Drmd V5 Beta 2 Released

[TelcoLou]

Also, save states won't load for me. The load save screen seems to have the words "load" and "save" super-imposed on top of each other ...

Thank you very much for all your hard work

 

[DaveC]

Also Sonic 2 (it did in the old one) as a line about 3-4 pixels at the bottom of garbled land.

It does that on a real Megadrive too

 

[PSyMastR]

Nice release, the volume buttons dont work though

 

[K-teto]

They do, AFAIK
Nice release reesy, just one question, the flickering in previous versions, it was the vsync, wasn't it?

 

[lancelott]

Had a weird crash-to-menu after I tried to load Sonic 1 JUE rev 01. It didn't go to the black with white text loading screen, it just halted for a few seconds and went to the menu. Next time I tried it it went OK. Hmm.

Suggestion: Make games which you made game-specific settings for load these settings automatically. Games like Monster World 4 do not work with automatic region. You have to set it to, for instance, Japan 60fps. And unless you load a state, you're gonna have to manually change it.

 

[PSyMastR]

They do, AFAIK
Nice release reesy, just one question, the flickering in previous versions, it was the vsync, wasn't it?

Well, pressing them, they dont work for me. I made sure it wasn't a hardware problem, as I tested Beat2x, the movie player, and the music player, and tilematch. So hm...

 

[DaveC]

Nice release.

It would be nice to be able to put my ROMs in the DrMD dir under mnt/sd/drmd/roms/MD. Also my SMS under mnt/sd/drmd/roms/SMS and GG under mnt/sd/drmd/roms/GG. This way everything is in one spot but I can separate the GG and SMS zip files. I know the reasoning for everything in a common ROM dir. Still maybe this alternate method could be added? It could check in two paths for the roms. At least a separate dir for GG roms would be nice. If I pile all together it is hard for me to see what is what when managing files as they all end in ".zip"

I also noticed a weird sound panning bug in SMS. Everyonce in a while it sounds like the sound pans to one speaker for a moment and then goes back.


Thanks for the great emu.

 

[Reesy]

I would gues it uses a game name list based on checksums, with zip files the checksum of the compressed file is stored in the header while the checksum of uncompressed files haves to be calcluaated first.

Yep spot on, I may remove the rom detection code and just use the linux long filenames but why are people using uncompressed roms?

Hmm, I can't seem to get save states working with this new version on the md emulator. I tried finding places to bring in my old save states, and the menu never recognized any of them. Then, I thought maybe if I make a new state simply to find where this new menu stores a game state for a game, I could get it to work. However, when I tried to make a game state, the menu said failed and my gp2x froze.

I was using Sonic 3 BTW.

Old save states are not compatible and I'm not going to make them compatible.

Just got done testing the new release and while I am impressed with the new overclocking, MS support, and non flickering menu the new menu just feels sluggish. Is it underclocked?

Don't forget to give SquideNES some love, or did you drop that?

Menu runs at 40Mhz. I have not dropped SquidgeSnes but I'm having a break at the moment.

I'd love the scrolling fix mentioned earlier, and also I liked using L+R to go into and out of the menu. With it, I could L+R, save, and L+R (to return to game) very quickly (I'm a dirty cheater ). Maybe this just takes more time to get used to, but doing S, save, A seems too different.

I'm adding a screen where you can define button combinations to functions. So you will be able to setup L and R to enter and exit menu. You will also be able to setup quick save/load button combinations.

Suggestion: Make games which you made game-specific settings for load these settings automatically. Games like Monster World 4 do not work with automatic region. You have to set it to, for instance, Japan 60fps. And unless you load a state, you're gonna have to manually change it.

It should be doing that already, so looks like there is another bug there. I'll check it out.

It would be nice to be able to put my ROMs in the DrMD dir under mnt/sd/drmd/roms/MD. Also my SMS under mnt/sd/drmd/roms/SMS and GG under mnt/sd/drmd/roms/GG. This way everything is in one spot but I can separate the GG and SMS zip files. I know the reasoning for everything in a common ROM dir. Still maybe this alternate method could be added? It could check in two paths for the roms. At least a separate dir for GG roms would be nice. If I pile all together it is hard for me to see what is what when managing files as they all end in ".zip"

When I'm still working on my rom browser but I suppose I could add a quick function to select the rom directories you want for each system.

I also noticed a weird sound panning bug in SMS. Everyonce in a while it sounds like the sound pans to one speaker for a moment and then goes back.

Must be a linux bug as I don't do anything that could cause that. The same sample is played in the right and left buffer so there should never be a difference. Damm programming on Linux is like building on sand

 

[Yod4z]

this new beta don't support 6 buttons?

 

[DaveC]

When I'm still working on my rom browser but I suppose I could add a quick function to select the rom directories you want for each system.

Yeah something simple would be fine. No need for an elaborate GUI browser if you don't have the time for it. Even if it is a config file to edit.

Or simpler yet maybe just code it to look where it does now, if it finds nothing then look in a rom directory under DrMD with directories for the 3 systems ex: mnt/sd/drmd/roms/MD blah, blah. You could hard code the dir names for example MD, SMS, GG. That would be simple and sufficient. When you do a scan it could then set in the scan file the place where it found the ROMs so it wouldn't need to check both places every time. If you move roms to the other dir just re-scan. When you invoke scan it will look both places again.

 

[sam fisher]

You may have noted that the SMS only achieves full speed at 100Mhz, I just wanted to point out that this is basically the same code that runs on the GP32 version which can achieve full speed at 66Mhz. Now you can clearly see the impact of running this emulator under Linux.

Reesy

Indeed, As with Vobbos PCE emulator. However squidges number crunching suggests other wise.

 

[antidark]

Hi reesy congratulations for you drmd.

A little bug.

Eternal champions = A short black line down.

Asterix two games = badly the bottom mosaic effect

Is posible in next versions add gamegenie ?. Thanks for you time.

JC

 

[PokeParadox]

Found another bug.
SMS Global settings don't appear to be auto restored.
MD Global settings auto restore fine.

By this I mean that I set the clock value for SMS games to 100MHz (since someone mentioned that it still ran full speed) and saved to global settings. Restarting DrMD, the SMS clock rate was set to 140MHz.
Manually loading global settings fixes it, but it's a bit annoying.

 

[Sonistar]

my god this is good...

just fix TV-out and put in a Rom selector and ill happily declare this the best emulator ive ever used!

 

[yoyo219]

great work ! many thanks !

but can you make it support 6 buttons plz ? some games do need 6 buttons

 

[reallynotnick]

I really think the menu should be running at like 80mhz, it just is sluggish. Not to mention that should really speed up the rom scanning I assume.
How much time do people really spend on the menu? Its not like a lot of battery power is going to be lost, maybe 15 secs.

 

[Paradox]

didnt the older version support roms being in ./roms root of the .gpe file? now it's back to mnt/roms/md-sms etc? what's with that?

 

[EddCase]

I too love this emulator the only thing I think it's missing would be the 6 button support. That would complete this emulator for me.
Once again excellent work Reesy. Donation coming on pay day.

 

[mooseknuckle2000]

nice work! Look forward to new releases (& 6 button controls) Keep it up Reesy, thanks for your hard work

 

[nubie]

Just to clarify, this version has the same Genesis emulation as previous versions, work is under way to rewrite the rendering routines which WILL improve speed. 8bit versions and 16bit versions will be available. Hopefully the 16bit version will be as fast as the current 8bit mode...but as usual I won't know for sure until I write the code

@Reesy, Any technical crap you can throw my way to satisfy my curiosity, like is the scanning going to be left to right now instead of up/down inherited from the GP32? Where do you suspect the current slow-down is coming from?

Old save states are not compatible and I'm not going to make them compatible.

@Anyone, I am sure you don't need your saves unless you are playing an RPG, in which case if you got this far you can finish your RPG on the old emulator.

@Reesy, does this mean another different savestate will appear with the new rendering routines? Or did you do this update in anticipation of new routines?

Damm programming on Linux is like building on sand

@Anyone, how is the ability to gracefully shirk Linux and then re-load it (known as HH, Hard-core Homebrew) coming along? It should be easier than ever to reload it considering the new firmware speed .

I suppose practically all emulators whose authors are comfortable coding on hardware, or possibly a devkit specifically for EMU authors that ran on the hardware, could see a major boost in their emulators.

News on that?

And cheers to Reesy!!
Coming along nicely, this and Descent from Skeezix would have me buying another GP2X in no time