Makaron WIP News - Dreamcast Emulator for Windows

News via http://dknute.livejournal.com/35781.html

I'm pretty busy lately so I don't have time to answer any questions in the comments, sorry. I'll just address most pressing matters in this small update.

Yeah, I'm aware that MAME has got some more NAOMI games and that Makaron doesn't recognize the ZIPs. Well duh, I need to know the filenames first and I use MAME sources for that. Unfortunately you can't just unpack those ZIPs and create continuous images - or rather, you can, but since public versions of Makaron don't contain the necessary decryption keys the protection will not be emulated. Hence no joy. Support for these titles will be added soon though.

Apparently there's yet another GUI for Makaron :) Saves me some trouble for now I guess. One of the ideas I have is to just drop the internal one completly as creating a nice GUI in pure Win32 is such a PITA. I could make an external one in Delphi or something. Hotkey-based disc swapping for Dreamcast seems to work for most people.

Work on DX11 stuff is progressing but truth be told it's a bit like switching from DirectDraw to Direct3D - nothing works anymore and needs to be rewritten plus tons of new stuff to take in. DX9 was pretty matured so documentation wasn't a problem - can't say that about DX11 I'm afraid, there are some demos/sample code but that's not enough in many cases. Fortunately Geometry Shader is simple so I can focus on Compute/Pixel Shader and OIT. Still no idea how costly it'd be to switch shader programs, I keep doing that since I have no choice but maybe a longer PS code with dynamic conditionals would actually be faster? We are talking 2009+ hardware after all.

I've also been messing around with x64 code emitter though it's just for fun now. I still need a 64-bit capable compiler first :) While it's possible to integrate that into MSVC Express version it's not exactly straightforward - and I'm not paying for STD/PRO out of my pocket just for that.

Also having some fun with soldering iron, but nothing you people would care about I suppose.