gbadev.org forum archive

Hi,

if anyone is interested, a new version is out. I am sure you can find it somewhere ;)

New features:

v0.7.4

- Changed scheduling of M68000 and Z80.
- Some changes in M68000 internal memory handlers.
- YM2612 FM core mostly rewritten in ASM.
- Some bugs in FM core fixed (Operator 1 was sometimes not considered in certain cases).
- Fixed reset bug for FM core resulting in unstable sound for every game loaded except the 1st one.
- Raised sample rate for FM emulation from 16KHz to 28KHz (28, because a few games can't do 32KHz)
- Sound is completely mixed in hardware now, meaning every FM channel, PSG and DAC have their own DS sound channels.

v0.7
- Fixed bug in Z80 core, preventing some games from having sound.
- Fixed bug in 68000 optimization, that could make some games hang.
- Changed sound handling and doubled sample rate for PCM sound, resulting in slightly better sound quality.
- HW renderer partially rewritten, many glitches should be gone, some are still there (and will probably not be easy to fix ever)
- Sprite rendering completely rewritten in ASM. Should be faster and fix most of the sprite issues.
- Implemented mid frame palette updates (water effects in certain games). Note, that this just works, if a game is constantly fast enough, so slowdowns can still cause colors to flicker).
- Many little optimizations in memory handling and the CPU cores. Should reduce slowdowns.
- Added option for sprite masking. It is not 100% emulated, just faked to be enough for most games using it (disable it, if sprites are missing, that should be there).
- Added option to change between 3- and 6-Button pad (just works, if the option is applied BEFORE loading a game). When 6-Button pad is disabled, L+R can be used to move the visible screen area, X to center it.
- Added sound state to the savestates, so that the correct tracks should play now when a state is loaded. Savestates are still not 100% reliable and loading old states can potentially cause problems.

The new version also contains a preview version of a SMS/GG emulator i have been working on a bit. It has these features so far:

- Enhanced Z80 ASM core used in jEnesisDS.
- SMS/GG emulation.
- 10 Savestates per game.
- Rewind and fast forward feature.
- Settings can be saved per game.
- Fully rendered by the DS 2D hardware.
- Perfect sync option, that actually syncs every scanline (emulated scanline to DS scanline).
This option is more accurate, and needed for some games to look correctly, but it can be problematic to use it, when "Rewind" is enabled.
- sample accurate (almost ;P) PSG emulation.
- Stereo sound for GG games.

Known issues:
- timing is not exactly correct yet, so some games might not work, or have glitches.
- No FM emulation (yet?)
- Sprite updates need to be improved, sometimes there can be glitched sprites atm.
- Many more, that i don't remember now..

Hope you like it.

Last edited by Lordus on Sun Jul 13, 2008 1:05 am; edited 4 times in total

If you get sound added in the next preview then that would rock ! (Thought it is cool anyway !)
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Pretty awesome stuff here. I'm looking forward to further developments.

your emulator is made of ten different kinds of win, each more flavourful than the last. really. pretty-much-all-full-speed emulation Mega Drive emulation is a godsend, and I've noticed that if I don't cap the framerate it can bounce up to 80-100 FPS in some games - that's leaving a pretty decent buffer for sound, ? very, very good!

Last edited by frosty-theaussie on Tue Jul 10, 2007 1:45 pm; edited 1 time in total

Lordus, I sent you a mail about SN76489 PSG emulation ;)

Awesome stuff. I just tried sonic 3 and it ran at great speed, despite a few graphical glitches.

I wish you luck in making good progress.

Great work indeed! Looking forward to the future releases.

Keep it up - we all appreciate it!

WOW. I just booted this sucker up on my DS, and WOW.

Dang near spot-on full speed, shockingly good compatibility, and minimal graphics glitches.

I REALLY didn't expect something this far along. Here's one Sega nut that'd give his eyeteeth for a good Genesis emu. Please continue working on this.
I can tell it's going somewhere.

Does this have what it takes to beat PicroDrive?
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jester wrote:

Does this have what it takes...

I'd already say yes, just based on non-frameskipped speed, and 6 button support. :) Hooray, Samurai Shodown \o/

I wonder if this could ever possibly have any chance of supporting custom ROMs that are over the 4MB 'standard' Genesis size limit (and the DS' RAM size)...examples of these ROMs would be several of the Sonic * homemade hacks/addons, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat Trilogy

I am backing this to become the best!
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JLsoft wrote:

jester wrote:

Does this have what it takes...

I'd already say yes, just based on non-frameskipped speed, and 6 button support. :) Hooray, Samurai Shodown \o/

Woo. Another Samauri Shodown fan!

Shoot, I was hoping for sound... oh well, amazing stuff. I just love it when awesome homebrew just appears one day without notice.

Anyone out there who's done any experiments in playing Genesis sound on DS who wants to give this guy a push in the right direction?
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Supercard: miniSD, Kingston 1GB, Kingston 2GB
Ralink chipset PCI NIC

@ Lordus

To directly quote Ad_Enuff from gbatemp forums:

Quote:

The best Genesis/Megadrive emulator for PC is HAZE's HazeMD with source found HERE.. If nobody has heard of him before, then you haven't played MAME either! The MAME project emulates hardware 100% so there are no short cuts and therefore compatibility is 100% once the emulation is complete.

This might be of some use to you.

Keep up the good work

Thanks for all the positive responses!

I am definately gonna work on this until i am statisfied and i am a perfectionist ;)

Dont get your hopes up about sound too much. Ill do what i can, it just really needs a LOT of processing power. The FM chip needs about the same and in cases more power than the M68000 core itself.

@khan
Thanks, but i dont really see the point in that. jEnesisDS is fairly new, but i am working on Genesis emulation for a while myself and my Java version is at about 99% compatibiity atm and plays Dino Dini soccer just fine ;)
I am not aiming at 100% compatibility (which you can never reach anyway) with this one, but speed.
What is the point in a Genesis emulator for DS that plays every game... at 10 FPS ?

Lordus wrote:

Thanks for all the positive responses!

I am definately gonna work on this until i am statisfied and i am a perfectionist ;)

Dont get your hopes up about sound too much. Ill do what i can, it just really needs a LOT of processing power. The FM chip needs about the same and in cases more power than the M68000 core itself.

@khan
Thanks, but i dont really see the point in that. jEnesisDS is fairly new, but i am working on Genesis emulation for a while myself and my Java version is at about 99% compatibiity atm and plays Dino Dini soccer just fine ;)
I am not aiming at 100% compatibility (which you can never reach anyway) with this one, but speed.
What is the point in a Genesis emulator for DS that plays every game... at 10 FPS ?

wow! perhaps it's possible to implement sound on a scaled down level, with some parts cut back? having sound would be neat, but not at the expense of a constantly fluctuating/stuttering framerate.

hey, thanks for this!

i know the FM chip is pretty much an impossibility, but provided you aren't using the arm7 for much right now, the z80 is definitely within reason, right?

(and if you get the 68k and z80 working at a reasonable speed in tandem then neogeo might not be too far off...)

EDIT: it just occurred to me that goomba color can't be at all a bad reference to point to use for emulating a z80 on an arm7...

=)

Last edited by ethoscapade on Thu Jul 12, 2007 11:55 pm; edited 1 time in total

...

Wow. I tried this out at school today while not bothering to cheer on others in races, and I have to say this is the best Genesis emulator I have ever had the pleasure to use on my DS. It ran Sonic 1 and 2 perfectly, albeit some problems in Sonic 2 concerning what looks like scanlines flicking up and down the screen after a while, but the special stages are still playable even with the purple stripy background. Thank you for this wonderful emulator. I read a post before about having a large buffer for sound or something; this would be nice, but on my top 10 list for the next release, I'd say savestates would make this emulator one of the best I have ever used.

The gameplay seems smoother than on the actual console too. ;)
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Beyond Oasis is working great. It was impossible to launch with Picodrive. I'm really amazed! Great work!!!

This emulator is awesome, with the SW update, I can get sonic 3 running in scaled mode. But i cant seem to get my 2 favorite games to work, they are Master of monsters, of which i don't get the right panel displaying all the information, and Valis III, which just doesn't run at all.

Wow...I was a bit mad when I tried PicoDrive for DS only to find choppy video with low FPS and no sound. With this, gameplay is excellent, it's one of the smoothest running apps I've ever seen on the DS actually. Now I just can't wait for sound.

I have a Genesis, but I don't know much about how it does sound.

Does the Z80 do most of the sound or does the FM chip? Even if some effects didn't show, all it really needs is background music and jump and item sounds, it depends on what chip the sound is on.
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blades wrote:

This emulator is awesome, with the SW update, I can get sonic 3 running in scaled mode. But i cant seem to get my 2 favorite games to work, they are Master of monsters, of which i don't get the right panel displaying all the information, and Valis III, which just doesn't run at all.

Huh, scaling? WHERE?! LINK. NAO. PICS OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN.

The software renderer has scaling.
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dualscreenman wrote:

What about Gaim DS? Gaim pretty much has support for all IM programs.

tepples wrote:

"Goshdammit, the DS is not a Gaim-boy! It's a third pillar!"

Quote:

The software renderer has scaling.

Vertical scaling is also implemented for the HW renderer and will be there in the next version along with savestates. Horizontal scaling wont be possible though.

Quote:

Master of monsters, of which i don't get the right panel displaying

Sorry for that. I forgot to enable vertical windows in the SW renderer - i had some things disabled for easier comparison to the HW renderer.

New version is out, see first post for details ;)

Great work Lordus, I look forward to giving the new version a go. Here's the first link I found were you can download it: http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=71593

Awesome! And glad to hear you're giving sound an honest attempt :)
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Original DS Phat obtained on day of release + flashme v7
Supercard: miniSD, Kingston 1GB, Kingston 2GB
Ralink chipset PCI NIC

Hey, I know you say horizontal scaling isn't possible with the HW renderer, but is it possible to combine HW and SW rendering? Because then horizontal may be possible... though honestly I haven't a clue. >_>

I give you full permission to flame me. :P

um.. nope.

and software rendering is slow.

whould be nice to use the 3 in 1 expansion to make a sound version =p
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I doubt additional RAM is going to help any. The bottleneck is the CPU power, not the amount of RAM. Lordus stated something to that effect on DCEmu some time ago.

Congrats to your third place at the Neo compo! ^^

congrats Lordus i hope you will update the emu to sound though lol.
Anyways keep up the good work.

Congrats Lordus. Meant to make a post last night but didn't get around to it, great work on 0.5! It's really great, can't wait to see if sound becomes feasible!

frosty-theaussie wrote:

Congrats Lordus. Meant to make a post last night but didn't get around to it, great work on 0.5! It's really great, can't wait to see if sound becomes feasible!

I cant wait either.

Congrats and I'm keeping my fingers crossed...

Just came home from holiday last night and found out about the 3rd place. Didnt expect it, but didnt expect this ranking either...

I made some progress with the sound, but its still a long way to go. I dont think full sound will be possible, maybe 3-4 of the 6 FM channels + PSG and DAC at reasonable quality. I currently have 2-3 channels + PSG working for games, that dont need the Z80 for sound, but i see room for optimizations. The Z80 will be a problem though, as it would have to be additionally emulated on the Arm9.

The only thing that is really slowing me down at the moment is that i dont have a DS anymore and it might take some time, untill i can get another one...

Lordus: I don't know if it helps, but apparently there's new cyclone68000 core out there from within the last couple weeks.

Doom5 wrote:

Lordus: I don't know if it helps, but apparently there's new cyclone68000 core out there from within the last couple weeks.

Thanks, but it wouldnt really help. I wrote my own 68000 core in arm assembly, and i intend to continue using it. It is an integrated core, based on my Java core, which has no known bugs and should be a bit faster than Cyclone.
I also dont even like to look at other code, because its much more fun developing from documentation only. Except for the sound cores, jEnesis was completely developed based on documentation and tests on real hardware.

Lordus wrote:

Thanks, but it wouldnt really help. I wrote my own 68000 core in arm assembly, and i intend to continue using it. It is an integrated core, based on my Java core, which has no known bugs and should be a bit faster than Cyclone.
I also dont even like to look at other code, because its much more fun developing from documentation only. Except for the sound cores, jEnesis was completely developed based on documentation and tests on real hardware.

That's quite the achievement! If you need a DS to develop on, and live in the States, I can loan you my DS phat. PM me if you're interested.

Quote:

I made some progress with the sound, but its still a long way to go. I dont think full sound will be possible, maybe 3-4 of the 6 FM channels + PSG and DAC at reasonable quality. I currently have 2-3 channels + PSG working for games, that dont need the Z80 for sound, but i see room for optimizations. The Z80 will be a problem though, as it would have to be additionally emulated on the Arm9.

I had always thought emulating the FM would be the most CPU intensive part, from what I'd heard from other coders. IMHO, I'd focus on the FM + PSG and ditch the Z80 for now. Games without music are kinda "meh", and sound effects are nice, in the games that will be able to use them without a Z80.

As long as there is a possibility of working sound in any reasonable form (if I had to choose between music and sound effects I'd go with the latter) it would be a dream come true.

well good luck lordus if you need help with art for the title menu i can help.oh yeah my r4 should arrive in 3 weeks.It is comming in 2 but my parents will hide it to my birthday.Back on topic if you need help we are happy to help.

If anyone is interested, a new version is out. See first post for details.

great :)
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Awesomeness. Thanks for all your work, I love sound!
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dualscreenman wrote:

What about Gaim DS? Gaim pretty much has support for all IM programs.

tepples wrote:

"Goshdammit, the DS is not a Gaim-boy! It's a third pillar!"

Hi Lordus
Great works for this new update as Thunder Force IV works near perfection with sound (which is for me the best test to see how the emulation works).
But I have two questions.
First : Do you think it'll be possible to force 50 hz on the game. What I mean is with the 50 hz, you got 2 black zone (up and down) so no need of vertical scalling.
Second : Can't you use the same kind of scalling as the other (but lost) MD emulator on DS which succeed to have full screen scaling or use some kind of hadware zoom (no scalling) on a larger screen (as the Ds can manage page screen of 512x384).
However and once again : GREAT WORK !!!

Lordus-

Great, great job. Shining Force is extremely more enjoyable since it has sound. Sonic and Street Fighter are working great now also. The speed has improved. And even though it's not perfect, the sound is an amazing add-on.
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mortys wrote:

Second : Can't you use the same kind of scalling as the other (but lost) MD emulator on DS which succeed to have full screen scaling or use some kind of hadware zoom (no scalling) on a larger screen (as the Ds can manage page screen of 512x384).
However and once again : GREAT WORK !!!

jEnesisDS already implements vertical scaling, and in fact this option is enabled by default. PicoDriveDS used software rendering, unlike most builds of jEnesisDS which use hardware rendering. Only software renderers can use horizontal scaling. Scaling horizontally in hardware rendering mode is not possible.

If you want horizontal scaling in jEnesisDS, download v0.4a and use the SW renderer version. This will cause a performance hit though, so you'll need to use frameskip to maintain full speed.

Mirror? I really don't want to register on DCemu just to download this. :(

Very impressive! You did what was considered possible by many! By that, I mean emulating the Yamaha FM chip at all, let alone on the ARM 7, along with PSG sound!

I was always told the DS was not powerful enough to do this, especially along side emulating the rest of the genesis hardware.

Keep up the good work.

mortys wrote:

Hi Lordus
Great works for this new update as Thunder Force IV works near perfection with sound (which is for me the best test to see how the emulation works).
But I have two questions.
First : Do you think it'll be possible to force 50 hz on the game. What I mean is with the 50 hz, you got 2 black zone (up and down) so no need of vertical scalling.

PAL has actually a higher vertical resolution, that's why those black borders appear for games that were not properly converted to PAL, or even done directly for PAL. Forcing the speed to 50Hz would have absolutely no impact on the resolution.

Lordus-

I just noticed that some of the bin file roms are smaller, and they seem to load faster. Do they work better that smd or gen? Or are they all pretty much the same?
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can someone mirror this :)
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Sonic 2 running fullspeed with sound on the DS, I thought this was an impossible dream, now thanks to Lordus it's real!!!!

I tried a bunch of other games. Only Beyond Oasis failed to work after the Sega logo.

Anyways, it's just amazing!

Mrshlee wrote:

can someone mirror this :)

Not my mirror, but at least you can get it when DCEmu is down
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Mrshlee wrote:

can someone mirror this :)

I put one up. You don't need to register.
Download
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Last edited by Potent1 on Mon Feb 11, 2008 9:49 pm; edited 3 times in total

Metaluna wrote:

Sonic 2 running fullspeed with sound on the DS, I thought this was an impossible dream, now thanks to Lordus it's real!!!!
I tried a bunch of other games. Only Beyond Oasis failed to work after the Sega logo.
Anyways, it's just amazing!

Thanks! And:

readme.txt wrote:

Some games work faster with "H-INT emulation", others need it to work at all.

Wow! I guess I'm going to spend the next couple of hours playing Beyond Oasis then...

Thanks a million! ^^

Potent1 wrote:

I just noticed that some of the bin file roms are smaller, and they seem to load faster. Do they work better that smd or gen? Or are they all pretty much the same?

BIN is a pure dump. SMD is deinterleaved and has a small header, due to the piracy device they originate from working much like that (2 banks of 8-bit RAM to emulate a 16-bit ROM), emulators have to reinterleave to make a usable image, hence the slowness to load. GEN is just a renamed BIN. So long as you have good dumps, it doesn't matter which you use. Tools exist to convert to BIN/GEN because SMD is silly.

Maxim wrote:

Potent1 wrote:

I just noticed that some of the bin file roms are smaller, and they seem to load faster. Do they work better that smd or gen? Or are they all pretty much the same?

BIN is a pure dump. SMD is deinterleaved and has a small header, due to the piracy device they originate from working much like that (2 banks of 8-bit RAM to emulate a 16-bit ROM), emulators have to reinterleave to make a usable image, hence the slowness to load. GEN is just a renamed BIN. So long as you have good dumps, it doesn't matter which you use. Tools exist to convert to BIN/GEN because SMD is silly.

Thanks a lot. That clears that up. I switched over all my SMD's to BIN's and it works a lot better.
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Awesome emulator!
Yesterday I tested all Sonic games and they worked great!

The only thing missing on this emulator is the screen size. Genesis resolution is too big for the NDS and we can't get horizontal resizing because of the hardware renderer.

Would you be able to implement a similar auto scrolling mode like PocketNES had? NES had a bigger resolution than GBA, but it had a mode that the camera followed a specific sprite.

Anyways, this emulator is amazing...
Thank you, Lordus!

I found a bug. In Sonic 2, in the Chemical Zone Act 2, there's pink bars appearing all over the main screen. These seem to stop when in the chemical stuff.

The sound is great!

I guess this is the the part under the water in that level which is not shown due to the layers problems.

I am actually trying to fix that at the moment (without slowing anything down). The problem is, that some games change palette entries mid frame, to achieve the water effect, for example. To get the same effect with the hardware renderer, the DS's palette would have to be updated on the same scanline, the game intended to do so. Of course that will be at a completely different time as the emulation of that scanline. This causes the current glitches. So the write has to be buffered and executed later during a DS hblank interrupt, which is not completely without problems.

yellowstar wrote:

I found a bug. In Sonic 2, in the Chemical Zone Act 2, there's pink bars appearing all over the main screen. These seem to stop when in the chemical stuff.

The sound is great!

I asked about that and here was the response:

Quote:

Yeah, that's one of those games that changes the palette midframe (for the water effect), which is currently a problem. Hopefully this (and the slowdown) will be solved in the next version, but the sound and everything involved took all my time for the current release.

EDIT:
Beaten by seconds!

this is absolutely amazing...!

So far I've found some issues, not complaining just trying to help maybe whittle out a few bugs:
(im sure for obvious graphical reasons) burning force
road rash 3 - bad display when on road.
rocket knight adventures - when "go" is blinking, the main character sprite freezes on screen
rolling thunder 3 - graphical error on the weapon selection menu
valis III - in intro sequence, the voice sound goes haywire
comix zone- bad performance, glitchy graphics
marvel land - colors are wildly out of control
altered beast - first boss graphics glitch

thats juts a few i noticed, quick loaded and tested em

hope it helps :)

thank you sooo much for bringing my nostalgia portable ;)

Always
RonC

Cant wait for the next release.
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i think this is by far, no offense to any other dev... the coolest homebrew so far.

well at close second with pocket physics and the tracker program

RonC

rpc9943 wrote:

i think this is by far, no offense to any other dev... the coolest homebrew so far.

well at close second with pocket physics and the tracker program

RonC

Is it that Moonshell is so inside the DS Scene that it is now taken for granted? :P

no no moonshell is cool man. all of it is cool, but this was pretty impressive to see a sega genesis working full speed and sound...

maybe i shouldnt have said anything, i guess im saying applicationwise besides the necessities it is a great app.

Sorry

RonC

rpc9943 wrote:

no no moonshell is cool man. all of it is cool, but this was pretty impressive to see a sega genesis working full speed and sound...

maybe i shouldnt have said anything, i guess im saying applicationwise besides the necessities it is a great app.

Sorry

RonC

Hehe:) It was just to tease you, no need for to apologize! :)

I love jEnesis too! hehe

Contra Hard Corps! \m/

New version (0.7) is out, including a new SMS/GG emulator. Check the first post for updated details.

Amazing work... as usual! ;)

And regarding the GG / SMS emulator, it's much more than a preview to me since it's already working full speed with sound.

I've tried a bunch of games : Bubble Bobble and Sonic 1 & 2 are just fine.

The only problem I've noticed so far is the GG version of Castle of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse displaying wrong colors.

I remember the first release of DSMasterPlus had the same problem.

Hey Lordus!

This emu is pure awesomeness! :o)

Just a quick question.

The player animations for Tecmo Superbowl sometimes just stay they same when running. Is there any option in your emulator to correct this?

I've tried them all but I was wondering if perhaps it was a combination of options that were needed.

Also, I'm not able to change anything in the options screen for this game or change team control either for season play.

I'm currently running it without sound and the 60 fps is utter fantastic!

Thank you so much!

The new GG/MS emu is great Lordus! For a preview release it is VERY good.
I do have a question about jenesisDS. Is there a reason why Road Rash 1/2/3 is not displayed properly? Is that a particularly hard game to emulate? As always man great work!

Road Rash, Rad Racer, and several other 8-bit driving games use a scanline-warping algorithm to draw the behind-the-car view popularized by Pole Position. This algorithm often needs cycle-exact CPU and PPU/VDP timing, or the road will glitch.
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Opus, i have to look into that. Animation glitches are probably caused by a game updating sprite tiles mid frame, which is not supported yet (or never will be).

medisyn wrote:

The new GG/MS emu is great Lordus! For a preview release it is VERY good.
I do have a question about jenesisDS. Is there a reason why Road Rash 1/2/3 is not displayed properly? Is that a particularly hard game to emulate? As always man great work!

Thanks.
Yes it is particularly hard when you render in hardware. Many EA games, including the ones you mentioned use 128x tile wide BG modes, which do not exist on the DS.

Edit:
Oh, sorry Tepples i didn't see your post as it took me an eternity to write those 2 lines ;) Of course that is an issue, too, with games like that. But i believe, that even with hardware rendering, the CPU and VDP timing is accurate enough to handle this. And it is also reproducible with software rendering, by not supporting 128x modes.

Cool I was wondering why. Actually the game is almost playable. Only the left side of the road is all messed up. Any way to make a specific hack just for that game?

For the GG/MS emulator I tried several more games and they all worked great, but Ys for MS has some glitches just to let you know.

You should take over SnemulDS I think its open source haha. Joking aside, I am glad you made the GG emulator because a few months ago I fired up my GameGear and the screen was dead. :(

Quote:

Opus, i have to look into that. Animation glitches are probably caused by a game updating sprite tiles mid frame, which is not supported yet (or never will be).

Honesty. Thank you! :o)

great work as usual, Lordus. very happy to see you've expanded into the realm of SMS/GG. never liked DSMasterPlus, a little too glitchy for me. yours is great though!

frosty-theaussie wrote:

great work as usual, Lordus. very happy to see you've expanded into the realm of SMS/GG. never liked DSMasterPlus, a little too glitchy for me. yours is great though!

Yeah I was amazed at the quality of his new emulator. Ever plan on making an all in one SMS/GG/Genesis/SegaCD emulator? I know its probably asking for too much, but is SegaCD emulation possible on the DS?

Hi Lordus
As always JenesisDS works like a charm but I've got a real bug with Devilcrash. There's some graphics that appears where they should not. It don't seem to stop the gameplay mechanics but is a real pain in the ass.
Hope you will be able to resolve this in a future update.
Anyway, thanks for your work.

[quote="medisyn"]

frosty-theaussie wrote:

I know its probably asking for too much, but is SegaCD emulation possible on the DS?

i was wondering that too. it'd be great to play shining force CD

don't know how the DS would go with that cd audio though.

medisyn wrote:

Ever plan on making an all in one SMS/GG/Genesis/SegaCD emulator? I know its probably asking for too much, but is SegaCD emulation possible on the DS?

The SMS/GG emulation is currently not included into jEnesisDS for a reason, which is lack of RAM. So i doubt very much that there will ever be an all in one emulator.
As for the SegaCD emulation, i would say no. At the moment jEnesisDS spends most of its time on the ARM9 for the 68000 emulation and is not always full speed. The SegaCD adds another 68000, which runs even 50% faster than the Genesis' CPU, plus rotation and scaling hardware (and some other things that have to be emulated).
Of course many games might not need the rotation hw, and spend a lot of time idling on the slave CPU, but still it would have to be synchronized and slow everything down.
The worst thing would probably be, that once it'd be there, people would ask for 32X emulation, which is completely out of the question. But people always want more, right?

mortys wrote:

As always JenesisDS works like a charm but I've got a real bug with Devilcrash. There's some graphics that appears where they should not.

Similar problem as above, it uses a 32x128 background. As it exceeds the DS' BG vertically, it should be much easier to fix though.

Last edited by Lordus on Sun Apr 27, 2008 10:25 pm; edited 2 times in total

Quote:

The SMS/GG emulation is currently not included into jEnesisDS for a reason, which is lack of RAM. So i doubt very much that there will ever be an all in one emulator.
As for the SegaCD emulation, i would say no. At the moment jEnesisDS spends most of its time on the ARM9 for the 68000 emulation and is not always full speed. The SegaCD adds another 68000, which runs even 50% faster then the Genesis' CPU, plus rotation and scaling hardware (and some other things that have to be emulated).
Of course many games might not need the rotation hw, and spend a lot of time idling on the slave CPU, but still it would have to be synchronized and slow everything down.
The worst thing would probably be, that once it'd be there, people would ask for 32X emulation, which is completely out of the question. But people always want more, right?

Ah, I forgot that SegaCD added another 68000. To tell you the truth, I think that the SegaCD did not have many good games anyways. Thanks for explaining that to me. :)

Thanks a lot for the answer Lordus. Hope to see this fix in another build !

..when i save a state in street fighter, for jenesisDS, all the graphics screw up and the hp bars disappear
_________________
rasengan

Quote:

..when i save a state in street fighter, for jenesisDS, all the graphics screw up and the hp bars disappear

The savestates don't really work very well yet, but i plan to work on them (when i feel like it).

Anyway, i rewrote most of the FM core in ASM, fixing some bugs along the way and changed the scheduling of the M68000 and Z80 core completely. Along with some other little improvements here and there, this results in speed ups of up to 30% and much better sound.

I could raise the sample rate for the FM sound from 16KHz, as it was in version 0.7, to 28KHz. A few games can not quite make it at 32KHz, that's why I left it at 28KHz, but I'm working on it. Anyhow the difference is not really noticeable, except for a few sounds.

You can get the newest version (0.7.4) here.

Awesome thank you for an update to an awesome emulator!

this recent release shows a noticeable improvement over the last. many games are now highly enjoyable. sound is no longer slowing down the frame rate on most of the games i tested. nhl95 is finally running smoothly (with only tiny performance hits during crowd noises), and who doesn?t want a bit of nhl95 on the go! you have done a good job so far and i can't want to see the next release.

keep up the good work.

-another world

Yes this new version is great. I love the dpad follow option for games like sonic. I asked this when the last version came out, is it possible to make a work around to get the road rash series working?

another world wrote:

this recent release shows a noticeable improvement over the last. many games are now highly enjoyable. sound is no longer slowing down the frame rate on most of the games i tested. nhl95 is finally running smoothly (with only tiny performance hits during crowd noises), and who doesn?t want a bit of nhl95 on the go! you have done a good job so far and i can't want to see the next release.

keep up the good work.

-another world

Thanks. The sound emulation itself is not really affecting the speed at all, as it's entirely run on the ARM7. The Z80 emulation is, of course. While most games can run at 120fps or above, there are some hard cases that still have occasional slowdowns. I wont stop until they're gone though ;)

medisyn wrote:

I asked this when the last version came out, is it possible to make a work around to get the road rash series working?

Answer is still the same. I don't see a way to do that with hardware rendering as i am doing it now.

There's one workaround: Only render the visible portion of the 128x32 tile map to DS VRAM. But it might glitch at extreme angles in a game that uses Pole Position style raster effects. I seem to remember at least the Game Gear version of Road Rash using a raster road.
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-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.

tepples wrote:

There's one workaround: Only render the visible portion of the 128x32 tile map to DS VRAM. But it might glitch at extreme angles in a game that uses Pole Position style raster effects. I seem to remember at least the Game Gear version of Road Rash using a raster road.

I think, that is a bit problematic. It might work for relatively static backgrounds, like in the Sonic3 save select screen, but unfortunately Road Rash and other games that have 128x32 bgs (like Batman and Robin, for example) scroll around heavily per line (which is even easier on the Genesis, as it has a horizontal scroll table, so games don't even need to use HBlank effects). So what is the visible area then? I would have to keep track of that constantly and update the DS maps (and tiles) on demand. At the very least that'd require a complete new renderer just for 128x32 mode.

I was thinking before of using two adjacent 64x32 maps that i can simply forward the VRAM writes to, like i do now, and choosing the right 64x32 map window out of it each HBlank, by setting the table address appropriately and adjusting the horizontal scroll value. When I thought about i calculated that I'd run out of VRAM, if i keep everything else like it is now, but I'm too lazy to recalculate that at the moment.. Of course, there is still the problem, when the map wraps horizontally, but it would probably be better than it is at the moment.
We'll see.

Hi Lordus
i don't know if it's my version of Thunder Force IV, but I get some graphical glitch on the top of the screen (No HUD and some kind of transparency) with last version. However : Great Work !

Good :)
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wow lordus, fantastic work as always! it's hard to believe that you've got it running so well on the DS. just a quick question, not trying to suggest anything, but how possible is it for Sega CD emulation to work on the DS? the Sega CD's CPU was a couple of steps above the Genesis' so i'm not sure how well that'd go down

you just gave me a way to play toejam & earl on my DS.

...for this i <3 you!!

just out of curiosity..why does the display take up more than the DS screen? it almost seems like i'm playing a widescreen game or something...and i know the genesis never had widescreen games!

i'm sure you explain this somewhere in this thread but i'm kinda lazy today...haha

frosty-theaussie wrote:

how possible is it for Sega CD emulation to work on the DS? the Sega CD's CPU was a couple of steps above the Genesis' so i'm not sure how well that'd go down

Probably the same way as Super Mario RPG and the Kirby games.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.

frosty-theaussie wrote:

wow lordus, fantastic work as always! it's hard to believe that you've got it running so well on the DS. just a quick question, not trying to suggest anything, but how possible is it for Sega CD emulation to work on the DS? the Sega CD's CPU was a couple of steps above the Genesis' so i'm not sure how well that'd go down

The SegaCD adds a lot of extra things to emulate. You have to synchronize 3 CPUs, and the 2nd M68000 runs at 12.5MHz (about 60% faster than the Genesis' M68000, which still runs, too, of course).
Video is basically the same, except for the scaling and rotation hardware, which is completely out of the question. Even on the GP2X, games that make heavy use of it run very slow.

So let's wait and see..

Holland wrote:

just out of curiosity..why does the display take up more than the DS screen? it almost seems like i'm playing a widescreen game or something...and i know the genesis never had widescreen games!

i'm sure you explain this somewhere in this thread but i'm kinda lazy today...haha

Genesis games that seem like that have a resolution of 320x224, while the DS just has 256x192. The screen is scaled vertically, but not horizontally (I'm kinda lazy to explain why that is not possible), except you turn vertical scaling off.

Hi Lordus,
I'd like to know if the display "bug" (in Thunder Force IV for example) is a known bug of the 7.0.4 release or come from my flashcard ?

Lordus wrote:

Holland wrote:

just out of curiosity..why does the display take up more than the DS screen? it almost seems like i'm playing a widescreen game or something...and i know the genesis never had widescreen games!

i'm sure you explain this somewhere in this thread but i'm kinda lazy today...haha

Genesis games that seem like that have a resolution of 320x224, while the DS just has 256x192. The screen is scaled vertically, but not horizontally (I'm kinda lazy to explain why that is not possible), except you turn vertical scaling off.

you're lazy, i'm lazy..it's cool. makes sense though..I know the scaling capabilities of the DS are a bit weak.

again..thanks for an amazing genesis emu!!

mortys wrote:

Hi Lordus,
I'd like to know if the display "bug" (in Thunder Force IV for example) is a known bug of the 7.0.4 release or come from my flashcard ?

I can't confirm it. There seem to be more issues with certain flashcarts now though, so maybe that is the problem.

Hi Lordus
just try Gunstar hero and it crash after a little while on first level. (No ram pack in my ds).

Just try another rom of TH Force Iv and it works with the US One.
Thks for your hard work.

mortys wrote:

Hi Lordus
just try Gunstar hero and it crash after a little while on first level. (No ram pack in my ds).

Just try another rom of TH Force Iv and it works with the US One.
Thks for your hard work.

I've played Gunstar Heroes on it and got through a couple of levels but I'm also using an M3 Lite, which I think has additional RAM?

gbadev.org forum archive

DS homebrew announcements > jEnesisDS 0.7.4 (Update: 2008/07/13)

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