Castaway/GP 007.1 Released :)

[skeezix]

This is a minor minor update to 007 proper. I've just made the accurate rendering mode the default, since it seems most of us preferred it anyway, and in some cases it sped things up. Only a few cases it seems to have slowed thigns down, and thats barely noticable.. yet the accuracy improvement is by far worth it most of the time.

So in 7.1 I've defaulted accurate mode on, though you can of course turn it back to the normal rendering mode using the options menu.

jeff

 

[ldaneels]

Thanks for the change as I am convinced it makes the most sense.
Out of a 100 games I have tested, I have never noticed any problem or significant hit during the emulation.

Loic

 

[Tobriand]

Accurate mode is great - thanks Skeezix...

BTW: I've noticed that with it on, decompression is fast even at frameskip 1 or 2... I wonder if it was having to display every line notice how decompression has flashey lines not flashey screens in accurate mode) as a screen, and therefore taking ages... I've had menus load up an a second and then another 5 to get to the games without changing frameskip, so I think it might have been something like that.

Whether I'm right or not, its something for others to test, as it might eliminate the need for a "magic" auto frameskip (and hence the list of possible features) Tis very nice, and even more so not to have to fiddle about with pressing select a load of times and setting frameskip to 90 before turning it down again... and even more so, I assume, for new users who prefer simplistic "choose-a-game-and-watch-it-run" people.

Future ideas? Well, apart from STE/TT/Falcon emu which I doubt to be possible, perhaps saving straight to the .stt image as opposed to creating the .sav one. Or only saving the updated bits and not the rest; it's annoying to be unable to save because of the size of the savegames from time to time (too much stuff on an SMC; can't afford more than about 6 saves lol) - so effectively the .stt would be patched with the saved data every time it was loaded - delete the .sav file and any virus problems vanish (along with save files, but you'd have lost them anyway) - and it saves a LOT of space (I can't believe that Sundog has 820kb free on an 830kb disk simply for 1 save lol)

Other than that... Would it be possible to make the mouse go slightly faster without making it more juttery (I'm being really really picky here, so ignore me if I get too much so) since its kind of annoying the sheer ammount of time it takes to get it from one side of the screen to the other... on a Windows PC, its under a second; on the CastawayGP its somewhere in the region of 6... which can add up over substantial usage.

Save states would be nice (those I can understand taking up the 830kb) but I know you don't desperately like them, and as long as there's some form of saving, that's good enough for me.

Castaway is an amazing job. I'm sure you'll run out of ideas sometime soon, but until then, it just keeps getting better

 

[Demonix]

Another release! Nice one - I hope your tooth is feeling better now mate!

 

[RobertG]

Didn't programmers load data from disk/tape into VRAM "back in the day", to speed things up? My memory is foggy.. I'm guessing that in "fast" mode the loader can't load in the next lot of data until the pallete has changed, so it's only loading one set of data per screen instead of 20 or whatever. Just a guess..

 

[faye]

Oh...WOW.

The last version I played with was 4.5.. this is a quantum leap improvement!
Ikari warriors seems to run a little slow but everything else (including rainbow island) looks and sounds fantastic.

Superb work.

 

[tk2001]

This is a minor minor update to 007 proper. I've just made the accurate rendering mode the default, since it seems most of us preferred it anyway, and in some cases it sped things up. Only a few cases it seems to have slowed thigns down, and thats barely noticable.. yet the accuracy improvement is by far worth it most of the time.

So in 7.1 I've defaulted accurate mode on, though you can of course turn it back to the normal rendering mode using the options menu.

jeff

skeezix,

I don't know if this has been suggested before but is there any way you could center the screen so that it is dead in the middle - as opposed to having a big border at the bottom of the screen?

Great emulator btw and keep up the good work.