Castaway 16.0 Released!


I don't see the world as an "us or them" "black or white" like everyone else ;) I have a Zodiac and a GP32, and a Lynx and a Turbo Express and lots of others, and I try and muck around with all of 'em ;) The Atari ST will always have a place in my soul and to that end I'll keep it around everywhere I can.. I see the GP32 and Zodiac as potentially the last of the open mobile game platforms (possibly including Pocket PC and Palm OS in general). We'll see if DS and PSP ever get opened up. But it may well be the GP32 forever as the one true emulation platform...

But lets hope the future opens up more devices as well :)

jeff
 
yes, this was time ago when i was very paraniod about the zodiac killing the gp32 you remember those days right, it had everyone riled up.

i too wait to see if home-brew code will ever function on the likes of DS or the psp
 
sensible GP32 posted on Mar 6 2005 at 03:40 AM said:
yes, this was time ago when i was very paraniod about the zodiac killing the gp32 you remember those days right, it had everyone riled up.

i too wait to see if home-brew code will ever function on the likes of DS or the psp

Or if there is indeed a GP32 2.

Trooper
 
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GP32 II? I can wait. there are so many things that the current model can do. For all of you FLU/NLU users just pretend the BLU is the GP32II and look forward to that.

The following things COULD be done perfectly on the GP32 given willing coders and alot of work:

Could be still done perfect (many are very close now) with the CURRENT hardware:

Colecovision
Gameboy
Gameboy color
Lynx
SMS
GG
PC-Engine
C64
Atari ST
Atari 2600
Atari 400/800/5200
Genesis
older MAME games
NES
Vectrex
Spectrum
Amstrad
Neo Geo Pocket
Wonderswan
MSX
Intellivision
some that I forgot

SNES may never be perfect on the GP32 but could be much improved.

So with the potential for all of the above systems having the potential to be perfect on the current GP32, you really don't need new hardware, you just need talented programmers with some free time.
 
skeezix posted on Mar 6 2005 at 02:40 AM said:
Ah well, MAME is out, so no one will see this thread anymore ;)

jeff

For awhile maybe. MAME is a very important addition to the GP32 emu collection. BUT your CaSTaway emu rocks though, after the MAME dust settles I am sure there will still be alot of interest in Castaway. I know I will still be very interested. I think alot of us are grateful to have it and thank you for the continuing updates to it.

I am sure you will be thrilled to see how good it looks when you get your BLU :D

Now off I go to give myself brain cramps trying to sort out all of the MAME ROM naming changes, with aspirin at the ready ARRRgh!
 
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said it before, will say it again...


...had never owned an ST

....had never been into handhelds

Castaway & GP32 has changed all that.

keep up the good work chief,
 
Nice release Jeff, thank you for your hard work.

I loved Amiga in my childhood and Atari ST is a nice addition to GP32 emus as it has no power for Amiga emu. Fortuantely many games were released on both platforms, and now it is a time to play them on the go in your CasTaway.

You made my day. Thumbs up!
 
nice one guv, saves work very nicely and the ST keyboard graphic is perfect for inputting a filename. Any chance you might replace the existing virtual keyboard with this one? I guess there would probably be some processor congestion if you did though.

Did you ever think of using an auto frameskip? Works nice in many emulators I wonder if it would work on yours.

Keep it up, we're still digging the ST, even if we don't say it too often!
 
I've not bothered with an auto-framerate yet duye to a simple little thing Iv'e just not had time to look properly into; the number of ticks reported by the BIOS at each CPU rate that I'm using. Sad but true. ie: When you ask for how much time has gone by, it varies by MHz and other settings, and I've not noted down the exact timings yet, so can't properly estimate FPS, and so can't do proper auto-skip. I suppose I could guess it for now :p

I may use the new keyboard artwork etc for the runtime keyboard, but it would of course cover some of the screen up, and I'd have to implement shifting and holding and all that like the existing keyboard has. Framerate would be hit if I rendered udner it, but most likely I'd just draw the keyboard at the screen bottom and while showing, not draw the ST screen anywhere near it; this would keep speed up, but make things look a little funny until you dismissed the keyboard. Probably okay, so we'll have to see.

Try making a screenshot and pasting the keyboard artwork at the bottom of the screen; it'd overlap by probably 1/3rd of the ST screen...

jeff
 
Skeezix, i'm not a coder or anything so feel free to correct me if i'm barking up the wrong tree here, but can Castaway make use of Cyclone? I'm only asking because i really enjoy using Castaway, I was a Dungeon Master and Captive addict for ages, so its just awesome playing them on my GP. From what i've read it seems Cyclone has a few bugs in it which cause errors. But would i be right in saying that Reesy has implemented it into DrMD already and its only symptom is that a few games don't work as expected? If this is so, what impact would implementing it into Castaway have, and how difficult would it be? Again m8, if i'm talking nonsense, please forgive me, i'm just curious. And *Awesome* Emulator!! :)
 
well ignore the keyboard graphic replacement idea as it's not really needed - the existing one is perfectly functional.

As for auto frameskip, it would be a welcome feature - it did improve opensnes quite dramatically IMO - and also would be nice to replace the <SELECT> frameskip function with a turbo button like littlejohn that boosts the frameskip as long as you hold the button.

A couple of ideas that would be useful for saves would be to load a save from within the savestate menu instead of having to restart the emulation first, and the other would be to reduce clock speed (66 / 100Mhz) when saving for saves when batteries are low

anyway, just ideas to see if you bite. It's looking good :)
 
fade posted on Mar 9 2005 at 05:47 PM said:
Skeezix, i'm not a coder or anything so feel free to correct me if i'm barking up the wrong tree here, but can Castaway make use of Cyclone? I'm only asking because i really enjoy using Castaway, I was a Dungeon Master and Captive addict for ages, so its just awesome playing them on my GP. From what i've read it seems Cyclone has a few bugs in it which cause errors. But would i be right in saying that Reesy has implemented it into DrMD already and its only symptom is that a few games don't work as expected? If this is so, what impact would implementing it into Castaway have, and how difficult would it be? Again m8, if i'm talking nonsense, please forgive me, i'm just curious. And *Awesome* Emulator!! :)

Skeezix said that Cyclone is so inaccurate that Castaway wouldn't be compatible with ANY ST programs, without a huge amount of modification to Cyclone. Cyclone is in ARM ASM, which is a *VERY* complicated programming langauge, much harder than C.
 
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I didn't sya it so dramatically though ;) Cyclone is great stuff, but it has "some' bugs.. hard to sya how many, but the ones there prevented it from working well with CaSTaway. I tried only two versions.. an older one, and a more recent Cyclone, but not likely the very latest; there are other issues aorund it though.. with fdave vanished, I'm a little leery of it, and as far as I'm aware he never explicitly stated what the licensing on cyclone was. I emailed hi a couple of times and never got a reply so i don't know if he approves of my using it (I got copies from other people), and with CaSTaway being GPL'd, cyclone woudl also have to be GPL'd in order to be used with it. So theres a few bugs that prevented cyclone from working, but it also worries me to look into investing lots of time into it when it may be unsupported, unapproved, or un-licensable :)

So someone needs to get the latest goods from fdave and find out the licensing details :)

As to myself debugging Cyclone.. its possible, but I'v not a lot of spare time (as I work a *lot* of hours) so when it comes to that I end up doing something else .. debugtging ASM of a CPU core is tedious work usually, and when you get so little time as I, I end up doing things a little more entertaining ;) Thats why I'm hoping others will debug it.. like Reesy ;)

jeff
 
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