poll; if you have some time, please take it.

CORRECTION The discoverer of the undocumented button was not porting RACE to NDS, he’s actually writing a new emulator for the GBA (thanks Flavor)

UPDATE The poll should now be fixed

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.