Posts Tagged ‘msx audio’

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

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Posted in Development, fMSX, Handy, RACE!, Update | 2 Comments »

fMSX version 3.5.3 released

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

New features in this version:

  • Games/applications that require MSX Audio/MSX Music will no longer crash the emulator if either is disabled in System settings – there will simply be no Y2413/YM8950 audio
  • ROM type settings are now saved between sessions – up to 500 different ROM’s can be tracked by CRC32 value

The second feature requires some experimentation, and I welcome any feedback you may have. As mentioned, the limit is 500 ROM’s – this is not counting the “auto-detect” ROM’s, for obvious reasons. The list is updated when ROM type is changed via the System menu – to remove an entry from the list, simply set ROM type to “auto-detect”.

Searching through the CRC values is done in linear time, when a ROM is actually loaded, but for 500 entries, this is not likely to take long (I’m not sure how long reading/writing these entries will take to memory stick, however).

The list is loaded from stick when the emulator starts up, stored in memory while the emulator runs, and saved back to stick when emulator is exited.

Download

If you find this feature helpful and are willing to help, please see the previous post

UPDATE Version compiled for firmware 1.50 does not work. Please use the 2.00 version

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Posted in fMSX, Release | 3 Comments »

Small Update

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

This is just a small note to let you folks know that work on wifi netplay is continuing as before.

For fans of fMSX, look forward to an update that will fix the crashing of the emulator when MSX Music/MSX Audio are accessed while disabled in System settings. Because this is a small fix, this release is not planned for the immediate future, but if enough people show interest, a bugfix release will follow. Those who know how to, or don’t want to wait can compile from svn.

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Posted in fMSX, Update | Comments Off

fMSX update fixes FMPAC issue

Friday, May 30th, 2008

Mislabeled settings are the reason why FMPAC games failed to run even with MSX Music enabled. Versions up to (but not including) 3.5.2 incorrectly labeled the MSX Audio engine as MSX Music and vice versa.

Version 3.5.2 fixes this issue and is now available for download. Note that if you don’t want to download it (it adds nothing but a correction to the typo), simply reverse your settings for MSX Audio and MSX Music and try running your favorite FMPAC-based games again. Note also that running FMPAC-based games with MSX Music disabled will hang the emulator.

The FMPAC diagnostic cartridge, Aleste 1 and 2 have all been tested and run fine and with sound. Please note, however, that the MSX Music engine requires more CPU power, so you will need to increase the CPU frequency (and disable vertical blanking/vsync) if you want full-framerate MSX goodness.

Special thanks to Victor Sartori for his help in tracking down the issue.

Download

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Posted in fMSX, Release | 1 Comment »

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.

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Posted in fMSX, Update | 3 Comments »