DCEmu News (Iván Toledo Emulator)

[ron]

Dear friends.

This afternoon , collaborating with Ivan, we had compiled a new version of his DCEmu, and our surprise was incredible, we booted LinuxDC and we could run lot of things in speeds between 4 and 8 FPS. A great advance for a great work. Visit Spanish Party 2K4 MadriDC site to see the screenshots and comments.

[LyonHrt]

Nice work, will your additions be available in the next source changes?

[ron]

For sure, during the weekend Ivan will implement more speed and more compatibility, and sure that all documents and sources will be updated via CVS, as always.
Remeber that this EMU is the only one, developed entirely as OpenSource with Free Tools.
The Ivan's next target is to get more speed optimizing code and execute the Bios. With this latest improvements the emu will be soon ready to launch all kind of DC Software.
One more thing, you will need to dump your DC BIOS in order to execute the emu.

[Ian_micheal]

Dumping the bios is pretty hard for most people. Ron could you take a look at neogeo cd for me see any were we can get some more speed.

[wraggster]

good luck with the emu ;)

[GPF]

here how I dumped my bios with dc-tool

$ ./dc-tool.exe -b 115200 -d rom.bin -a 0xa0000000 -s 0x200000
Console enabled
Changing speed to 115200 bps... done
Download 2097152 bytes at <0xa0000000> to <rom.bin>
recv_data: CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC
CUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC UUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC CCCCCCCCUCCCCCCCCCCCCUUUUUUUUU
UUUCCCCCCCCCUUUUUUUUUUUUCCC
Received 2097152 bytes
effective: 16595.199848 bytes / sec
Changing speed to 57600 bps... done

[wraggster]

its a shame an homebrew bios wasnt available.

[itoledo]

the BIOS is (currently) only used for the font routines. with a minor change to the source it can boot any (currently working) homebrew that doesn't use kanji, without the bios file.

[wraggster]

Thanks for the News Ivan ;)

[ron]

Well, lets continue speaking about news. At MadriDC you can get the latest info available about the Iván Alonso DCEmu.

Let's go: Firstly, the emu now can load ISOS, the procedure is listed in MadriDC site, last Ivan Toledo News. DCEmu doesn't load commercial games, just homebrew.

More than nothing, the textures cache has increased the performance in some scenes, whrere we're not doing twiddle every time to the texture.

Some Opcodes have been cleared, because were fulled with debug code to obtain more speed and limited support for transparencies.

Right now we're trying to implement fog (niebla) and other things. The 'tunnel' demo right now is able to do all that's supported by the DreamCast, in that transparent rectangle shown in the page, should appear a text with the actual parameters of the image.

Also a problem with textures has been fixed, now for sure a lot of things will run correctly.

To load an ISO: You have to create a "dc.iso" and put into dcemu directory, that file must have a LBA 11700

To create this same use : mkisofs -C 0,11700 -l -o dc.iso "name of directory"

In that directory you must put the usual documents contained in the CD

To the 1st_read that usually comes in the CD you have to make descramble and copy to the directory of the dcemu. With this the DCEmu will be able to found everything

[ron]

Dumping the bios is pretty hard for most people. Ron could you take a look at neogeo cd for me see any were we can get some more speed.
All Spanish Dreamers will test your petition, feel free to post there, All of you are welcome. Also in Talfi. For us is very nice have your presence in our forums. Thx

[ron]

its a shame an homebrew bios wasnt available.

Dear Wraggster, Dan Potter designed a BIOS for the DC a long time ago, I know that was very primitive and I losted its clue, correct me if I'm wrong !! ;-)