Posts Tagged ‘work-in-progress’

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VICE PSP status

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

VICE PSP is largely complete; I say “largely,” because the main thing holding it back at the moment is intermittent sound lag.

What is definitely going to be in the release:

  • The usual features present in my other computer emulator ports: virtual keyboard, state autoloading, per-game configurable input, peripheral indicators, state saving/loading
  • Support for tape images, disk images, cartridges. Each can be “inserted”, “ejected”, and auto-run (by which I mean that a specific program on tape/disk can be automatically run) separately
  • Several other things that are a side-effect of being a port of VICE, so to speak :)

The sound lag issue presents itself when emulator begins to skip frames – sound works perfectly (as far as VICE is concerned, anyway) otherwise. It would be fairly safe to say that once this is fixed, a release is imminent.

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Posted in Update, VICE | 2 Comments »

Corrections, clarifications

Friday, April 24th, 2009

I realized my description from the last post wasn’t entirely correct, the emulator isn’t actually new per se, it’s just new vis-a-vis those that I’ve already released. Most everyone guessed correctly that it was a Commodore 64 emulator – it’s VICE, to be exact. I realize a port of VICE already exists (called PSPVICE), but as I mentioned before, I port software because I enjoy doing it, not necessarily because it’s needed :)

To answer some of the questions that are already coming in, yes it will have a virtual keyboard (it’d be pretty stupid to have a computer emulator without some form of one), and yes, it does support CRT files. VICE PSP is based on the latest version of VICE, 2.1.

The amusing part of this is that VICE PSP would have probably been released half a year ago, if it wasn’t for a misinterpretation of its performance, on my part. Due to a variety of factors, I was getting what seemed like surprisingly poor performance from the emulator; work on it was shelved for months, until I decided to take another look.

I still don’t have a definite release date, but work is progressing well, and a release shouldn’t be that far off.

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Posted in Update, VICE | 4 Comments »

New emulator currently being ported

Monday, April 13th, 2009

I’m currently working on porting another emulator to the PSP. For the curious, the image below contains a(n all-too-obvious) hint about the system that this emulator emulates.

I don’t know when the work will be completed, but the largest challenges have been overcome, and it’s all a matter of time now.

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Posted in Emulators, News | 3 Comments »

What to expect from the next Fuse PSP release

Saturday, December 27th, 2008

Fuse PSP 0.10 now compiles and runs fine, and is getting very close to a release — ideally, before the New Year. What’s fixed:

Bugs reported by ewgf:

  • Multiple files in a ZIP archive does not crash the emulator
  • TRD files should no longer persist after the emulator is shut down (although as before, Fuse may change the selected machine, if it’s necessary. This setting will persist until it’s changed again)
  • On-screen keyboard should work as expected under supaplex.trd

Improvements, suggestions:

  • Tape fastloading can now be toggled on and off, to support some of the finickier TZX files
  • Issue 2 keyboard support can be toggled on and off
  • Loading sound can be toggled on and off (only works with fastloading disabled — fastloading turns off sound while it’s active)
  • New button options are now available (square/circle/triangle/cross with L/R held down)
  • Virtual keyboard speed has improved a bit
  • State exporting has been added, for support with other Fuse ports
  • Tape autoloading, to begin loading tape immediately when selected

What’s still being worked on:

  • Compressed disk loading — still not trivial :(

Also, virtual keyboard is likely to undergo some changes, but most likely not in the next release.

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Posted in Fuse, Update | 7 Comments »

Merry Xmas!

Thursday, December 25th, 2008

Robot Santa Look forward to some interesting releases in the upcoming days.

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Posted in Emulators, Update | 2 Comments »

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 »

Progress update

Sunday, September 7th, 2008

If there’s one thing that’s more annoying than malfunctioning hardware, it’s fried hardware. In a laptop.

The Nvidia card in my Inspiron 9300 (my main development machine) is fried – the display is a mess, and the system hangs shortly after starting up. I’ve already ordered a replacement card, but that’s probably going to take a while. For the last couple of days, I’ve been relegated to developing on a remote machine via NoMachine NX, then downloading the compiled binary for testing. This is ridiculously inefficient, but it hasn’t been without fruitful results.

Coming soon

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Posted in Emulators, Update | 5 Comments »

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