GenesisPlusDC With VMU Support ! (26/07/06)

[Darksaviour69]

Another new release today, but this time by BlackAura

OK, here's another build to play with...

gpdc-20060726.zip

Drop that .bin over the top of Warmtoe's last release, and it should be good to go.

Only five changes worth mentioning, most of which aren't that important...

1 - Palettes are now double-buffered. That gets rid of all of the palette tearing effects, or weird blocks of colour on screen when a game was supposed to change the palette mid frame.

2 - Sound channels are now properly synchronised. They were very slightly out of sync before - the right channel was a few samples behind the left. Should result in a slight increase in sound quality. This was needed because the mono output sounded terrible without it (see below)

3 - For those of us who still have to put up with a mono TV, there is now a mono sound output mode. Don't get too excited - it doesn't speed things up, because it's still stereo. It just gets the sound hardware to do a mono mix, rather than a stereo one. It's enabled from the Dreamcast's BIOS (set the sound mode to mono). If you have a mono TV and some sounds were missing (like every other ring "ding" noise in Sonic), check this setting and try with this version.

4 - The sound looping bit from the menu has gone (I never noticed it because it was only the right channel, and I have a mono TV), as has the momentary blip of audio when you start the second (or later) game.

5 - SRAM support has been hooked up. Only works with C68k, and has only been tested with Sonic 3. Seems to work pretty well though - the SRAM save for Sonic 3 takes up a single block, and it still has about 200 bytes free in that block out of 512 total. Loads from and saves to the first VMU only. Error handling is crap, so it might occasionally destroy a save file. The saves from all your other games should be safe though.

No icons though. If anyone wants to draw some (32x32 pixels, 16 colours), feel free. A different one for each game that supports SRAM would be pretty cool. Eyecatch images (the little pictures that appear on the BIOS VMU manager when you have a file selected) might be cool too - they're 72x56 pixels, and can either be 16 color (adds 4 blocks), 256 color (9 blocks), or true colour (16 blocks). Considering their size, I'd probably make them optional.

Just to make clear both BlackAura and Warmtoe are working on this

dcemulation.org forums

Comments and download via comments

[Christuserloeser]

SRAM support ? Damn, that's sooo sexy !

[Christuserloeser]

SRAM support ? Damn, that's sooo sexy !

[JohnnyB]

I've made a default save icon that you're free to use.



I don't know if you need to use a certain background colour for transparency or what so it's just white right now.

[DaRKSLa1N]

Does it have Directory Browsing? :S, i have make a lot of bad cd´s because my roms.txt isn´t accurate :S

Any idea to fix this?

[AkumuHau]

i extracted the sbi that was released a few days ago and just erased the 1st read file and replaced and renamed it with this, but it never makes it past the sega boot up screen

[Dull Blade]

it s nice to see a boom is genesis emu. if anything i thought the genesis emu would of been the most polished instead of nester dc. seeing how both are systems of sega (dc and genesis). I support you DC - genesis coder, for now i can enjoy Toejam and earl on the Television

[Christuserloeser]

Originally Posted by AkumuHau

i extracted the sbi that was released a few days ago and just erased the 1st read file and replaced and renamed it with this, but it never makes it past the sega boot up screen

I compiled SBIs + plain files versions + a little tool set:

[YZB]

Thanked ~
to test,Probably the speed is very slow on the simulator?

[Christuserloeser]

Oh, thanks for these great screenshots!

Probably the speed is very slow on the simulator?

Very slow in Chankast.... GenesisPlus is using the Dreamcast PowerVR2 video card at 100%. This could be the reason why it is so slow in Chankast.

On a real Dreamcast it is VERY fast

[LazerTag]

I tried using the romlst creator and just found I did not like the output I was getting. And it seemed a really big chore cleaning up after it manually. So without to much manual intervention on the files I came up with this. I hope someone finds it helpful or at least comes up with an even better idea on doing this. It seems a little long, but it is really was easy to move through all of it.

Required Tools

DOS command line (you should have this)
Notepad (you should have this too, :lol: )
GoodGen (if you want your ROMs named correctly)
Excel (some other worksheet application will probably work too)

1) Open a CMD window in your ROM folder

2) goodgen inplace (skip this step if you are not going to use GoodGen)

3) dir /on/b *.zip > roms2.txt

4) goodgen in place nosep (skip this step if you are not going to use GoodGen)

NOTE STEP 4 - This may not be needed, but I didn't want to waste a CD only to find that spaces in file names caused issues in GPDC. If spaces are a non issue, you can skip step 4 and just "copy roms2.txt roms1.txt" and then skip STEP 5 also.

5) dir /on/b *.zip > roms1.txt

So now you have a list of all your ROMS in two different files.

6) Modify roms2.txt to your liking.

You can edit this file however you like really. It is used for the ROM list displayed in GenesisPlusDC. For instance in mine I didn't want to see all the ".zip" extensions and all the various region codes or ROM codes that GoodGen applies. So I did quite a few "replace" commands from Notepad to rid myself of them. Do make sure if you actually remove any of the games that you also remove them from roms1.txt. It's important to keep the two roms TXT files in sequence line by line. Other wise you may end up with a list where you think you are picking one game, but it's loading another. Trust me if you mess that step up you will notice. :P

7) Open Excel, highlight the A column and go to Data > Import External Data > Import Data. Pick your ROMS1.TXT and click Finish

8) On Import Data window Click "Existing worksheet" and make sure the selection is "=$A$1" without quotes.

9) Now do the same as step 7 and 8 for the ROMS2.TXT file, but highlight the B column and use select "=$B$1" without quotes

Now column A should contain ROMS1.TXT (unedited list of your ROM ZIP files) and column B should contain ROMS2.TXT (your display list for GPDC)

10) Click in column C1 and type in the calculation '=A1&" "&B1' without the single quotes the double quotes are used.

this should now show you A1+B1 in C1 with a single space between each value.

11) Right click C1 and select copy, the click C2 to select it scroll down to your last used row (let's say it's C60 for the sake of this guide) and shift+click C60. So now C2 through C60 should be selected, right click and select Paste. this will copy your calculation into all the subsequent fields so the concatenate like it did for A1+B1

12) Select the C column now and right click Copy. Then paste into your ROMS.TXT file GPDC


Again I hope someone finds this helpful. I sure thought it was fairly easy, thought it seems like many steps, but now my list looks just like I had wanted and it didn't take hours of typing or editing to get it that way.


GenesisPlusDC is quite awesome too. I'm a first time user of it. I Have not used it much yet, but I have a few games that I have found do not work. Is there a system for reporting these?