Too late (!_!) I already translated the readme. For anyone interested:
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e[mulator] for PSP 0.80beta4 by e
Everyday I give thanks to the people who test this for me.
Concerning the Wonder Swan, I've once again rewritten it entirely.
I love rewritting things, so please forgive me.
-About the menu-
If there's a hang up in the menu, look for the file emulator.cfg and please delete it.
If you want to return to the menu in the middle of a game, just push the button specified in the key config, or if it's PC Engine, Select+L Trigger.
Since the select button doesn't exist on the real Wonder Swan machine, I've alloctaed it unconditionally.
You can set the menu key to a different button, but you can't change the select key function.
-Something resembling a history-
0.80beta4
Progressing on fixing only the Wonder Swan
I've corrected the graphics refresh so it might have gotten slower.
*About the fixes
(*) Corrected the ordering of Job and Job's names when selecting a Job in FF1
(*) Fixed processing of sprite windows
This was a problem with dialogs and when selecting magic from the menu in FF1
(*) Fixed a problem with heads being cut off at the edge of the screen in RPGs
(*) Fixed the display of Makaidoshi Saga's original mode
(*) Fixed the display of dialog rectangles in Romancing Saga
(*) Fixed a problem with your vehicle and the enemy vehicle not displaying on the course map in Final Lap Special
(*) Fixed the process for allocating the CPU (this might cause problems?)
(*) Deleted unnessecary internal data
It is no longer compatible with past state saves.
(*) Confirmed the launching of Mari&Eri's Atilier (the cause of the problem is unknown)
(!) There's a possibility that reported problems other than those listed above have fixed themselves.
If you test it and it doesn't work please send a report.
*Unconfirmed Items
(*) A reported problem with Saint Seiya
*Known Problems
(*) Xi doesn't work (reason unknown)
0.80beta3
[ WONDERSWAN ]
The reason the sound breaks is because there's not enough PSP CPU power.
(a) Fixed a bug with BG/SP
Items I believe to be fixed (o: oSwan bugs, e: eSwan bugs)
(o) Puzzle Bobble's display has been cleaned up
(o) With You's font display has been cleaned up
(o) Problems where the charaters would appear as another in Pocket Fighter/Guilty Gear1&2 has been fixed
(o) Problem with the BG display after a battle in Pocket Fighter has been fixed
(e) Display of Digimon's life has been fixed?
(e) Foreground BG MAP window is fixed?
(o) Incorrect display of the opening of Naruto has been fixed?
(o) Front Mission's display has been fixed?
It looks like it was a bug related to the CPU
(b) Sped up
(*) Optomized the memory refresh
(*) Added cycle consumption from pipeline stall (refer to the end)
This will probably cause problems in some games.
(c) Improved the speed of video issues
(*) I think I've fixed the FG Window processing.
But, in games like GG, etc... some characters appear to get cut off when they move to the edge of the screen
(d) Unimplemented features
(1) Sound DMA
(2) SRAM save
(3) EEPROM save
[ PC Engine ]
(*) It appears as though MP3 playback caused unpredictable behaviour, so for the time being I've stopped implementing it
The reason why it's not working is a mystery
-About publication in magazines, etc...-
Unauthorized publication in any commercial medium is prohibbited.
If you want to contact me, please do so through the forum.
If I'm in the right mood I'll get in touch with you.
-Sped up V30MZ-
>>The reason why the once unbearably slow Wonder Swan is now, more or less, working<<
As you know Wonder Swan's CPU, the V30MZ, is a CPU which integrates a pipeline operating at 3.072MHz.
I was fully aware of the fact that oSwan, which this is ported from, was already at the brink with the pipeline when I implemented it.
In short, in order to execute commands that operate in 1clock, it's nessecary to analyze 30,700,000 commands every second, which was a pretty demanding operating condition for the PSP.
In the actual CPU a pipeline stall would occur when a branch or jump occured, and a penalty big enough to fill the entire pipeline would be asessed due to the pipeline having to fetch once more time.
I focused my attention on this point and and implemented a penalty for the V30MZ pipeline fetch portion.
The example below is pretty extreme, but it's only to make this easy to understand so don't call me on it.
Please think of this all as a process that has to finish in 1clock.
0x0000 add ax,1
0x0001 add bx,5
0x0002 jump 0x0000
Just perform a simple calculation with the above program, and you'll see that, when the 00 adress command has finished 3 times, the nessecary clock becomes 7clock.
However, in the actual CPU a pipeline stall occurs at the jump order so 2 pipeline stalls should occur, and, penalty included, the amount of clocks nessecary should be 7+8x2(clock).
In this calculation, the reason why there's a penalty from the 8clock pipeline stall is that, if the prebuffer is 16 bytes and a command is 2 bytes then 8 commands are fetched and so pipeline stall=an annulment of 8 commands(clock) takes place and this simple calculation is based on that.
Furthermore, V30MZ=a simple CPU as a basic premise and I've implemented it in a way that the following conditions will deffinately consume 8clock.
(1) A branching command (regardless of whether the branch is saved further down the pipeline)
(2) When a program counter is rewritten utilizing POP, etc...
This is really a very basic implementation, so there's almost certainly some incompatibilities.
So the long and short of it is that, even though depends on the conditions, the result is that the unit of time required to analyze a given number of commands has been reduced, resulting in fast operation.
At first I was planning on writing this out in a dynamic compiler style in assembler, but there's no such thing as a condition register in MIPS and I'm keeping it a secret that it frustrated me.
-Video refresh processing- 03/28/2006
The Wonder Swan's video uses the priority list below to control the display of 4 screens.
(1) Sprite -foreground (with sprite window)
(2) Tile -foreground (with map window)
(3) Sprite -background (with sprite window)
(4) Tile -background (no window)
and this is how I had it displaying but, with this when selecting jobs in FF1, the priority when displaying the job title and the character when they overlap is odd, so I fixed it.
-CPU processor allocation- 03/28/2006
Usually with allocation, it's unthinkable for an operation to cancel something that the CPU should be processing as it's highest priority.
oSwan has an implementation that makes it so that it doesn't process if it occurs when it can't allocate the processor so I changed it.
The end.</div>
There are deffinately some portions in there that are dodgy at best, but it still probably beats a Google translation. Should be more readable at the very least.
As far as I know, there aren't any good PC engine CD emulators available for the PSP (but if I'm wrong, by all means, someone correct me), and it seems like there aren't any motivated coders working on the project, so it may be quite some time (if ever) before we see proper emulation. Especially as the system was never big outside of Japan, and most of the great homebrew coding seems to be coming from the west these days.
Yeah, Chi no Rondo uses mostly CD tracks, but does use computer generated music for some portions (such as the rooms right before bosses), so those should deffinately have no problem playing.
I highly doubt we'll ever see a (proper) Castlevania game on the PSP. They've tried to make it 3D a number of times, but they haven't managed to keep the same magic as they've had in their 2D games. And, in case you don't know, there was actually a famous dispute between Konami and Sony over the 2D Castlevania for the PS where Sony was trying to block Konami from developing/releasing it over some sort of hissy fit that the PS is a 3D, not 2D, platform. I can understand Sony wanting to encourage developers to develop in 3D since it promotes the specialties of their hardware and helps to keep the industry moving forward, but obviously that version of Castlevania is widely hailed as the crowning jewel of the series and Sony's policy almost cost them dearly in that instance, and has surely cost them any number of excellent games that we'll never know about. For the time being though, thankfully all Nintendo cares about is good games and the Castlevania series has found a comfortable niche on the game boy platforms.