jEnesisDS 0.7 + ApprenticeMinusDS 0.2.6 - Genesis (SMS/GG) Emulator for Nintendo DS

[Lordus]

I've been playing the hell out of the Sonic games ever since I found jEnesis (0.5), and those 2 things were the 2 th ings that bugged me.

And they are still not really fixed.. Unfortunately there are still slowdowns in those areas in Sonic games, so the colors can still go wrong sometimes (except you disable the Z80, then it should be fast enough).
I also have to fix savestates for good, but the next version will have some bigger changes anyway, which will probably force me to change them again.

great work but any idea why the rom "mercs" doesnt work

Have to check it.. Did you try with H-Int enabled? if that doesn't fix it, you have to wait until i do

Awesome work! This emulator is great, one of my favorites! Most of the games I've tried work perfectly (or near enough!).

Will the big-game support come in the next version? (the 32MBit support - the kids would love to play Pocahontas on-th-go).

Is there any way that you could make an option in the menus to change the behavior of the L,R buttons? It would be handy to have one as state-save and the other as state-load. I don't find myself missing the cut-off portions of the screen enough to scroll back and forth with the L,R buttons.

Again, great job! This is definitely one of the more polished emus out there on the DS.

Thanks. Support for big games is on my list for the next version.
The L+R buttons for savestates is possible of course, but is it any faster, really?
I don't want a button to directly load or save a state, as you could accidentally loose your progress.

For jEnesisDS, i think you reached the very limit of the DS processing power because sometimes sound became very buggy after slowdowns, it can't handle emulating both z80 and 68000 at the same time or maybe it's a problem of syncro between arm 9 and 7, (or both lol) anyway we feel that it's too much for the poor little DS; but maybe you know some more optimisations to prevent slowdows as much as possible! The good thing is a lot of bugs are gone now and global emulation is better.

Bugs i found: in Gunstar Heroes the intro is broken, still no potions showing on Golden Axe, Comix zone is still a mess lol and in Mega Bomberman in battle mode i see strange lines over the battlefield...

Thanks a lot Lordus, nice update... As always :thumbup:


Edit: For the next version maybe you can enable the 6 button pad by default and add large rom support, i think i'm not the only one dying to play Sonic and Knuckles & Sonic 3 anywhere

Edit2: By the way, is it possible to add ZIP support like Lameboy in one of your emus or they take both too much memory? Thanks

Thanks again. I don't think, the limit is reached, and actually i plan to have all slowdowns eliminated with the next version.. (hopefully).
Actually i think i messed up a bit again, by doing a last minute fix for sound errors like the noise when you went into pause mode in Turrican. It seems this fix makes the sound a little less reliable. I will look into that, too.
There won't be any huge improvements for the sound, i think, but i am sure i can make it almost 100% reliable and improve the FM quality a bit.

The Gunstar Heroes intro was always broken, wasn't it? The problem is, that it changes the address of the BG table mid frame, which is hard to support in my current HW renderer. It is possible, but would slow everything way down. The other bugs will have to be checked, and Comix Zone should be OK, when i manage to eliminate the slowdowns. (The intro is another question though, as it does more tile updates than the DS can handle, and i haven't found a good solution to fix that).

I disabled the 6-Button pad by default on purpose.. First, there are not that many games that need it, and second, i am a bit tired of people constantly moaning about screen resizing. I thought having an easier way to do so (and one that is enabled by default, as few people seem to actually care about changing any options) would maybe minimize that a bit.
I plan on making it possible to save options per game though (like in ApprenticeMinusDS), so you would just have to change that setting once.

Zip support is possible of course, but jEnesisDS is really low on memory already. I see what i can do though. For ApprenticeMinusDS, it should be no problem, it also already compresses savestates, btw.

ive run into a problem....
I downloaded the file, got jenesis, patched it and put it onto my micro sd. booted up gnm and started the emulator. when i open a rom it just shows a black screen at the top. and the system freezes. it worked well before i upgraded....

This damn gnm.. (sorry) i thought i had the touchscreen problem from the last version fixed, but it seems i still couldn't make it happy..
It would really help to have one of those sometime, to finally fix the issues with it.

[RupeeClock]

I'm absolutely in love with this new ApprenticeMinusDS right here, I'm playing Wonder Boy 3 on it and it's a dream come true.
Seriously, it appears to emulate 100% perfectly, no graphical or audio errors, perfect framerate, and the savestates remove the need for passwords.

Thank you.

[paul3100]

Zip support is possible of course, but jEnesisDS is really low on memory already. I see what i can do though. For ApprenticeMinusDS, it should be no problem, it also already compresses savestates, btw.

Lordus, couldn't you make use of the GBA extra memory for those of us that have it for zip support and of course those larger genesis games?

paul

EDIT: mega lo mania now works :-) , the japan one worked but not the US or europe but they do now so thank you.

[PigVenus]

Lordus,
You are the best! I can't believe that you actually take time to respond to questions & comments of the users! Wow!

I just had a question, does jEnesisDS make use of the added RAM from expansions cards (especially the EZFlash 3-in-1 )? Just wondering as this approach is used by SnesEmulDS.

Thanks again for such great work! :thumbup:

[Shidori]

I think RAM from expantions cards should not be needed since the biggest genesis cartridges are 4 Mo and in snemulds they are supported well without any external RAM, plus their's not many users that own 2 linkers

But it can be helpful for Zip support indeed since i don't know if Lordus can add this feature for roms larger than 1 Mo because of the lack of memory (still better than nothing!)

Thanks for the reply Lordus, after reading it i agree that only a very few games support the 6 button pad and the feature to move the screen with L and R is very useful by default, i just tested it! The intros in gunstar and comix even if they cannot be fixed are not important and nobody care about them, but the problem in golden axe affect the gameplay for exemple and is more problematic. Anyway the vaste majority of bugs are indeed caused by the slowdowns like you said, i wish you luck for having them eradicated! Keep up

Oh and a little remark: i found that Street Fighter match the screen perfectly (by disabling vertical scaling) and El Viento scales horizontaly too but just during the intro and menu, that would be cool if they contained some code that scale them automaticaly... Is this possible? And if it is, could we use this for some rom hacking

[Spidery_Yoda]

And they are still not really fixed.. Unfortunately there are still slowdowns in those areas in Sonic games, so the colors can still go wrong sometimes (except you disable the Z80, then it should be fast enough).
I also have to fix savestates for good, but the next version will have some bigger changes anyway, which will probably force me to change them again.

Yes, I have noticed some slight flickering when the games slow down a bit, but it's still a massive improvement of the entire levels having flickering water all over the place .

One thing i'd like in the next version (although, I understand that making requests isn't really my place), is a sleep mode for when you close the cover. I don't know anything about coding for the DS. Is it difficult to include that? Would it mean putting aside resources that could otherwise be used by the emulator? I don't know.

But of course getting the emulator running perfectly is far more important than a sleep mode

[Thargor]

This emulator is awesome but can I just ask one question, will the scaling ever be fixed or is that just something you have to put up with? Seems like theres loads being chopped off the sides.

[Sir_Voe]

This emulator is awesome but can I just ask one question, will the scaling ever be fixed or is that just something you have to put up with? Seems like theres loads being chopped off the sides.

I don't think there's anything that can be done about that. A few versions ago there was a SW build included that showed the whole screen, but at the cost of losing full speed and all sound. With this new version, you can scroll the screen to show those cut off sections with L and R, and re-center it w/ X though, which works great.

[DanTheManMS]

This emulator is awesome but can I just ask one question, will the scaling ever be fixed or is that just something you have to put up with? Seems like theres loads being chopped off the sides.

The method used by jEnesisDS to make it run at full speed comes at a cost, the most noticeable being the inability to scale horizontally. It cannot be done with hardware emulation. You will have to put up with it.

If you want to try a version with horizontal scaling, use v0.4a SW renderer version.

[crookedmouth]

ive run into a problem....
I downloaded the file, got jenesis, patched it and put it onto my micro sd. booted up gnm and started the emulator. when i open a rom it just shows a black screen at the top. and the system freezes. it worked well before i upgraded....

What do you mean by "upgrade", if it is that you upgraded your MicroSD card to a different size or make , you might want to make sure that you are using v1 of the gnm dldi patch. Some different brands don't work with the GnM. I know that the 1Gig Sandisk MicroSD works with v1 but not v2 of the chism patch.

I found that JenesisDS 0.7 works fine as long as I run it from my DSOrganize browser. I've included the version of DSOrganize that I am using. Hope it works. Just Extract the zip directly to the root of your card, then put the MicroSD card in and boot your DS and run DSO. Don't patch it again, A GnM prepatched DSO, JenesisDS and Apprentice is included.

I have the touchscreen working now too,no freeze ups Save States work, Left/Right scrolling works. It's awesome. I have no clue why it needs DSOrganize to make it run, but without it, it is just a black screen above.

The same goes for Apprentice, it needs DSO.

Thank you Lordus! Awesome work.

A quick question about Apprentice. Theres probably no chance that SG-1000, SC-3000 will be supported is there?