Hardest port?

[bronxbomber92]

Hey, I was just wondering what your hardest emulator was to port and why? Acourse besides gba :p

[Video_freak]

There are probably a bunch of console emulators that cannot be ported, so we can't classify them as "hardest".

[bronxbomber92]

No, I mean the hardest personal port for zx-81 himself ;)

[zx-81]

No, I mean the hardest personal port for zx-81 himself ;)

The hardest was caprice 32, mainly because :

1 - i've ported it using the GTA eloader (so no debug env)
2 - it was my first real emulator port on PSP, and i didn't know
very well the PSP / SDK etc ...
3 - there were many no portable C code, mainly endianess
problems, memory alignement isue etc...
4 - there were many bugs in the original source code, that i
had to fix on the linux version and then fix them in the PSP
version.
5 - I had no User interface source template
(all other emu i've ported use the caprice 32 user
interface i've developped for pspcap32)
6 - same for the virtual keyboard stuff etc ...

Pspcap32 was the hardest, but it's also the one i like better
(i spent so many hours on it when i was a child, to develop maths software and games ).

I hope it answers your question :) :)

[bronxbomber92]

Yeah, totally does! Thanks... *Goes downloads it and looks at source code* :p

I only wondered as I you have been pumping out releases like crazy. Would you say its harder then the gba?

[zx-81]

Yeah, totally does! Thanks... *Goes downloads it and looks at source code* :p

I only wondered as I you have been pumping out releases like crazy. Would you say its harder then the gba?

pspvba was a nightmare ;)

[bronxbomber92]

LOL... Probably would of been easier to start from stratch :p

[zx-81]

LOL... Probably would of been easier to start from stratch :p

lol may be yes :p :D :D

[bronxbomber92]

Doesn't matter now though :p

Besides, I already played pokemon ALL the way through using one of your earlier slower version
lol

[Shadowblind]

Hey Zx-

Have you ever been asked ny Sony to make games for them?

[zx-81]

Hey Zx-

Have you ever been asked ny Sony to make games for them?

lol ... Emulator porting is very simple compared to develop a commercial game.

In the first case it take fews days, on the second case it takes several years with a big coder staff ;)

[bronxbomber92]

Yeah, take a look at one of zx-81's emulators, theres probably anywhere between 5-15 thousand lines of code.
Then maybe look at doom 3 for example, there's a lot more there :p... And there's a lot more complicated commercial games out now a days.

[yaustar]

Commercial games can hit the million mark easily. 5000 LOC is nothing in comparision.

[Shadowblind]

I looked at a gamemaker game, and it even had about 5000 lines.

How many LOC(guessing that means lines of code) did the original Mario Bros have?

[ACID]

Still ZX will be working for one of them. Thats if they whant a great coder

[yaustar]

Cant comment on Mario Brothers but I have seen the decompiled Metroid ASM code (AFAIK, from the SNES and before, console games were done in ASM) is 9291 lines including comments and whitespace (which TBH is a hell of a lot in ASM).

http://mdb.classicgaming.gamespy.com/m1/m1source.txt

[bronxbomber92]

Hmm, heres another quesion.

What was your easiest emulator?

[zx-81]

The easiest was may be pspcolem, the coleco vision emulator ...

[quzar]

Cant comment on Mario Brothers but I have seen the decompiled Metroid ASM code (AFAIK, from the SNES and before, console games were done in ASM) is 9291 lines including comments and whitespace (which TBH is a hell of a lot in ASM).

http://mdb.classicgaming.gamespy.com/m1/m1source.txt

That's a common misconception. There were multiple cross platform development kits for the SNES and Genesis. We also know that many development houses had C compilers when coding for the NES, and though I'm sure much of the code ended up being just logic code that surrounded the asm hardware interaction code, there is some sort of misconception that there is no such thing as C for older systems, which is just untrue. Hell, you could probably write in C for the atari 2600, of course, you wouldn't be able to do much. The point is that there is no need for game logic code to be written in assembly, although hardware interaction code should be (and is basically in any system anyways, at the lowest level).

Anyways, I think the largest project I've worked on had hundreds of thousands of lines (MAME =P) and the smallest, which is one I wrote from scratch, that is actual emulation is under a thousand lines when you don't include linked libraries, or the CPU emulation (which uses compiled gotos and macros, so there isn't a good way to qualify the number of lines of code, maybe pass it to a preprocessor?).

[yaustar]

Interesting... Its just that I haven't seen or heard of any cross compilers for the SNES and below homebrew or otherwise hence the misconception.

[quzar]

Both SNES and Genesis had a devkit made by a company called Psy-Q (they later made dev kits for the saturn and playstation). In addition to that, the company that designed and manufactured the SNES' cpu had released a C compiler for the system, so the tool would have been availible.

There is also TuME ( http://members.aol.com/opentume/ ) which was used by virgin in the early 90's (remember the similarity between aladin and the lion king for both snes and genesis?).

[yaustar]

I cant seem to find much on Psy-q (in fact the first result is SN Systems). Do ypu know of any open cross compilers for either console that I could look at?

[quzar]

Oh, I'm fairly sure they both have gcc on them now. But that's about it for open. Most all the tools used for the cration of these games are not open source at all.

[bronxbomber92]

Thats interesting... Hmmm... Time todo some researching!

[Video_freak]

Any ideas bronxbomber92? :)

[yaustar]

Most all the tools used for the cration of these games are not open source at all.
Well, that's given isn't it ;). I have only experienced using SN's Gamecube Toolchain (which was a pain ¬¬).

[bronxbomber92]

Could this be it? Not really sure though...
http://www.snsys.com/

[yaustar]

That's SN Systems, a company that specialises in selling/licensing cross platform toolchains for a variety of platforms. I am not sure what you mean by 'it' though.

[bronxbomber92]

By "it" I mean Psy-q...

[yaustar]

After some frantic google searches, yeah pretty much.
http://cache.cow.net/psygnosis/history/SATURNPSYQ/

It sounds like PSY-Q was the name of the toolchain/compiler by SN Systems.

[bronxbomber92]

Yeah, thats the site I found...

[quzar]

The bet place to do searching for that kind of information is the assembler forums. They are just full to the brim with little tidbits about stuff like this.