Release DraStic Nintendo DS emulator

[Askarus]

That's how it should be.

Some games like Yoshi's island use the DS hinge as part of the screen.

So if let's say a cloud disappears behind the screen it takes a while until it will appear again.

This is good for Ds as it gives you the feeling as the scene will simply be "hidden" behind the hinge, not interrupted.

 

[PokeParadox]

That's how it should be.

Some games like Yoshi's island use the DS hinge as part of the screen.

So if let's say a cloud disappears behind the screen it takes a while until it will appear again.

This is good for Ds as it gives you the feeling as the scene will simply be "hidden" behind the hinge, not interrupted.

Yes and it's on a per-game basis. Some games just ignore the physical gap between the screen...

 

[levi]

Not many that I can recall - I think Super Space Invaders (or whatever it was called) does that and it's rather distracting. All Nintendo titles respect the border, I think.

 

[PowerGod]

Even "Dragon Ball - Origins" has that gap very visibly in the intro movie, because the characters seems like cut in the middle... doesn't seems so an issue in gameplay.

If it's not too difficult to develop maybe can be added the possibility to shrink the 2 screens when put one over the other to leave a black border between both ?!

Another unrelated question, is it possible to rotate the screens by 180° in games like Brain Training that uses the screen vertically ?

This can be useful to grab better the pandora because for now right-handed people have to cross the hands to write on the display.

 

[Exophase]

I do want to do a gap option, it's just a little low on the list right now (and depressing since it makes the screens even smaller)

Rotation is kind of tricky since I don't think there's any hardware option for it that I can really use. Still thinking about how to best do that.

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

On the side, now that DraStic is so good, someone may want to update this to reflect the true capability of DraStic.  Or just don't describe it in detailed there.  Let the details be handled in the Repo so you don't have to update this post everytime the capability changes.  Same goes for other emus as well.  Just my 2-cents.

 

[mcobit]

Well, there seems to be some hardware support for rotation in the OMAP overlay featureset.


Maybe an opportunity for notaz to patch up his SDL once more


http://omappedia.org/wiki/Bootargs_for_enabling_display#Mirrorring_and_Rotation_of_OMAPFB

 

[Exophase]

We talked about the rotation stuff before, it's just not something that's actually well exposed to the current software and not really usable without going through a bunch of hoops. So I don't think anything will be happening that way any soon time.

The software rotation is probably not a huge deal since the emulator does a final conversion pass on the scanlines, just need to do rotated versions of those and the performance hit won't be that much. It's probably more work actually setting up the screen parameters to match it.

 

[notaz]

Well, there seems to be some hardware support for rotation in the OMAP overlay featureset.


Maybe an opportunity for notaz to patch up his SDL once more

http://omappedia.org/wiki/Bootargs_for_enabling_display#Mirrorring_and_Rotation_of_OMAPFB

Hmm I wasn't aware about DMA rotate capability, and it works on OMAP3!

Currently there is no way to enable it without root and there is no ioctl to do it, I'll need to think how to expose it to applications.. (which means firmware update will be needed).

Haven't noticed any bad effects on performance.

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

OMG!  The OLD OAK TREE (the Obsolete Pandora so they say) just getting better and better!

Edit:  Can you try GTACW to see how that run?

Edit 2:  Now I just have to find a way to mod my screen so I can rotate it vertically!

 

[hmc]

Question:

Especially with TV-Out, but even without when the main screen is set to full-screen, the screen rendering of DraStic appears to be a bit rough. Diagonal lines have very obvious "steps" in it etc. Since I don't have a real DS to compare, I don't know, if that's the same on a real DS. 

If it isn't, I realize it may be necessary to get the needed performance. But even then, is there an option to make the rendering finer? For games that don't demand so much performance, it may be preferable to have better resolution / rendering.

 

[mcobit]

It is just scaled and bilinear filtered. If you have a look at the original resolution of the DS, jagged diagonals are expected when scaling to fullscreen.


Theres not much that can be done about it without rendering to double res and applying some filter what will have quite some performance penalty


Edit: On a real DS it shouldn't be that obvious as the sceen has the same res as the input and there is no need to interpolate so one pixel is still one pixel and it is still sharp.

 

[levi]

Yes, and the DS only has a vertical resolution of 192 pixels on each screen which has to be scaled to 480 interlaced pixels by the scaler, and then assuming you're using a modern flat-screen TV with many hundreds of progressive pixels, the TV scaler then needs to rescale that up to full screen. It's not surprising you end up with some jaggies - people complained about them on the DSi XL and that only went from 3.1" to 4.2", not the 32+ inches that a TV-out cable is likely to connect it to these days.

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

Yes, and the DS only has a vertical resolution of 192 pixels on each screen which has to be scaled to 480 interlaced pixels by the scaler, and then assuming you're using a modern flat-screen TV with many hundreds of progressive pixels, the TV scaler then needs to rescale that up to full screen. It's not surprising you end up with some jaggies - people complained about them on the DSi XL and that only went from 3.1" to 4.2", not the 32+ inches that a TV-out cable is likely to connect it to these days.

That's why I own two SONY BVM-20E1U.  These are the best TVs ever made!

 

[Exophase]

Hmm I wasn't aware about DMA rotate capability, and it works on OMAP3!

Currently there is no way to enable it without root and there is no ioctl to do it, I'll need to think how to expose it to applications.. (which means firmware update will be needed).

Haven't noticed any bad effects on performance.

Okay you are clearly going to need to tell me more about what you did here (or maybe you left it in the channel and I'll see it when I get home)

 

[fusion_power]

Yay, Advance Wars DS!  This could work well, you can play the game with Stylus, not only D-Pad and buttons (these of course would be not that great in rotated mode).

 

[FelixNemis]

I don't know if this is a known bug or if it even happens to other people but If I push the pandora button when drastic is running it shows a blank screen and a bunch of garbage on the smaller screen. I think it's opening the pandora menu, because if I close the menu (pandora button again) and then alt tab, drastic starts working again.

edit: using the latest version of DraStic, doesn't seem to matter which game I'm playing.

 

[Exophase]

It's a problem with an older OS version, if you update to the latest it should go away (or at least it did for me)

 

[FelixNemis]

Yeah, that fixed it

 

[vcoleiro1]

@Exophase

I know I had raised this before, but just letting you know there is a lot of people on the Ouya forum who want Drastic on the Ouya.  There is a whole thread about sideloading it onto the Ouya, but of course that's not ideal due to the touch requirements for some games.  Perhaps the use of the touchpad could suffice - don't know.  Anyway, just letting you know there is a market there for it.