NeoDC v2.1 Clearing the crappy v2 releases out.

Alexvrb · Post by **Alexvrb** » Wed Feb 16, 2005 11:02 pm

Nebula? That emulates NGCD too? I thought it only ran NG roms, in other words the cart system.

Anyway Quzar, you could put a small loading bitmap in there if you wanted to. I don't really see the point, but why did IM remove it?

Post by **Christuserloeser** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 2:32 am

DCmad wrote:I ever wondered why the loadings in NeoCD/SDL don't show the classic NeoGeoCD animations. In the real console, the loading times were stupids. And the screens served as amusement.
NeoCD/SDL doesn't need it, the loads are very improved. But they still exist.
So why NeoDC can't display those screens. I miss some of them, like the beautiful B&W portraits in KoF95, or the SD characters on Samurai Spirits 2, even that monkey playing with grenades.

I miss them too

An emulated BIOS would be great, it would allow to release CDI downloads, even ones that have the homebrew stuff on it too...

xenon · Post by **xenon** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 4:45 am

Alexvrb wrote:Nebula? That emulates NGCD too? I thought it only ran NG roms, in other words the cart system.

Anyway Quzar, you could put a small loading bitmap in there if you wanted to. I don't really see the point, but why did IM remove it?

Nebula emulates since near the first versions the NEO GEO CD. Now the emulation is perfect.

Yours,

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 5:08 am

I ever wondered why the loadings in NeoCD/SDL don't show the classic NeoGeoCD animations. In the real console, the loading times were stupids. And the screens served as amusement.

The NeoGeo CD ROM dealt with it. The same bits of code that dealt with loading files off the CD also displayed the loading screens and stuff like that. I guess the code to emulate that was removed for some reason...

Actually, I can think of one reason - the loading screens used SDL to display the images. The SDL video output code was removed, and replaced with native DC rendering by Speud. For whatever reason (I'm guessing IM didn't know how to do it) the loading screens were simply disabled, instead of being converted to native DC rendering as they should have been.

It's not like it's hard to do. I saw the DC rendering code from the emulator. It wouldn't be that hard to rig it up to display the loading screens. Not hard at all.

Yogi · Post by **Yogi** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 5:48 am

Hi ppl,

I had done exactly what was documented @http://www.dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=48807, but my dreamcast wouldn't load the emulator. It passed the "sega" screen & just goes back to menu selection. What can be wrong?

When i load the image with daemon tools, Windows would not recognise the image. Is it normal?

xenon · Post by **xenon** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 6:02 am

Quzar, I've retested the games which I had some "problems"...:

- LEAGUE BOWLING: No Chip music. You only heard the first note

. Perfect graphics. Perfect SFX Sound.
- MUTATION NATION: No CDDA. Perfect graphics. Perfect SFX Sound.
- PUZZLE BOBBLE: No Chip music. You only heard the first note

. Perfect graphics. Perfect SFX Sound.
- RALLY CHASE: No CDDA. Perfect graphics. Perfect SFX Sound.
- SOCCER BRAWL: Perfect SFX sound and CDDA music. Perfect Graphics. Now, if you disable the SFX you have CDDA.
- SUPER SIDEKICKS: No CDDA. Perfect graphics. Perfect SFX Sound.
- THE SUPER SPY: Same as the others, but no CDDA music. It happens the same in the PC Emulator, so, for now, no problem.
- VIEW POINT: The same as SOCCER BRAWL
-

Post by **Christuserloeser** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 6:28 am

VIEWPOINT runs just perfectly for me. Same for SENGOKU 2

YEAH!

Fosters · Post by **Fosters** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 11:47 am

The reason that you usually dont see loading screens on NeoCD is that there is a large amount of HLE going on around the CDROM accessing. Instead of properly emulating the neogeo cdrom the emulator hooks into bios calls to read files and play audio and handles them itself. The result is that you get much reduced loading times

but you lose out on the animations that the bios would display 8(. Personally Im all for reduced loading times.

Another benefit of the HLE is that as files are accessed directly it makes porting the emu easier.

To put up a visual indicator that something is loading NeoCD/SDL displays a bitmap.

Arqueiro · Post by **Arqueiro** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 1:46 pm

Fosters wrote:The reason that you usually dont see loading screens on NeoCD is that there is a large amount of HLE going on around the CDROM accessing. Instead of properly emulating the neogeo cdrom the emulator hooks into bios calls to read files and play audio and handles them itself. The result is that you get much reduced loading times but you lose out on the animations that the bios would display 8(. Personally Im all for reduced loading times.

Another benefit of the HLE is that as files are accessed directly it makes porting the emu easier.

To put up a visual indicator that something is loading NeoCD/SDL displays a bitmap.

maybe we can have a switch for this ?

ViolentMessiah · Post by **ViolentMessiah** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 5:02 pm

not sure if this has been discussed...but the cdda tends to go silent on mostly every game ive tried. example: the next round in a kof game , or next match in samsho.

DCmad · Post by **DCmad** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 5:37 pm

Fosters wrote:The reason that you usually dont see loading screens on NeoCD is that there is a large amount of HLE going on around the CDROM accessing. Instead of properly emulating the neogeo cdrom the emulator hooks into bios calls to read files and play audio and handles them itself. The result is that you get much reduced loading times but you lose out on the animations that the bios would display 8(. Personally Im all for reduced loading times.

Another benefit of the HLE is that as files are accessed directly it makes porting the emu easier.

To put up a visual indicator that something is loading NeoCD/SDL displays a bitmap.

Thank you, sir.
Now i see how NeoCD/SDL handles the loadings. And i, like you and everyone else, am all fo faster loading times.
I didn't asked for this feature to go in the emulator, just i couldn't understand for sure why it wan't there.
Now i question. Each game has its own loading screen that the ROM displays.
Maybe this screen is a file on the CD. Can NeoCD/SDL (consequently NeoDC) use this file to display in the loading screen? Replace loading.bmp with this suposed file? I think SDL can do it.
Note that i'm just wondering here. Maybe that's too much work for a almost non existant loading screen...

EDIT: Ok, a little offtopic here. NeoGeoCD+ is a thing i did for personal use. It's a single SBI containing NeoDC 2.1 and Neo4All 0a2.
The image for NeoDC says 9.2, but it's the latest release. I'm on linux and being slaped by Gimp in the face

Sorry, there's no readme into it, as i said, it's for my personal use

Just wanted to share.

Post by **Quzar** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 5:40 pm

The only reason I never had it display the loading bitmap was because i thought it was a waste of space. No matter what, we wont get the original NGCD animations, unless i can get information from elsemi, who i have tried emailing to no avail.

Link · Post by **Link** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 11:22 pm

Hi,

I just wanted to say. I tried the Emu very good work. Thank you Quzar for continuing the work on it. I have one small request. I have found that if you slip and hit all 4 buttons (a,b,x and y) it BSODs you. You can still hear music playing but no game going after that. Just wanted to let you know and ask if it's possibel to fix this

Thank you for your time and the continued work on NEO DC

Post by **Quzar** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 11:39 pm

Link wrote:Hi,

I just wanted to say. I tried the Emu very good work. Thank you Quzar for continuing the work on it. I have one small request. I have found that if you slip and hit all 4 buttons (a,b,x and y) it BSODs you. You can still hear music playing but no game going after that. Just wanted to let you know and ask if it's possibel to fix this Thank you for your time and the continued work on NEO DC

hehe, actually that is by design. I have it that way for testing over coder's cable. I'll remove it from future public releases.

Salamander2 · Post by **Salamander2** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 5:06 pm

i'm not ready to post the research of the games.
post it later.

karsten · Post by **karsten** » Sun Feb 20, 2005 3:33 am

samurai spirits 3 works perfect (cda music and sound effects ok) but is slow

just my 2 cents

nice work anyway!

ps does neo dc have auto frameskip?

Post by **Quzar** » Sun Feb 20, 2005 3:44 am

NeoDC has no frameskip at all.

When I get fullspeed, I really want to own it, not just think its there

karsten · Post by **karsten** » Sun Feb 20, 2005 5:25 am

quzar wrote:NeoDC has no frameskip at all.

When I get fullspeed, I really want to own it, not just think its there

eheheh good work!

by the way i never tought that it could run this good

karsten · Post by **karsten** » Sun Feb 20, 2005 5:33 am

ops, i forgot 2 suggestions, repositionable screen and in game menu' would be useful.

for the rest everything is great.

by the way, not emu related,; i tought that the dreamcast would be faster than this in loading NEOGEO CD files. something wrong with my dc?

Post by **Quzar** » Sun Feb 20, 2005 5:45 am

the thing is, what would an in game menu be used for? the only option i have built in is region, and switching that in-game would probably crash it. I'm never gonna add over/underclocking features because they would create issues that i dont wanna be responsible for, and frameskip, well, i dont feel that even in its current state its needed, so why ever have that. the only possible thing that it could be used for would maybe be resetting (to allow for a new game to be inserted without restarting the DC) and re-positioning the screen.

I think though, if I did screen re-positioning, it would be enabled in the same area as the region selection (which everyone seems to ignore) and would be saved to the vmu so that it is automatically loaded every time. oh and by screen repositioning, i don't mean screen resizing, because that would mean warping the image.

and about the speed, i dont have a real NGCD to test it, but the DC loads as fast as possible, and i dont think its that slow.