Gp2xmess 0.10 Released

[telengard]

Been quite a while since the last update. I had some free time and also have been chatting w/ DaveC about getting a D-pad mod so I'm thinking about the gp2x again. I haven't bothered much w/ my gp2x or coding for it because the joystick on mine is pretty much useless for games. Hopefully a modification will help with that. I thought I would add support for the Coleco Adam since I can never seem to win one on eBay.

I am not familiar w/ this computer so I'm unsure how to use it and do not have any Adam disks to test out. When booting the 'typewriter' screen shows up and I was able to type in it. I welcome feedback on how well it works for folks and maybe some tips on how to test it further.

If anyone has any non-emulation related bugs they've found (file picker, etc) please let me know and I'll look at them.[cut]

It's available for download here (as well as the source):

http://users.adelphia.net/~bsturk/gp2x.html

If anyone has issues w/ this release please let me know in this thread. I haven't cut a release in quite a while and I may have foobar'ed something.

~telengard[/cut]

 

[aapje89]

your site it not working for me:
"The page you have requested was not found on this server."

 

[wraggster]

site down, i get a weird message ?

 

[reaper79]

site down, i get a weird message ?

It might have something to do with adelphia. They've been making a lot of changes since being bought-out by Time Warner.

 

[telengard]

your site it not working for me:
"The page you have requested was not found on this server."

Hi there,

Yes, adelphia seems to be having problems at the moment. Even my home page gets an error. Can't log in anymore either.

I'll try and call them later today. I'll also see what I can do about uploading to the gp2x file archive site.

~telengard

 

[telengard]

your site it not working for me:
"The page you have requested was not found on this server."

Hi there,

Yes, adelphia seems to be having problems at the moment. Even my home page gets an error. Can't log in anymore either.

I'll try and call them later today. I'll also see what I can do about uploading to the gp2x file archive site.

~telengard

Just confirmed that adelphia is having issues w/ their servers in my area. They hope to have it fixed soon. Sorry about that...

~telengard

 

[TelcoLou]

Drat!!! I was so looking forward to this ... any way you can upload it to the archive? It's free to register there ...

... also a quick query; would USB keyboard/joystick support be feasible in the future? I have this twisted urge to code in TI BASIC :lol:

 

[ingrin]

Yay!
I had a Coleco Adam for a year or so, but we wound up selling ti and buying an Apple IIC instead. The Adam was quite buggy.
The only game I recall playing frequently was the Buck Roger's game it came with. I hope to give this a try when your site comes back up.

Great to have you back!

 

[naples39]

Are there any speed increases here? It was always kind of shocked me that Apple II can't run fullspeed on an overclocked gp2x.

 

[vampire8bit]

good to see you back and start work again on the emu, thanks. Will you be adding intellivision support at some point?

 

[telengard]

Drat!!! I was so looking forward to this ... any way you can upload it to the archive? It's free to register there ...

... also a quick query; would USB keyboard/joystick support be feasible in the future? I have this twisted urge to code in TI BASIC :lol:

Hiya TelcoLou,

I will attempt to upload it later tonight if I get another free moment.

As for TI BASIC, well that is pretty twisted , but I will add it to the TODO list. Is this something I can test w/ my current gp2x or do I need special HW?

~telengard

Yay!
I had a Coleco Adam for a year or so, but we wound up selling ti and buying an Apple IIC instead. The Adam was quite buggy.
The only game I recall playing frequently was the Buck Roger's game it came with. I hope to give this a try when your site comes back up.

Great to have you back!

Hi there ingrin,

Hehe, I always wanted an Adam for some reason. From what I've read it was not the best machine ever as you mentioned. My fiancee had one when she was young and she loved it. I am going to have to learn how to use it to do testing of the Adam support I just added.

Hopefully I can stay back.

~telengard

Are there any speed increases here? It was always kind of shocked me that Apple II can't run fullspeed on an overclocked gp2x.

Hi naples39,

I was pretty shocked too. Unfortunately the mess folks go for code portability and correctness over performance and it shows. I hope to address that at some point, but right now this is a "pure" port, no changes unless they were necessary to get the emulator to run on the gp2x. I have done some preliminary benchmarking of the performance for certain drivers and the core emulation of the systems (not graphics blitting, etc) are the culprit.

~telengard

good to see you back and start work again on the emu, thanks. Will you be adding intellivision support at some point?

Weird, all of my individual responses are being quantized into one response....

Anyway, hi there Hirolaser,

I could possibly add support for that, although I do not know how good the emulation is. Didn't someone port Bliss to the gp2x?

~telengard

 

[naples39]

Thanks for the response. Optimization is much easier said than done, and in all honesty Apple II support use is a low priority for me. Thanks for your work on this.

 

[jbrodack]

how can i get oregon trail for apple II working? I've never had a problem getting any other emulator to work but i can't seem to get this one to work at all.

 

[telengard]

how can i get oregon trail for apple II working? I've never had a problem getting any other emulator to work but i can't seem to get this one to work at all.

Hi jbrodack,

What kind of problem happens? When you load the image does the emulator crash or does it not even start?
I will fire up my image of Oregon Trail tonight and see. Are you using IIe/II+/IIc?

Also, for those interested my site seems to be back up!

~telengard

 

[TelcoLou]

Drat!!! I was so looking forward to this ... any way you can upload it to the archive? It's free to register there ...

... also a quick query; would USB keyboard/joystick support be feasible in the future? I have this twisted urge to code in TI BASIC :lol:

Hiya TelcoLou,

I will attempt to upload it later tonight if I get another free moment.

As for TI BASIC, well that is pretty twisted , but I will add it to the TODO list. Is this something I can test w/ my current gp2x or do I need special HW?

Puck2099 made a USBJOY library:

Link to topic and files

... not sure about the keyboard issue though.

 

[jbrodack]

how can i get oregon trail for apple II working? I've never had a problem getting any other emulator to work but i can't seem to get this one to work at all.

Hi jbrodack,

What kind of problem happens? When you load the image does the emulator crash or does it not even start?
I will fire up my image of Oregon Trail tonight and see. Are you using IIe/II+/IIc?

Also, for those interested my site seems to be back up!

~telengard

i just know i haven't really been able to start any of the apple II emulators. If you can get your oregon trail up and running could you just provide a step by step of what you did to get it working I would really appreciate it. I haven't tried to get this emu in a while but since it was the only one I've ever not been able to get working I gave up on trying to get it to work. I might not have had a correct os/bios file or something.

I'm pretty sure there have been others who just wanted to get oregon trail up and running in this emulator yet had problems.

oregon trail is one of the few nice memories I have of going to my catholic grammar school so I would love to play that game again.

 

[telengard]

how can i get oregon trail for apple II working? I've never had a problem getting any other emulator to work but i can't seem to get this one to work at all.

Hi jbrodack,

What kind of problem happens? When you load the image does the emulator crash or does it not even start?
I will fire up my image of Oregon Trail tonight and see. Are you using IIe/II+/IIc?

Also, for those interested my site seems to be back up!

~telengard

i just know i haven't really been able to start any of the apple II emulators. If you can get your oregon trail up and running could you just provide a step by step of what you did to get it working I would really appreciate it. I haven't tried to get this emu in a while but since it was the only one I've ever not been able to get working I gave up on trying to get it to work. I might not have had a correct os/bios file or something.

I'm pretty sure there have been others who just wanted to get oregon trail up and running in this emulator yet had problems.

oregon trail is one of the few nice memories I have of going to my catholic grammar school so I would love to play that game again.

Hi again,

I was able to try this out tonight and I got Oregon Trail working fine (albiet slow). Here is what I did:

- Ran the apple2e gpe file
- Press the left shoulder button to bring up the menu
- Chose the file selector and inserted my oregon trail disk 1 image
- Press the left shoulder button to bring up the menu
- Choose 'Reset System' from the menu
- Oregon Trail should load.

The reason why I asked if you got the startup sound and saw Apple ][ at the top is because from that I can tell if you have a BIOS issue or a bad Oregon Trail image. If you don't get the startup sound, it's most likely your BIOS file. It must be named apple2e.zip etc. The same name as the gpe files.

hope this helps,
~telengard

 

[jbrodack]

thank you. it ended up being an issue with my bios. i had a 13k bios that when i opened I found only 1 file but then found the correct 17k bios with several files in it.

it crashes while im naming my character though. haven't gone into the actual game yet but nice to at least see the intro screens and such.

i couldn't even get the pc emulator to work before since now I know i had the wrong bios but since I have the right bios now i'll probably try it on my pc.

again thanks for your help. the emulator would crash instantly before which like you said means the bios is wrong. now it at least loads up and lets me go through some set up screens in oregon trial.

 

[vampire8bit]

telengard, any chance of optimizing and making the atari 7800 emulation full speed? I read in an earlier thread that emulation is pretty good when overclocked to 250mhz, but not full speed even at that high.

 

[telengard]

telengard, any chance of optimizing and making the atari 7800 emulation full speed? I read in an earlier thread that emulation is pretty good when overclocked to 250mhz, but not full speed even at that high.

Hi Hirolaser,

I've done a lot of profiling on the a7800 driver and the bottleneck is the core emulation. I'm hesitant to muck with that code at the moment. I'm hoping to upgrade my toolchain which will hopefully give a speed boost. In addition I'm going to do some more testing w/ different compiler flags. If all of that doesn't provide a speed boost I'll look into modifying the drivers themselves. Once I do that, keeping up w/ newer xmess releases becomes a *real* chore unfortunately.

take care,
~telengard