CaSTaway/PSP 003 released!

Hi Skeezix,

I hope you will be able to find the time to continue this emu :).
Having a powerfull ST emu would be really really cool.

After your comment I went on the web and try to look on various source code of ST Emu.

It is true that really a few have their source code published...
What a waste. Looking at the castaway original pages,
it is said that emulator is a 68000 with just a basic support of the graphics chip.
No sound emulator and so on...

What is your job based on ? Have you written other part on this emu ?
Can you describe what you changed to the core of the emu ? :D
I know that Arnaud Carree (one of the SainT author) spent a lot of time to have very good sound emulation (his YM player from WinAmp is incredible I think)
He released recently his code for it. (source in LGPL license)
http://leonard.oxg.free.fr/

There is also this page I found looking for YM 2149
:http://sc68.atari.org/apidoc/group__...ym__devel.html

When I look at the different site and saw that the ST was roughly emulated with a 100/133 Mhz PC, I believe that a 222Mhz + Graphics accelerator + Media Engine of the PSP could bring the atari to really powerfull limits :)
(= more accurate emulation and keep a 1x speed)

Still, probably very accurate cycle emulation would be difficult to do at roughly 8 Mhz. (it is done in Snes9x but the cpu are running at 1/2 or 1/3 of the ST Mhz speed).

Actually on the Snes, there is many games trying to wait for "result" of the Audio chip... Looking at the YM doc, it seems that the YM has no possibility to do a WRITE BACK to the ram or something...
So you could put the whole YM emulation as a process running on the ME as a sound generator and have your emu sending data to the register like a real YM chipset. :)

Anyway, may be the technical detail here are boring a lot of people...
Feel free to contact me to discuss more detail ! I am very interested in your emu on the technical side, and I hope we can discuss technical detail together.

Laxer3A

You're certanly not making me bored. I don't know very much about the technical aspects of emulators but I find it very intresting.

Are you thinking of helping out on this EMU a little bit Laxer?

I hope so because Snes TYL is incredible.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by laxer3a

Hi Skeezix,

I hope you will be able to find the time to continue this emu :).
Having a powerfull ST emu would be really really cool.

After your comment I went on the web and try to look on various source code of ST Emu.

It is true that really a few have their source code published...
What a waste. Looking at the castaway original pages,
it is said that emulator is a 68000 with just a basic support of the graphics chip.
No sound emulator and so on...

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Yeah, open source-wise theres mostly CaSTaway, STonX, Hatari, with Hatari the only one slightly in development; CaSTaway was only in development for a short while years ago, and STonX stopped also years ago. CaSTaway is good because its fast, though lacking a lot of features (the 80/20 rule... the last 20% is 80% more work :) STonX is pretty good, but east RAM like mad.. though it does have some very cool features in it, such as mapping GEM GUI calls to native (X11) GUI calls for speed.. very interesting stuff. (Also has HDD support mapping to native filesystem.)

STeem, SainT etc are all very good, but closed source; they seem like all good fellas and once in awhile I chat with various folks but they're all hesitant to open up (not sure why.. their apps need to survive, as the best of breed.)

I wrote my own very basic ST emu as well, but its not very complete ("TOSemu"); it does only BIOS calls and such, but redirects to various systems like telnet. ie: Hence, my telnet ST BBS :) No video displays or the like, just basic stuff.. but good enough for running a BBS in. I'm working on bundling it up, a 'bbs in a box' so that folks can run an old ST BBS just by tar/recompile, but not a lot of interest in the project from anyone :P

Quote:

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What is your job based on ? Have you written other part on this emu ?
Can you describe what you changed to the core of the emu ? :D

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My contribution for this project has mostly been the many ports, and pulling the various CaSTaways together. The Pocket PC guys did some really great work, so I bug them once in awhile to get updates.. the lad got very busy recently when he had a new baby introduced, so its proably a dead project as well.. but he really helped the cycle counting get more accurate, and the FDC timings and such (floppy disk controller). I've not had enormous time to wrestle with the emu core (since I run my own business, I'm already working 70+ hours a week :), but I've fixed up the display code, the YM code, the timing code, IKBD somewhat, added the ST disk database system, etc etc.

Quote:

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I know that Arnaud Carree (one of the SainT author) spent a lot of time to have very good sound emulation (his YM player from WinAmp is incredible I think)
He released recently his code for it. (source in LGPL license)
http://leonard.oxg.free.fr/

There is also this page I found looking for YM 2149
:http://sc68.atari.org/apidoc/group__...ym__devel.html

When I look at the different site and saw that the ST was roughly emulated with a 100/133 Mhz PC, I believe that a 222Mhz + Graphics accelerator + Media Engine of the PSP could bring the atari to really powerfull limits :)
(= more accurate emulation and keep a 1x speed)

Still, probably very accurate cycle emulation would be difficult to do at roughly 8 Mhz. (it is done in Snes9x but the cpu are running at 1/2 or 1/3 of the ST Mhz speed).

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A very good ST emu needs some horsepower, but not an enormous amount (much less than an Amiga emulator.) I only wish I cudl get at some of those other projects to port 'em over :)

The SNES is mostly speed hit from the graphcis rendering, no?

Quote:

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Actually on the Snes, there is many games trying to wait for "result" of the Audio chip... Looking at the YM doc, it seems that the YM has no possibility to do a WRITE BACK to the ram or something...
So you could put the whole YM emulation as a process running on the ME as a sound generator and have your emu sending data to the register like a real YM chipset. :)

Anyway, may be the technical detail here are boring a lot of people...
Feel free to contact me to discuss more detail ! I am very interested in your emu on the technical side, and I hope we can discuss technical detail together.

Laxer3A

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Sure, anytime. Life is busy, but never too busy for a good chat!

jeff

Hi,

Helping... hum I dont know :)
First I would like to see how far Skeezix want to go.

The computer I spent most of my time learning about computers was an ST
and I really felt in love with that machine.

Many people were saying that Amiga was better bla bla bla...
Yes it was definitely technically better (=hardware wise) BUT look at the demo, technically at the beginning of the scene, the demo on ST were technically superior to the Amiga one. Coder on amiga just relyed on the Copper and hardware sprite to do everything and didnt stretch their technical skills for quite a while.

When the ST died, the Amiga released pretty good demo reaching the level of tuning that the guys did on ST with their own hardware. But it was too late for me to watch.

I dont know if I am going to help on this emu... Actually I have another project after TYL (hardware this time) and I work 50/60 hours a week.
And yes I need a social life too :)

LOL Ah the old Amiga/ST war. Bring's back fond memories. Well at that time In was a little too young to care about coding or demo's but I had both an Atari ST and an Amiga and there was never any question that ames on the Amiga just looked and sounded nicer. The ST was a great machine and had great versions of most of the best games, and in some cases the games were virtually identical. But even then the Amiga had the slight edge. But right now the Atari St emulator is far superior and faster than the Amiga one, so I can play all those classic games almost as good as the Amiga versions at an awesome speed.

It still bugs me that the goal in Kick Off hass no net and the field is so bland, but hey the games plays the same and just as good. I just need to find a blank disk so I can save my Player Manager game.

Does saving to a blank disk work yet? Because I think in order to start a game you need to save to a disk. I could always use the PC version of caSTaway to set up my game I suppose.

I would love it if you helped out JUST a little on caSTaway, if that is if skeezix would like your help. 'm sure your busy, as am I. But if you took a look at the code maybe you woul have at least a few idea's on how to improve it?

Right now I think it mainly needs options added to the GUI, a increase in compatibility would be nice too (I'm looking at you Sensible Soccer) but not as important since it seems close to 90% of game work great. Maybe higher, I have only found a few games that don't work out of the close to 150 games I have tried. I havn't kept count but it hasn't seemed like many of them didn't work.

Quick question for skeezix...

Are the save states compatible with the PC version of caSTaway and vice versa?

The GUI and such is all a snap, I juts need a bit of time; compatability is 'the work', since its not hard to do, but its hard to know what to do ;) ie: Takes a lot of time to work through whats going on at the hardware level and emulate it. (Remember, the whole project for PSP is only a week old so far, though it does leverage quite a bit from my other versions :)

(I'd say half the Amiga games were ports from the ST; the ST for awhile was more popular as a game platform I think, so thats why so many Amiga games are just direct ports; they often even ran a touch slower, since the ST was a touch faster. Sometimes they used the superior audio system, and sometimes they did whole new ports and those were better on the Amiga.. but anyway :)

The current version has broken writing in the FDC; if you try to write to a floppy it'll get confused in the timing and just error out in the ST after a bit (as if the drive went bad.) I'm either gong to fix that, or roll back a version of the FDC code where read/write still work, and then you can format disks and all that sort. (ie: Format a disk, save the disk out to a .ST file, then load it up as oyu need it, etc.)

Real life is fighting me back, but I'll get another version out early next week .. I likely won't be near a comp for a couple of days, to end my vacation on the road :) ie: Getting faster menu scrolling and such is only a few mins work, but I need to get those few mins ;)

jeff

Awesome, eagerly looking forward to that update.

Some good news (for me anyway) I used the blank disk included in the GP version of caSTaway and put it in the Virtual drive when Player Manager asked for it. It came up with a bunch of ascii text on screen as if it was going corrupt and then BING the game came on! WOOT! So I just saved the state and I'm away playing Player Manager! which is probably the second best football game ever made IMHO (after Sensible World of Soccer which he ST sadly didn't have).

Can't say i ever remember any games runnign faster on the ST, in my experience (which is over 10 years ago I admit) either the games were identical on both systems (in some cases) or the Amiga one was slightly better (in most cases) or the Amiga version was vaslty better (a few but very notible cases).

I remember the ST was much better for creating and playing with music but that the Amiga always had much better sounds and music in games. Which i always found wierd.

I loved both though and do remember that time at the beginning when the ST got all the best games first and then the Amiga catching up becoming the dominant home computer in europe. I always stayed out of the Amiga Vs St debates for the most part because I loved them both, but it was always obvious to me that the Amiga had superior hardware power.

Good days and great games. Those who grew up with only the games consoles games of Nintendo and Master System, or even the Super Nintendo and Magedrive didn't know what they were missing, far superior games on the ST and Amiga 500. Remeber Kick Off on the Master System? Man it was awefull. And Sensible Soccer on both SNES and GENESIS was only any good if you never played the ST or Amiga versions. Why use four buttons when one does the job better?

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Originally Posted by skeezix

(I'd say half the Amiga games were ports from the ST; the ST for awhile was more popular as a game platform I think, so thats why so many Amiga games are just direct ports; they often even ran a touch slower, since the ST was a touch faster. Sometimes they used the superior audio system, and sometimes they did whole new ports and those were better on the Amiga.. but anyway :)

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As you say many Amiga games were ST ports but just in the first years. Around 1990 Amgia most games were developed directly on the Amiga. In the beginning developers didn't make use of the Amiga's special chips and therefor Atari ST games were faster because of the slightly faster cpu. But when developers knew how to use the hardware, the Amiga games became faster. Just look at Lotus Turbo Challange II. The Amiga version is running much smoother than the ST version.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mr.Modem

As you say many Amiga games were ST ports but just in the first years. Around 1990 Amgia most games were developed directly on the Amiga. In the beginning developers didn't make use of the Amiga's special chips and therefor Atari ST games were faster because of the slightly faster cpu. But when developers knew how to use the hardware, the Amiga games became faster. Just look at Lotus Turbo Challange II. The Amiga version is running much smoother than the ST version.

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LOL is this debate still alive after all these years? :D