Ideas for Scherzo's NesterDC SE.

Sir Savant · Post by **Sir Savant** » Mon Sep 12, 2005 7:28 pm

I think that is on the suggestion list somewhere in the teens. Like page 12 or something.

tray262 · Post by **tray262** » Mon Sep 26, 2005 9:45 am

You guys are slacking on the posts in this thread, I just couldn't let it get to page 2. lol

ghostparty · Post by **ghostparty** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 11:03 pm

Any news?

LyingWake · Post by **LyingWake** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 12:31 am

http://www.sch3rz0.com/nesterdcse/wip_features.php

Syd · Post by **Syd** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 9:08 am

Hey Scherzo when you say you can view the instruction manuals as images, does this support PDF files?

LyingWake · Post by **LyingWake** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 2:48 pm

Probably not. He most likely has support only for images (jpg, png).

404NotFound · Post by **404NotFound** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 3:19 pm

Here is a suggestion... In the Homebrew forums, VMZip can cause some dramatic reducitons in savestate size. Is there any chance that a feature could be added that would on-the-fly compress all VMU data? I know people could just use VMZip, but it'd be really cool to have such a thing built in.

LyingWake · Post by **LyingWake** » Sun Oct 09, 2005 3:47 pm

404NotFound wrote:Here is a suggestion... In the Homebrew forums, VMZip can cause some dramatic reducitons in savestate size. Is there any chance that a feature could be added that would on-the-fly compress all VMU data? I know people could just use VMZip, but it'd be really cool to have such a thing built in.

I believe most, if not all homebrew do zip their saves. It was just a flaw that the commercial games had.

Strapping Scherzo · Post by **Strapping Scherzo** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 3:51 pm

I'm bored here at work, which is amazing since I'm almost always busy and stressed out here.

So I figure I'd update you people with my progress.

Yes, I'm still working on it whenever I get the opportunity. I just hope all the whiners realize that I have very little free time, especially free time where I can sit down and write some code.

I started to get into some memory issues so I had to pull out the MP3, MOD, OGG music support. I managed to cut down the size of the binary by 700kB the past week. This really helped.

The KJS JavaScript interpreter is the true memory hog. But I'm actually surprised that this wasn't an issue much earlier in development. It's too late to do something different. I will make sure that NesterDC SE has the features I want AND not run out of memory.

The number of major feature-adds is getting smaller and smaller. Check out the WIP page to see my progress.

http://www.sch3rz0.com/nesterdcse/wip_features.php

I'm going to devote some time to the CD builder application. The true core of the builder will be a config-file-driven command line program. That way, making ports of the builder to other platforms like Linux and Mac should be much easier. This cmdline thingy is just about done already.

I'm going to build a Windows app that'll basically give you a nice clean visual way of editing the config's various options. I look to other people to make equivelent GUI interfaces for other platforms like Linux and Mac.

Once the builder is done, NesterDC SE will be in a state positioned for a release at any moment after I decide it's ready.

I will choose a handful of testers from DCEmu to help me find the kinks. I'd like to be at this testing phase in about a month.

So the time is coming. Finally.

Sir Savant · Post by **Sir Savant** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 4:12 pm

"You smell that Rei? That's the Smell of Success!" lol.

Umm, so it is commandline? You think it would be okay to build a small java app to call the functions, something not too messy, but so that it can be portable? It would be nice for you to release the cmdline app before the whole release so a gui can be worked on and released around the time of the NDCSE release.

The list is getting smaller and I only see a few major problems. Kudos to you sir.

LyingWake · Post by **LyingWake** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 4:15 pm

Reread that - he said he's going to make a GUI for Windows. The reason for the commandline version is for easier porting to other OS'.

Sir Savant · Post by **Sir Savant** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 4:48 pm

I was just asking if it would be okay to use java to do the menu (ie, I get bored and do it myself, resulting in something half-assed but usable for the time being for those not in windows). I know he is making the windows gui.

Anyways, this topic needs a pruning.

Strapping Scherzo · Post by **Strapping Scherzo** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 8:32 am

I'm sort of considering using a library called wxWidgets. It's a cross-platform GUI toolkit. If I use that, then all that would be required for another platform is a recompile. The only thing that deters me from going that route is the lack of a nice dialog editor like in Vidual Studio. But who says that this little proggy has to be pretty, right?

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 9:10 am

You could try using wxGlade or VisualWx.

Strapping Scherzo · Post by **Strapping Scherzo** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 9:19 am

Thanks for the links. The only one I knew of before was wxDesigner. But that VisualWx looks rather nice. Looks like it's almost a self contained IDE with the compiler support and all. But I'm sure the built-in text editor will piss me off in one way or another and I'll have to go back to my trusty TextPad.

Dreamcast4life · Post by **Dreamcast4life** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 1:46 pm

Sweet Scherzo, I really look forward to this ultimate NES masterpiece that has been in the making for a long time, a good day coming to the DC scene indeed.

TyBO · Post by **TyBO** » Tue Oct 25, 2005 9:38 pm

WOO HOO!! The release of NesterDC SE will soon be upon us. This will certainly make a splash in the homebrew scene! W00t, 1337, pwn, etc.

Post by **Quzar** » Wed Oct 26, 2005 12:10 am

Hey, if you still need to drop down the memory usage of kjs, hit me up and i fancy myself as pretty good at stripping things down (hey, i got neodc down to a little over 600kb, and a mame sga from 5 to 1mb =p).

There is no way you should be so low on memory that you can't load and play mp3/ogg/whatever files.

Strapping Scherzo · Post by **Strapping Scherzo** » Wed Oct 26, 2005 8:12 am

Oh, the music could be played, sure. I know that the streaming nature of playing requires relatively little memory. I stripped out the functionality because the libs were rather large and accounted for a good chunk of the binary's size.

The problem I think I'm having with KJS is not so much the library, but the shear amount of script that I've written for Nester. And it's not the size of JS files themselves that worries me. Apparently, KJS parses the script and turns it into some sort of node structure, like an intermediate byte code form. Definitely faster to run than parsing a function's code every time you call it. KJS runs quite fast on DC. But, with speed, you usually trade space. So that's what I think it is.

Garbage collection was a problem in the KJS engine. For the sake of speed, I'm sure it lets dead objects sort of build up then do a big sweep ocassionally. I found the function in KJS that starts the garbage collection sweep and I exposed it to the scripts. So now I call it when I think it's needed.

Also, I store things in KOS's ramdrive so that CDs can be swapped and for other reasons. I have all the GUI images in there plus the NES database. But all this stuff only takes up 371 KB of memory. Not much.

The binary's size was about 1900 KB a couple weeks ago. Then I stripped out the music support. I then re-compiled everything using -Os, even KOS! Amazingly, emulation is still fullspeed. In fact, I don't notice anything different. But now the binary is about 1200 KB.

It's very possible that there's a memory leak somewhere too. I've gotta double check all my news and mallocs.

Post by **Quzar** » Wed Oct 26, 2005 11:22 am

suprisingly Os can actually be faster on the Dreamcast at times than O3 depending on your cache interaction.

and i don't know if this is still applicable, but mallocs don't always give aligned pointers, so i always use memalign(32, * ); in place of malloc and calloc.