CaSTaway/PSP release 004!

[skeezix]

This is a sexy build if I do say so myself..

CHG: When in joystick-on-analog mode, sensitivity is reduced a bit.. ie: I
found when pulling left I'd often get up-and-left or down-and-left as my
thumb isn't accurate enough; so I've altered it so to indicate a direction
you need to be further to the edge of the analog zone, so it more often
would detect straight-left when I wanted it.

CHG: New font for user interface; built a font importer package so I could
suck in truetype fonts easily, and am using a variant of Arial 14px for now..
should be much more readable and smooth (a little bigger and rounder.) I'm
pleased with my 'auto kern' system.. seems to work well for nice dynamic
spacing.. I just need to add auto-anti-aliasing sometime
- For each dialog, title font is bold and with drop-shadow

NEW: In menus, up/down works as normal; left/right will quick-scroll up
and down, letting you move faster.

FIX: Repeat timer prevents 'cursor mode' from repeating 'too quickly' ..
so using cursor mode for playing Dungeon Master, Captive etc should work
pretty well now

FIX: In game-list (output from database lookup) it shouldn't sometimes have
garbage in game names

NEW: New PSP launcher artwork - backsplash and icon by parobolee - thanks mate!
o Looking good I think!

CHG: Increase game list height, to show more games if lots in database

NEW: ST Games database right in the disk picker
o Database look up is done each time disk picker comes up; sort of lame..
should at least be cached within the emu runtime, and ideally between emu
runs.. but maybe next version
o Draws first 25 characters from game-list descroiptions, starting about
1/3rds of the way over in the picker display; should fit pretty well. To
get the rest of the listing, pick the disk and hit "look up in database" to
get the full listing line by line

NEW: When analog is operating the ST mouse, there are now two speeds build in..
ie: far-left is 'left 2px per frame' while half-left is 'left 1px per frame'.
Let me know if more degrees of speed are needed..

NEW: Frameskip is supported (though mostly not needed!) -- in the runtime
[start] menu, frameskip options are available. Some math heavy operations
will slow things down a touch, but generally the emu is fast enough.

NEW: Throttling is supported; in the main runtime [start] menu you can now
enable or disable throttle -- enablingmeans the system is slowed down to
approximately a real ST (north american, anyway); if throttle is off, try
running as fast as possible. The default is throttle is _on_

Get it here:

http://www.codejedi.com/castaway

jeff

[parabolee]

Great work Jeff, I can't wait to go home and play with this

Full feedback to come later tonight. I think this is shaping up to be one of the best EMU's on PSP. I think it's in the top three already and is my personal favourite.

[Mr.Modem]

Nice update. Since I am home I can test it immediately!!!

[skeezix]

Hope she all works out.. I was cranking away far too much this morning, but she seems quite stable on my PSP so I figured it needed unleashing :P Still lots to be done, but I think 004 has everything most people would ever want. Still need to add some 'config file' magic to let keybinding happen per-game and the like, and some more finesee.. and fold in Hatari and some more compatability fixes I've got on the mind..

Anyway want to whip up artwork for the save-state keyboard screen? Its all just a black background right now.. functional, but ugly

jeff

[Mr.Modem]

Works good! In the next release I would like some graphics options like an ability to turn scaling off. And it would be nice to have an option to change the folder for the TOS image and the disk images to get rid of the corrupt data icon. Anyway keep up the good work! You will get my Click for Devs vote next month.

[ultros]

wow, thanks skeezix.

the 004 really "feels" better, ijust tested 2 games and i must say it's very usable

a key-configuration would be great, like you said and one little thing is a bit annoying:
the games in the gamelist are not sorted alphabetically, but in order of beeing copied there. so you have to search for the disk you want to load....
an alphabetically sort would be much easier.

and can you turn off the database lookup? it takes a lot of time, if you go back to the browser.

anyways, great progress. keep it up!

[skeezix]

I don't have my to-do list with me, and some of these are there.. but I made a note of these so far for today:

- New menu to set scaling options; ie: full-screen like now, or 1:1, or some others, and enable or disable bilinear filtering (smoothing) while scaling
- Move A-ST folder to within the CaSTaway folder
- Alpha / ascii sort
- Caching of the database lookups; ie: I'll make it so it scans as now on first entry to picker, but subsequent views will just use the cache; if I get time, I'll make it store the cache to MS, so that the big-hit will only occur once. I've got only about 20 or 30 disk images on MS right now, and it scans them in a second or two (pretty damned fast; took Palm and GP32 ages .. the MS bus on the PSP must be fast as hell)

jeff

[Mr.Modem]

Poor jeff. Just an hour after the realese of the new version we ask him to add new stuff. It can't be easy to be a dev!

[parabolee]

I know but this guy knows his $#@!! This is the fastest progress I've seen an Emu take. After 2 weeks and 4 versions it's really close to the quality of the best of them.

I've said it before, I only wish Christopher (the guy working on PSP UAE the Amiga emulator) was doing such a great job. Not to dismiss his work but it's been months since we saw an update (we were supposed to see one at the end of August) and it's still far from playable. But I do understand it's a lot harder to code an Amiga emulator.

[Mr.Modem]

Yeah this emu was even playable at full speed in the first release, that's just amazing. I wish Toni Wilen, the guy that develops WinUAE could make a good Amiga emulator for PSP. He's probably the person in the world that knows most about Amiga emulation. Or maybe a port of WinFellow is the solution. It's much faster that UAE and have rather good compatibility.