Genesis Plus / DC

ZacMc · Post by **ZacMc** » Sat May 24, 2003 2:04 pm

Dr. Zoidberg wrote:I'll have to buy some new blanks tomorrow so I can have a bit of a play with this.

Man I need CD's. I have one left, but that one is put away just incase of a DreamSNES release . hmmm I think I still have money of my gift card at buest buy.

Grab an old Data CD or a non-selfboot CD. Pretend the data track is your audio session. Use Selfboot or SBootInducer to burn the second session (with CDRecord). You now have a Selfboot disc without using a blank CD.

ZacMc · Post by **ZacMc** » Sat May 24, 2003 6:23 pm

BlackAura wrote:[url=http://files.frashii.com/~sp00nz/Doom/f ... 01_bin.zip]SBI 2.1 Package[url] - It's untested, and it's the first SBI I've actually made. It should work though.

Thats the plain files

katraqueyous · Post by **katraqueyous** » Sat May 24, 2003 10:40 pm

In the future you think you can enable 6-button support for peeps with ascii pads?

BTW, the emu is awesome!

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sat May 24, 2003 10:54 pm

SBI - I forgot to change the link on the page, and I just copied it here.

Genesis Plus doesn't support 6-button pads itself (yet), and I don't have any games that use them to try to implement it. I suppose I could give it a shot though.

Decreasing the CPU clocks will make the emulator run faster, but can make the emulated system run slower. For example, Sonic 1 does not need all the CPU speed, but if you take it too low, the game begins to run really badly, even though the FPS/Speed is still fairly high. You can safely decrease the Z80 clock to 25 with no ill effects, but you won't be able to do that when (if) I add sound support.

I'm going to try to add auto-frameskip, maybe a few other cool features, and (hopefully) try to speed it up a little more.

I'd appreciate it if people could collect some settings that run really well for some games, so I can possibly include a games database feature in the next release, which will automatically adjust the settings for each game to make it playable without manually tweaking everything. I already have a ROM database I did a few months ago for my own Genesis emulator which I can adapt. I just need some settings to plug into it.

Oh, and the zipped ROM support was actually not coded my me - it's built into the code of Genesis Plus, and it got ported across anyway. I did test it - all my ROMs are zipped. However, just make sure that the ROMs are the very first thing in the ZIP file, otherwise it might not find them.

Dre@mC@ster · Post by **Dre@mC@ster** » Sat May 24, 2003 11:03 pm

Great work on the emu, but now don't they have to change your rank from silver stars to RED ones?

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sat May 24, 2003 11:13 pm

They could, I suppose. I've already released a few programs (nxDoom, nxQuake, a couple of worthless test programs) for the DC, but I got made a mod about the same time as the first release I made. Actually, I think it was partly because of that.

emptythought · Post by **emptythought** » Sat May 24, 2003 11:18 pm

holy crap. the menus look awesome! i burn this and 2 other programs on a disc today and i accidently put the roms in the wrong folder, so im gunna have to re burn to check the games out. but so far im impressed already just by the menus. very very nice work black aura.

another thing, since genesis+ supports zipped roms with it working, isnt this the first emulator to support zipped roms for the dreamcast? i thought the dc wasnt able to load zipped roms for some odd reason.

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sat May 24, 2003 11:24 pm

Zipped ROMs are just slightly annoying to implement if the emulator doesn't already support them. And, in some cases, it might be a little difficult due to RAM restrictions. In this case, GP already supports zipped ROMs, and I have ample RAM spare, so implementing zipped ROMs is trivial.

Thank Politoe for the current look of the menus - they're mostly his design. And they certainly do look awesome. My own art was somewhat pathetic, and I'd be embarassed if I'd released the emulator with my own artwork. It truly sucks.

katraqueyous · Post by **katraqueyous** » Sat May 24, 2003 11:59 pm

Man, this emu is awesome. I played a full game of Pit Fighter and Outrunners. Yo, BlackAura, I'll try to collect some settings and tests for some games. I'm calling out to those to collect some settings also.

Dre@mC@ster · Post by **Dre@mC@ster** » Sun May 25, 2003 12:11 am

BlackAura wrote:They could, I suppose. I've already released a few programs (nxDoom, nxQuake, a couple of worthless test programs) for the DC, but I got made a mod about the same time as the first release I made. Actually, I think it was partly because of that.

Well with all my power I Knight thee Mod/Dev'er
*********

DcSteve · Post by **DcSteve** » Sun May 25, 2003 12:19 am

can sound be turned on in the GP code at all, i know that it wouldnt be full since the speed is not full, but i just want to see if the tones are correct, because dcgen's arent...

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sun May 25, 2003 1:09 am

There's no support for sound at the moment. I was experimenting with sound support, but didn't get it working before the release. It should sound fairly good, when I gen it working.

katraqueyous · Post by **katraqueyous** » Sun May 25, 2003 2:00 am

The sound will obviously damper the performance, or do you have a certain way around it?

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sun May 25, 2003 2:10 am

It'll slow things down - there's no way around that. I might be able to make it slow the emulation down a little less than it otherwise would, but it might break a couple of games. I was thinking of breaking the emulator into two parts - the main system (main CPU, video) and the sound system (Z80, sound chips). The main and sound systems would be emulated totally separately from each other. That would also mean the sound would not skip, but would still slow the emulator down. In fact, it might slow the emulator down too much. But I'm sure that the DC can handle just the sound system at many times normal speed.

I might also try an event-based timing system instead of GP's default scanline-based system. That way, the CPU emulation would run slightly faster, and the rendering might well run faster too. Some emulators for other systems (like WinUAE for the Amiga) use this technique, and the Amiga is a far more complex machine than the Mega Drive. I don't know how well this system would work on the Dreamcast, but I think it's worth attempting.

Aside from that... The Z80 emulator is one of the faster C-based Z80 emulators, but it isn't the fastest. The main CPU emulator is actually one of the slower, but most compatable, C-based M68000 emulators that I know of, so I might look at replacing it with a faster one.

politoe · Post by **politoe** » Sun May 25, 2003 2:28 am

I just tested it out and its great work BA. I'm out of internet, so I didn't here the news until like 30 min. ago.

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sun May 25, 2003 2:33 am

Thanks!

What do you think of the GUI then?

chrisfbt1 · Post by **chrisfbt1** » Sun May 25, 2003 2:43 am

Politoes GUI Fits Perfectly

I'll Post Some Settings After i pla....I mean "Test" some more

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sun May 25, 2003 2:55 am

Actually, it didn't fit perfectly. I had to tweak the settings a little bit (see theme.ini in the genplus directory) to get it all looking good. But it certainly does look good.

I just tried your theme - It looks pretty cool, but I can't get the colours right for the selection box. Since I can change them at will (in theme.ini again), could you just tell me what colours you think would work well?

Oh, and I had to use JPG files for your theme - they were about 2.5MB as 16-bit PNG files. The quality is actually pretty crap, because they've been dithered, compressed, un-dithered, stretched, squished, re-dithered and re-compressed. Could you take the originals (not the dithered ones, preferably), resize them to 512x512, then dither them down to 64k colours (16-bit, not 256 colours), and save them as either JPG files, or PNG files. Whichever you think works best. You could actually use BMP files or PCX files, if you were so inclined.

Just about to try -=DC_Zach=-'s theme, which uses a black font and has slightly odd positioning for the ROM screen. I think it'll work alright though.

politoe · Post by **politoe** » Sun May 25, 2003 3:03 am

The GUI looked preety good. Sorry I fifn;t change to makew you do more work.

You had me lost when you wanted us to change some stuff around, so i said to myself. i dont want to mess up. So ima just let you do it.

Thanks for the compliment chrisfbt1

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sun May 25, 2003 3:22 am

Actually, I was planning to do most of it in the first place, so it's no big deal. Getting the theme into the format on the disc took about ten minutes.