PSP2600: Atari 2600 emulator for PSP v1.0.1

Hi ZX, first off awesome work, it's really been a long time coming. I was a little disappointed to see that the emulator is beset by the same problem the other PSP port of Stella had, which is over-pronounced flickering on many games. The two games I checked on, Asteroids and Space Invaders, both suffer from this. In Asteroids the lower half of the screen is too dark and flickers quite badly, and in Space Invaders the bullets of the invaders are almost too dark to see. I would hope that this is something not too hard to fix, because it would be a shame if this problem makes some games less fun to play because of it.

Thanks again for your great effort!

I'm not sure if it is what you are talking about but some of the games can't be fixed from this as the 2600 low amount of memory made it to where some of the sprites have to alternate frames on screen. setting the fps upto 60fps helps this out a bit 40 just makes it a bit more pronounced.

Thanks for the input, Turn2 - setting the FPS to 60 definitely makes a lot of the flickering go away, and I understand that there'll always be a certain amount of flickering due to the limitations of the original hardware. The bullets shot by the invaders in Space Invaders still seem *very* dark to me though. I compared the PC version of StellaX and PCAEwin just to confirm this, and even with the PSP screen at maximum brightness the bullets are still very dark grey rather than the off-white that they should be. Can anyone else confirm or deny this phenomenon - I'm starting to wonder if it's just me seeing this.

Thanks guys!

I'm using double buffering, may be using simple buffering there will be less flickering ... I've to try this.

Anyway this is a stella port, so all bugs found in previous stella port will still appear on this version, until they are fixed.

maby there could be like a slight motion blur filter so the flickering won't be as noticeable

is this supposed to have paddle support?

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Originally Posted by Turn2

I'm not sure if it is what you are talking about but some of the games can't be fixed from this as the 2600 low amount of memory made it to where some of the sprites have to alternate frames on screen. setting the fps upto 60fps helps this out a bit 40 just makes it a bit more pronounced.

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Yeah, well sort of. It was not so much different frames, as displaying them at a different(lower) frequency, so they could display more sprites on screen at the same time.

Some of the PC emulators make up for this with double and triple buffering. But they also coded the emulators to display the 30mhz and 15mhz sprites to display at 60mhz, which isn't really accurate, but much better on the eyes. However, I believe this was done using direct-x in the windows API, and wouldn't be present in the basic Stella core code.

The previos port of Stella for the psp is plagued with the same flicker problems. This port is considerably better with it, due to the double buffering at 60 fps.

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Originally Posted by carpy

The previos port of Stella for the psp is plagued with the same flicker problems. This port is considerably better with it, due to the double buffering at 60 fps.

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Using very simple hack in the source code, i can play space invaders without any flick problem :) using only 40 fps ...

Great work again Zx-81. Thanks for all the time you put into making these emus better. This one gos way back but had some really fun games. limited grafics doesn´t mean limited fun.
Cheers

I waited long time for a finally crisp (not blurry) ATARI 2600 emulation on the PSP! Comparing ACTIVISION HITS REMIXED, your work does a much better job! Finally I can play Demon Attack & Spider Fighter on my PSP! Thanks a lot and keep up the good work!
:thumbup: balduin