Posts Tagged ‘work-in-progress’

Newer Entries »

Time

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

As in, “I wish I had more of it”.

There are at least two emulators that I’m currently working on. Neither is yet definite; I’m trying to split my time between the two to keep things interesting. It’s fairly certain that at least one of them will be finished some time in the near future.

Unfortunately, my free time has been decreasing almost exponentially. Because of this, the successor library to psplib is likely not to be finished; I will do my best to just upgrade the current version. Parts of the UI code make the video rendering library extremely sensitive to change; I would like to rewrite the UI component, but that is a rather hefty task, and one that will require a considerable amount of time.

On an unrelated note, if you like puzzles and have an XBOX 360, try Braid. It’s very rare to see an original game these days; Braid is as brilliant as it is unique.

Tags: ,
Posted in Emulators, Update | Comments Off

SMS Plus PSP adhoc work-in-progress demo

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

Here’s a preview of the SMS Plus emulator, with adhoc wi-fi gameplay support (ignore the idiotic clicking – it’s caused by the camera’s zoom lens):

As you can see, a large part of the work is done. There are still some things that need polishing, however:

  • Keeping connection alive when a player exits to the menu, and allowing some basic tasks while in menu
  • State sync feature, similar to SNES9X TYL
  • Timing issues

Cheers,

Akop

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Emulators, SMS Plus | Comments Off

psplib update

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

I have spent the last few days (weeks?) rewriting psplib into its successor library, libpl. Most importantly, graphics, font and image rendering core is being rewritten from scratch; it’s already significantly better than the older version. Among changes so far:

  • Faster bitmap font rendering (swizzled, VRAM-based fonts)
  • More accurate image resizing (no more scissoring artifacts, as most apparent in fMSX PSP)
  • Support for multiple pixel formats (instead of fixed 16-bit “5551″ format)

Future plans:

  • Support for swizzled images, in-place image swizzling
  • Completely new GUI system

Simple “upgrading” to libpl from psplib no longer seems possible; therefore, emulators will have to be largely rewritten to use the new library. Once the work is finished, I also hope to have some sample code available, in case anyone wants to write applications based off the library.

If you’re interested in the progress, you can find semi-nightly builds in the libpl directory, under the trunk branch of the svn repository. No promises on the code actually compiling (or doing anything useful, for that matter) :)

Many thanks to the ps2dev/psp forum folks for their helpful answers to many of my questions.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

SNA support

Monday, November 26th, 2007

While there will be no support for SNA files, as mentioned in an earlier post, there will be a more sensible way to quickly load and run disk and tape images in the next version of Caprice32 PSP.

For those who are interested in why exactly SNA will not be supported, here are the reasons:

  1. SNA files are model-dependent. Once a snapshot is created for a 464, for example, it can no longer be used for another model, since the file itself captures the system’s identity
  2. SNA files are emulator-dependent. They are of little use to anyone using another emulator
  3. For the above two reasons, I do not want to contribute to saturation of SNA files on the web, when much better alternatives (ROM, tape and disk images) are readily available
  4. Treating SNA files as regular image files means supporting save states for the SNA file. This just seems recursively silly

This decision is final (sorry); however, if you absolutely insist on loading SNA files, feel free to add such functionality by downloading and compiling your own copy (ah, the beauty of open source software).

I am aware of CPC’s inflexibility with regard to disk loading, however, and as mentioned before, there will be a more sensible way to load, say, Gryzor, and instantly see the title screen, instead of having to cat and run your way through BASIC. So pull up a chair and stick around, this should be interesting, if not fun and (gasp!) useful :)

Tags: , ,
Posted in Caprice32, Update | 4 Comments »

Future of Caprice32

Friday, November 23rd, 2007

Thanks to those who submitted feedback about Caprice32, ZIP and multi-disk support will be added in the next release.

SNA files, on the other hand, will not be supported, and here’s why. SNA files are not proper cartridges or disk images – they’re save state files containing a “snapshot” of memory and CPU registers. The Save State tab provides the same functionality (except as an added bonus, it GZip’s the save states, making them a lot smaller).

If you want to convert an existing SNA file to Caprice32 PSP’s save state format, here’s how to do it:

  • Compress the SNA file with GZip
  • Pick some PNG image (any in-game screenshot made with Caprice32 PSP will do)
  • Concatenate the PNG image with the GZipped SNA file in the following order: PNG image, SNA file
  • Rename the resulting file so that it’s composed of the full name of the disk image (including the extension), plus ‘.sXX’ as an extension, where XX is an integer between 00 to 10. Example: 1943.dsk.s00
  • Place the file in the SAVEDATA directory, and it will be available when the DSK file is loaded.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Caprice32, Update | 3 Comments »

Newer Entries »