GP32Vecx updated - v0.2 is out!


S

Sdw

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May 8, 2003
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146
Location
Sweden
Website
www.ag1976.com
I have released version 0.2 of my Vectrex emulator for GP32. It can be downloaded from my webpage:

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~sdw/other.html

The improvments are:

* You can now select and load ROMs from a file selector (thanks to CHNs excellent file requester!).
* Invert color palette with "Select"
* Some minor speedups

Quite a few games seem to be playable, here's a list of what I've tried that seems to work :

Armor Attack
Bedlam
Berzerk
Blitz
Clean Sweep
Dark Tower
Fortress of Narzod
Heads Up
Hyperchase
Mine Storm (built in game)
Patriots
Pole Position
Rip-Off
Scramble
Solar Quest
Space Wars
Spike
Spinball
Star Castle
Star Hawk
Star Trek
Vector Vaders
Web Wars
 
good update! Some things to add: long file name support, and a cache of games already on the SMC so it does not have to load every time
 
Glad to see someone is working on a Vectrex port, I've really not had the time (plus I'm lazy) to work on mine.. I'll give this a try tommorow :)

good update! Some things to add: long file name support, and a cache of games already on the SMC so it does not have to load every time
Click to expand...

Doesn't really need the cache.. From experience with my Vecx port I could scan /gpmm/vectrex with a complete romset in milliseconds. It's not like the NES where you can have hundreds of roms. I think he'd be better off concentrating on getting the speed up a bit :)
 
I think you're selling yourself quite a bit short. The speed seems about 80% to me, a bit faster than Robert's. The splash screen is great, and the invert color option is very cool.
 
His version is about 10 ~ 20% slower than Vecx GP6, which isn't released (fast, but very broken..). He's definitely making better progress than I was, and his version seems alot tidier :)
 
Thanks for all the feedback!

The speed seems about 80% to me
Click to expand...

Actually, I can understand that, when playing some games you almost get a feeling like "Hmm, this game is slow, but not so slow that I would want to play at almost 3x the speed!", but infact, I'm pretty sure that my calculations on the speed are correct.
And my windows version runs very much faster, so 40% is about right.

RobertG:
Out of curiosty, is your emulator based on the same source as mine (www.eecg.toronto.edu/~manohv/vectrex.html, seems to be down at the moment)?
Have you any good ideas on how to speed up the analog emulation parts (via_sstep, alg_sstep) as they seem to be the functions eating the most time.
I'm considering trying to rewrite some of it in asm, but I wonder if there will be a speed boost big enough to warrant all that work...
 
Sdw, yep mine is based on the same source..

I squeezed a bit of speed out of the video emulation bits, can't remember of hand what I did though.. I'll go through my source sometime :)

You're definitely correct about it slowing everything down.. I spent a while optimising the CPU core which has helped things but it's definitely the analog bits that are the main problem.

As an experiment I stuck in some code to skip cycles of the analog emulation and whilst it completely messed up the graphics (as you'd expect) it was FAST, even when running on the emulator.. If I can ever be bothered ( ;) ) and can find some detailed vectrex documentation I'll probably rewrite that whole lot.. The 6809 core is fine as is really.
 
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