Gigadrive 0.023

[craigix]

The amiga does have some crazy chips in it, especially the very advanced gfx which were capable of some very unusural effects such as 7 screens of any resolution/colour depth (upto 4096 - 1 bit half bright) all on the screen at once - then sprites of any resolution on top of that and so on...

I'm not certain but the multitasking may have been hardware, it could certainly multitask 'from scratch' with no OS (workbench) loaded, but i'm not sure what was in the bios exactly so maybe software was doing it.

The sound hardware was similar to the GP32.

The amiga was so much more advanced than the atari st its almost comical looking back, but it was not until about 1991-93 that people actually learned to program all the amiga hardware very well.

Would make a facinating project Dave

-Craig

www.gbax.com

 

[Rigor Mortis]

Just tried it out and I'm lovin it.

 

[maltloaf]

i tested some games too!!

Dragonball Z ... : has sound and a nice speed. really great!!
Samurai Shodown: has sound but some grafic bugs. thats sad...

you can read in the readme that there is a bin support.
but it isn't!! every game had to be converted into a smd file...
but that isn't so bad

Bins work fine here. And have done for ages.

What size is your bin file in bytes?

every rom ive tried is a bin... been fine so far

 

[solarice]

Big Thumbs Up

Bin files working for me too btw.

 

[kotd]

"ANOTHER WORLD" (or Out of this world)

IS WORKING!!!!

:lol: ALLELUYAH MY BROTHERS!!!!!

SAY WITH ME :lol: ALLELUYAH!!

Thanks Dave

Go on please

Bye

Herc. h34r:

Just out of interest, for the games that do work fine (like Strider, Sonic, you know the simple ones) is everything okay with the emulator, or is it crashing randomly?

I got that on Monday, but I think my batteries were running out...

Nope hasn't crashed once. Works perfect. DOn't know what people are complaining about speed. Streets of Rage 3 and sonic 1 seem to run too fast on this beta for me on 133mhz. THe sound is good. Just theres no drums and the bass sounds weird in sonic. Also the ring sounds in sonic sound a bit weird. However I was suprised how good the sound was.

 

[triksR4rabits]

I was also surprised by the sound, but although you feel sonic 1 runs too fast on 133 do you find it playable? I did in prior versions but not so much in this one (speed isnt optimized yet after all). The frameskip is simply too high. Still, this is fantastic

 

[DaveC]

Oh, by the way, fDave, since you coded Cyclone68000, could you create an Amiga emulator...?
I need it this evening, thanks 

Back to Ontopic:
That's the spirit fDave... just sort those bugreports out and ignore the "I want! I need! It's uncomplete!"-posts

Thanks again for your great work

As far as an Amiga emulator, don't count on it. The GP32 or any other handheld is simply not strong enough to do it. The 68000 is only a small part of the Amiga chipset. You have the blitter, copper, 4 channel stereo sound, a multitasking OS, it is just too much.

I think a full speed no frameskip Atari ST w/full sound is certainly doable though. While not an Amiga, it is the next best thing.

Do you know I'm itching to find out about the extra hardware in the famed Amiga.... it's kind of like a continuation of the old Atari ST versus Amiga battles of yesterday.
"My Amiga is SOOO much harder to emulate than your crappy Atari ST"

...what can be in this beast which means even Cyclone cannot handle it?
I want to know why

4 channel stereo sound and a multitasking OS? Well the OS is software not hardware, so that isn't even releveant is it? And as for 4-channel stereo sound, well the MD has 10 channels, and even the speccy 128 has 4, so I don't see why that's a huge drawback. hell i'll bet the C64 is more complicated.

No the only thing I can see is this Copper or Blitter thing, and if they aren't as powerful as a flipping Pentium-4 then it's going to be a serious letdown for the Amiga-nah-sayers!

All of this that I say is pertaining to Amiga emulation on the GP32, I don't have any doubts that it could be emulated on a 400 MHZ machine.

Cyclone could easily emulate PART of the Amiga which is the 68000, but...

The Amiga had all kinds of other gfx chips that worked together for blitting and gfx co-processing through "copper lists" etc. It had separate gfx mem and other "fast" mem as it was called. While weak by today's standards it would be a bitch to emulate. Many graphics modes also were used such as 640 x 400, 640 x 200, 320 x 400, 320 x 200 plus 32 colors up to 4096 at one time through hold and modify mode. Plus it had hardware sprites as well. Just keeping track of these modes is a chore in itself! The sounds were all sampled through a 4-channel 8-bit DAC.

The Atari St was a bit more straightforward It was basically a CPU some RAM and an admittedly dreadful sound chip (the C-64 was better for sound!). No blitter, no copper, one or two hardware sprites. The graphics were also simpler as it could display only 16 colors out of 512 at 320 x 200. It had a 640 x 200 x 4 color display used mostly for the desktop.

This comparison is made not to start an Amiga VS ST battle, which would be pointless at this point in time, it is only to put the feasibility of such emulators in perspective.

The point being is that it would be easier to emulate an ST than an Amiga. Since the GP32 has trouble emulating an ST which we now have (it is kind of slow) , how could it emulate something more complex?

 

[Azure]

The new version sounds great! However, because of the load of homework and this week being finals week, I won't have the time to try it out until the weekend <_<

 

[wave]

The point being is that it would be easier to emulate an ST than an Amiga. Since the GP32 has trouble emulating an ST which we now have (it is kind of slow) , how could it emulate something more complex?

To answer this question we could ask skeezix? (I think is the castaway autor), to put cyclone on its emu and see the results.

 

[timeslip]

Just incase they havent been posted yet heres my list of games with working sound

Strider
Fantasia
Golden Axe 3
Gunstar Heroes
Paperboy
Phatasy Star 2&4
Samuri Showdown
Revenge Of Shinobi
Shinobi 3
Streets of Rage 1&2
Street Fighter 2 Champioship Edition

 

[mek]

Thanks for your great work fdave.

Tried the new version (166mhz) yesterday and here's the results:

Streetfighter 2 Champion edition - Sound works, however it's now running too fast and still crashes when the fight should start.

Samurai Showdown - Sound works, but sounds horrible. No Gfx problems here.

Final Fight - Sound works. Gfx seem to be ok.

Italy 90 - Sound works. Have not tried to play, just checked the sound.

Probotector - No sound. Weird backgound gfx bug. Plz look into this fdave :unsure:

Xenon2 - Sound works. Plays great!

 

[Boil'em'Mash'emStick]

Wow, I can't wait to get my BLU now because of Gigadrive.

 

[kknd_cf]

Wow, I can't wait to get my BLU now because of Gigadrive.

Yup it's great.
btw Captain America and the Avengers works with sound.

 

[washo]

it is so cool...
the 166MHz version rocks

see you :lol:

 

[Mark]

I haven't downloaded this yet...will do.

 

[frogger]

I sent this to Dave earlier as a PM but I'm posting it here again for the bug reports - hope no one minds! cheers

Hiya, congrats on an excellent emulator... I'm very impressed with the latest version! It's nice to see more and more games working with each version... here's a few bug reports for you (from memory!) -

Lotus 1 & 2 - both versions of the game have the problem I've seen reported elsewhere. It starts up the game ok, but when you hit second gear your speed gets reset to zero before you can get into third

Worms - Brings up the title screen ok but crashes (blank black screen) before you get any further

Sensible Soccer - Starts up ok, but crashes (sometimes completely) before you can start a game (only tried to start a friendly match though)

Chuck Rock - fails to start (black screen, file selector still available)

Paperboy - starts ok, but when you go past the first house the colour of the building changes (I think it's when it starts to draw the second house) and the game freezes

Micro Machines - fails to start (black screen)

Hope these help! Keep up the good work!

Rob

 

[frolik]

fdave: do you want us to be reporting bugs in each game? or do you not actually need them at this time

 

[frolik]

Just out of interest, for the games that do work fine (like Strider, Sonic, you know the simple ones) is everything okay with the emulator, or is it crashing randomly?

I got that on Monday, but I think my batteries were running out...

Just been playing Road Rash 2, got quite far into the 2nd course and paused the game, when I tried to un-pause it the emu had locked up, not even L+R would do anything. I paused the game before this and it came back ok.

Not had it crash again tho

 

[shah]

F- DAVID....

Any chance you could get GODs to work. It boots and when hte game is about to start it hangs up..!

Loved the amiga classic ... BUT i could not get passeda certain level.. ithink it was two. You have to go into a room and get something,but you could not jump high enough to get it... and so had to reboot again... Something like that..!
Thanks.

P.s: EARTH WORK JIM works PERFECTLY..!

 

[frolik]

Gunstar heroes: sound plays well but was playing the 2nd level and the emulation froze with a nasty constant bleep - using the 156Mhz version which my gp doesn't usually have a problem with

Any chance you could get GODs to work. It boots and when hte game is about to start it hangs up..!

if you want to play gods you could use the atari ST or SNES version for now..... just a suggestion!