Ideas for Scherzo's NesterDC SE.

Strapping Scherzo · Post by **Strapping Scherzo** » Sun Aug 28, 2005 9:44 pm

I totally see your point, bender, but I'm welcome to suggestions of any kind. The bad suggestions are easy to ignore and brush off.

I know perfectly well that I could have focused just on improving compatibility and speed, but I'm trying to make something much deeper here. When this release is done and you make a disc of NesterDC SE, that disc will be a NES library customized to your needs... filled with screenshots, cart scans, manuals, maps, FAQs, NSFs, and more. I personally can't wait to finish this darn thing so that I can veg out on my couch and have a NES marathon.

Some people have been against this, saying that I should just stick to the basics and make a damn release already. I know it sounds preachy but I have a vision and I don't want to do anything short of what I want.

bender · Post by **bender** » Sun Aug 28, 2005 10:11 pm

I said I wasn't going to post more but I lied

Just to say sorry and thank you, scherzo

Cid Highwind · Post by **Cid Highwind** » Thu Sep 01, 2005 1:51 am

Thanks Scherzo

I'm am really looking forward to the release of this emulator, but please take your time to make it perfect. This is going to be the perfect NES emulator if what you are planning to do will become reality. I will gladly wait for that a little longer. If I want to play NES games that badly at this moment I will just get my NesterDC v7.1 disc, which works great for me as well.

tray262 · Post by **tray262** » Thu Sep 01, 2005 4:01 pm

I'm hooked on this emu, even tho I've never played, I've been checking the status every week. Hope everything keeps getting better.

Strapping Scherzo · Post by **Strapping Scherzo** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 7:12 pm

HOLY SHIT.

Today I decided to take a break from the whole FAQ ordeal and do some programming. I intended to work on fixing the KOEI games' graphical glitches.

So I download VC++ Express (which is awesome considering that MS provides it free of charge), the Platform SDK and installed them. I get the Win32 version of NesterDC working which is what I use to debug emulation problems.

So I start up Romance of the Three Kingdoms and my mouth drops. The graphics are perfect!!! At some point in my past changes, I fixed the KOEI games without knowing it. I'm a little perplexed but oh well. Life is good.

MetaFox · Post by **MetaFox** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 7:13 pm

Yay for random fixes!

You've got to love when something gets fixed and you don't know how you did it.

GyroVorbis · Post by **GyroVorbis** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 7:21 pm

Strapping Scherzo wrote:HOLY poop.

Today I decided to take a break from the whole FAQ ordeal and do some programming. I intended to work on fixing the KOEI games' graphical glitches.

So I download VC++ Express (which is awesome considering that MS provides it free of charge), the Platform SDK and installed them. I get the Win32 version of NesterDC working which is what I use to debug emulation problems.

So I start up Romance of the Three Kingdoms and my mouth drops. The graphics are perfect!!! At some point in my past changes, I fixed the KOEI games without knowing it. I'm a little perplexed but oh well. Life is good.

! I bet you were WTF-ing over that all day!

Post by **Christuserloeser** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 8:17 pm

Wow, that's incredible ! KOEI games are fantastic

Strapping Scherzo · Post by **Strapping Scherzo** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 10:39 pm

Wait, I got prematurely excited. The KOEI games I tested are mapper 1 games. The mapper 5 games, like Romance of the Three Kingdoms 2, are still garbled. Just gotta figure out why.

Strapping Scherzo · Post by **Strapping Scherzo** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 5:51 pm

OK, fixed it for real this time. However... I now know why Castlevania 3 runs so slow. It and many of the KOEI games use mapper #5 which apparently has the ability to do CHR bank switching in the middle of a frame. Or something like that. I ever don't claim to know WTF I'm talking about.

Well, Castlevania uses mapper #5 too but doesn't use the fancy bank switching. I know it doesn't because I commented out the code that does it and it worked. It worked and it was fullspeed. So the mystery about CV3 is solved. Nice, fullspeed CV3 when I release.

KOEI games now work too, but if they use mapper #5 they're going to be slow. DAMN slow. Like 10fps slow. I'm going to see if I can speed it up.

Syd · Post by **Syd** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 6:08 pm

Good job Scherzo! Nothing like using a hack or two to fix the problem!

drybed · Post by **drybed** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 9:57 pm

10FPS? if it goes at that speed, can't u just raise the frame skip faster to make it full speed?

TyBO · Post by **TyBO** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 10:02 pm

drybed wrote:10FPS? if it goes at that speed, can't u just raise the frame skip faster to make it full speed?

Well... kind of. Increasing the frame skip will make the game really choppy and hard to watch, but technically, it could run full speed that way.

Strapping Scherzo · Post by **Strapping Scherzo** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 10:42 pm

TyBO wrote:
drybed wrote:10FPS? if it goes at that speed, can't u just raise the frame skip faster to make it full speed?
Well... kind of. Increasing the frame skip will make the game really choppy and hard to watch, but technically, it could run full speed that way.

Exactly, and it's been done.

Actually, I increased the frame rate quite a bit now. It's averaging about 35fps now. Doing some more things right now to try to get that up even higher.

Remember, this speed problem only applies to mapper 5 games, of which very few exist. The rest of the games are very much fullspeed.

TyBO · Post by **TyBO** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 10:51 pm

Good to hear Scherzo! I'm confident you'll be able to get it fullspeed or close to fullspeed in the near future.

I was just thinking though... with all these great features being included in NesterDC SE, how much room will there actually be for the actual ROMs? Like, assuming the average NES ROM size is 200 KB, would you say like... 50 ROMs?

... I'm just curious... I know it's probably hard to predict at this point since the emu isn't complete yet.

LyingWake · Post by **LyingWake** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 11:17 pm

LOL 50? I know a lot more will fit on there.

TyBO · Post by **TyBO** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 11:23 pm

Ha... OK that's good to know.

It just seems like with all this stuff, there might not be as much room for ROMs, y'know?

... and hey, I'd be perfectly content with that, considering how much has gone into this.

Post by **Quzar** » Tue Sep 06, 2005 2:26 am

Scherzo: be careful, just because it's not apparent that the game uses the mapper ability doesnt mean that it never uses it. If you could try to research that and see if it may or may not be used in specific places in any of the games.

Strapping Scherzo · Post by **Strapping Scherzo** » Tue Sep 06, 2005 6:24 am

Quotable Quzar wrote:Scherzo: be careful, just because it's not apparent that the game uses the mapper ability doesnt mean that it never uses it. If you could try to research that and see if it may or may not be used in specific places in any of the games.

Yeah, I thought of that. I'm not going to disable the bank switching functionality at all. I'm going to work on getting it faster, which I've already done some.

hrb2k3 · Post by **hrb2k3** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 7:17 pm

i don't know if this has been mentioned cause i don't want to read the 22 other pages of this thread.

one of my favorite nes emus is the patched version of FCE Ultra with movie playback ability using .fcm files. they are way smaller than divx/mpg files and only a few kb's a file. i was watching a speed run of mike tyson's punch-out!! and the .fcm file was only 21KB. pretty cool.

is it possible to add .fcm or .nsm support in NesterDC SE.? i know FCE ultra is open source, so maybe it could?