Genplus DC Q

[quzar]

Btw, I just found out that in you current build disabling the sound results in black screen of death for all games...

I posted that exact thing on dcemulation.

Np. My point was to ask Fox to enable the IRQs to improve FAME.

He's working on it. It's not like me bothering him over and over can make him work faster.

Why would you say that ? I mean, I'm sure no one has yet tried to get FAZE to work in GP/DC.

I've tried it elsewhere and it's barely better if at all. Also, the API is so radically different it's a pain to work with.

[Christuserloeser]

He's working on it.

I see. Great news that is !

I'd say release this build. It's a big improvement over the previous build. BlackAura's build still is a tiny little bit better because of a few problems with FAME (controls do not respond in some games), but the working sound emulation should make up for that

Edit: Maybe you should keep working on improving the software renderer side of the emulator. There actually are some games that likely never will be emulated via the HW renderer, and there are games that could be playable already via the SW renderer if sound emulation is disabled, although I hope they also will be supported by the HW renderer soon.

Edit2: I've uploaded the source code of GenesisPlusDC v01. I hope it would be helpful if you would be interested in improving the software renderer side of the emulator. See my DCEmulation.com post.

[Neoblast]

Well, sound is messed up in this version, sometimes desynced and with weird noises and slowdowns, you should leave sound as is on blackaura's build...
And improve the graphic stuff which works quite bad at some scrolling games like outrun, roadrash and hangon

[quzar]

It's been brought to my attention that BA is still doing something with GenPlus at dcemulation.com. If he wants my help, he knows I'd be glad to contribute my changes. I only started on this under the assumption he was done, so that's all for me.

[Neoblast]

Okay, good to hear there is still some work on gen plus. I'll contact BA in order to offer my help in the project

[BlackAura]

I wouldn't call it "work" just yet, but it might be a something.

Mekanizer asked if he could do some work on the thing, and if I could send him a copy of my last source release. Fine, no problem. He's currently fiddling around getting his toolchain and so forth back up and running, has posted a binary of GP/DC with an updated copy of FAME, and was looking into the IRQ problem with GP/DC and FAME.

In terms of actually doing something, I've been looking into gutting the sound system and rewriting it, with speed (on an SH-4) in mind rather than absolute accuracy. I've started designing and implementing a YM2612 emulator on those lines.

Basically, the goal is to get a YM2612 emulator running at 48KHz (4x that of MAME's), using around 12% of the total CPU time (probably something like 1/2 that of MAME's). To do that, I'm ignoring some features of the chip (LFO and SSG-EG modes, basically), simplifying others (like the envelope generator, which accounts for nearly a third of the work the emulator has to do), and trying to keep the main synthesis code as small and fast as possible, keeping the SH-4's cache requirements in mind.

I have the core of the FM operators written, and it works pretty well if you set it's parameters manually. Since this is the bit where 99% of the work is being done, it'll need a lot of tweaking to make it run fast enough on a Dreamcast, but it's doable. Now all I have to do is write the code to take the FM registers, and generate parameters for the synthesizer - that turns out to be where 99% of the programming works needs to be done.

Aside from that, I think it'd be a good idea to set up a Subversion repository somewhere. One of the problems we've had is that there hasn't been a central copy to contribute changes to. Everyone's been hacking on their own private version (myself included), and actually getting changes between branches is tricky, so just doesn't happen. This way, if anyone has some improvements to contribute, they can do so, and progress can be made.

I know that I've made some improvements that have been lost for various reasons - that's part of the reason I've done so little on GP/DC lately. That, and the number of times I irreparably broke the thing, and the sheer number of bugs in there that I just don't have the ability to debug. CZ80, for example - it's fast, but seems to cause no end of problems, and I wouldn't have a clue where to even start fixing it.

To that end, I just created a project over at Google Code, called genplus-dc. Nothing in it yet, but I'll upload something later. If anyone wants to join in, just ask.

[quzar]

I would love to join in. If it's ok I had four things that I think are worthwhile (and I'm sure are not broken): multilingual menu, assembly tweaked twiddling function (still has some room for speedup but I was never sure about the assumptions I could make on the ordering of tiles and such), a modular switching ... thing... for using multiple z80 cores (current just cz80 and CrabZ80, but could add mame's and raze), and the new romlist format that allows for spaces in filenames (just uses the pipe character '|' to tokenize game name | filename).

I'm glad that you're back to doing any DC stuff.

[quzar]

Finally got around to putting together a patch against the SVN to incorporate my best additions (just like you suggested Christus!!).

Hopefully this helps something...