Beta Handy

[cosam]

Rough little port of Handy, the Atari Lynx emulator:

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/pandora.cgi?0,0,0,0,71,87

You will be asked for a BIOS file (lynxboot.img) at first start-up, which will be copied to appdata. You will be warned if the BIOS checksum doesn't match that which the PND expects.

Controls:

• D-pad: D-pad (duh)
• Pause: Start
• A: X
• B: A
• Option 1: Y
• Option 2: B

Default is to run with an "LCD" effect which looks like scan lines. If you want to turn this off, make a file named "nolcd" in appdata/handy but be warned that you may need to crank up the MHz as the software rendering is pretty slow.

 

[Gruntfuggly]

That's it. I really really want my Pandora now...

Can somebody try this out with Rampart and let me know how well it works?

Thanks in advance (two months?) SteveM...

 

[cosam]

No idea how you're meant to play it, but Rampart seems to run quite nicely.

 

[cbrotherson]

You're on a role, Steve Thanks!

 

[Gruntfuggly]

Are the cut scenes and speech OK between phases?

Regarding play -

1) shoot the crap out of the ships
2) rebuild your castle (tetris style) as big as possible without leaving any gaps
3) Put new cannons within castle
4) Repeat until ships give up!

Later on it gets exceptionally hard...

My favourite game of all time.

 

[dosteridge]

This is great news, now I just need my pandora..........checks his email account for the 100th time today!

 

[skeezix]

There you go DaveC

jeff

 

[socket]

Thanks! This is so awesome...

Now all I need is a Vectrex fix!

 

[Jumpman]

Can somebody try this out with Rampart and let me know how well it works?

Just tested Rampart, and it runs great. I haven't used my lynx in years, so I'm not sure how well it's running, but the speed is nice. I would say it's fullspeed, or very close.

Great work SteveM. A nice frontend, and some extra options for display, and this one will be all done. I'm heading back to test Chips Challenge!

Chris

 

[paddy]

I would love to see jaguar emulator ,the thought of aliens vs predator and tempest

but bill n teds and blue lightning is also a happy thought

lynx really needs v-sync ,it's the same with all the emulators for lynx ,but it really looks good with scanlines on the pandora and it runs ok ,not fullspeed.

actuly most all games run like fullspeed but strange becase biil n teds doesn"t ,does handy have frameskipping on ? and when can we expect fullscreen in our emulators,anyway thanks Steve for handy lalready running better than both my psp lynx emulators.

 

[DaveC]

Great job, it works pretty good even though unoptimised. Most stuff runs fullspeed or very close. The sound is also pretty good and doesn't stutter like other Lynx emus.
The scanlines look decent although they should be vertical not horizontal ( on a real Lynx they really weren't scanlines they were the LCD subpixels that were course)

I few minor things and it would be pretty much done:

Please allow a preview pic so us minimenu users will have a pic.

Allow remapping buttons I don't like the action buttons in the middle they would be better as X and B to me. If they were configurable it would be nice.

Savestates would be great.

Different scanline modes including vertical.

V-sync.

Allow loading different games without exiting.

Thanks for the good work.

lynx really needs v-sync ,it's the same with all the emulators for lynx ,but it really looks good with scanlines on the pandora and it runs ok ,not fullspeed.

actuly most all games run like fullspeed but strange becase biil n teds doesn"t ,does handy have frameskipping on ? and when can we expect fullscreen in our emulators,anyway thanks Steve for handy lalready running better than both my psp lynx emulators.

Yeah I get a bit of v-sync screen tearing but not too bad. It is also as fullscreen as you will get without it looking like shit. You stretch it up and it will be a blocky mess and the scanlines won't work out even either (some gaps would be doubled some not).

As for Jaguar, ask Firefox.

 

[cosam]

Yeah, there is a lot that can be done with Handy. There's already a v-sync option but I think it depends on OpenGL which I chopped out in order to get it to build. Scan lines and other effects are in there too somewhere. The original sources have hard-coded controls, so I just tried to match the layout as best I could on the Pandora for now. So, plenty to do, but I'm not likely to get around to it any time soon. If someone feels like picking it up, I will of course provide my (rather minor) changes to get you started.

Please allow a preview pic so us minimenu users will have a pic.

How do I do that? I wasn't aware you needed to do anything in a PND to allow overriding the preview.

 

[paddy]

I like the requests for making this the perfect lynx emulator hehe ! i am sure SteveM is busy with other stuff and quite frankly i am just glad he is porting stuff over so we can all have a go ,these builds could be optimised but i think there are already other devs doing most emulators in a more complete way ,when i ask for the fullscreen option ,i mean scaled in as high a resolution as possible so it does look good ,like the psp versions of just about all emulators out there ,once scaled add a nice filter to make it look as clear and smooth as possible and it will look very nice.

Atari lynx scaling/resolution not stretch ,as the scanlines would look really bad if stretched ,but even then the scanline can be altered and made smaller ,more scanlines to the display.

I am really asking when will the pandora start to use proper gl support so it can do our emulators justice ,do we need a kernal update or something for graphics hardware support ? i may be talking piss now ,just not sure but when i ask for fullscreen what i want is something like the psp ,there were no complaints with emulators on the psp fullscreen so why do people want to argue this and better still why do they want to play a game in a small screen within an already small display ? i do understand for emulators like lynx/gamegear/neogeo pocket/gba the screen display was already small but well mabe you should try those emulators on a 42in hdtv with an original xbox (hacked)
and you will see those systems look amazing fullscreen on such a large display not to mention looking sweeeet on a psp fullscreen ,but ohh yes we are talking about the pandora here and somehow it can do it but no one wants it ? well why not just add that feature for those who want it ?

These are not requests to SteveM ,i think he is doing a great job ,i am really just asking about the state in graphics terms the pandora is in just now ,do we already have graphics hardware drivers ,will we be getting them soon ?

 

[OrR]

How about a rendering mode that actually tries to simulate the Lynx' display?

The German Wikipedia page hints at the Lynx having a horizontal subpixel resolution of 480. So a Pixel probably looks somewhat like this:

(I'm not sure about the order of Red, Green and Blue and I don't have my Lynx here...)
The picture size on the Pandora's screen would be something like this:

The effect would look like this:

I'm not a color expert, so I have no idea how to make this look closer to white...

Of course, the above wastes a lot of space. The Lynx picture fits into the Pandora's pixels 4x4 times, not just 3x3. An alternative rendering method:

The white border would be the spacing between the pixels. It could also be a shade of grey, maybe it would have to depend on the color of the surrounding pixels to help with brightness simulation.
Size on the Pandora's screen:

What the effect looks like:

So why would this be a good idea? Well, one case would be if a Lynx game used subpixel rendering. Not sure any of them did, though... Also, it might look closer to the original grainy screen if done right. I'm not sure how well it would actually work but it might be fun to try...

 

[DaveC]

Yeah, there is a lot that can be done with Handy. There's already a v-sync option but I think it depends on OpenGL which I chopped out in order to get it to build. Scan lines and other effects are in there too somewhere. The original sources have hard-coded controls, so I just tried to match the layout as best I could on the Pandora for now. So, plenty to do, but I'm not likely to get around to it any time soon. If someone feels like picking it up, I will of course provide my (rather minor) changes to get you started.

Please allow a preview pic so us minimenu users will have a pic.

How do I do that? I wasn't aware you needed to do anything in a PND to allow overriding the preview.

Well there is no preview now. So there is nothing to override.

Even if you just put a placeholder in there do that. I think you need something in there to begin with. I am no expert on pnds ask ED or Skeezix, they will know.

 

[cosam]

Well there is no preview now. So there is nothing to override.

Even if you just put a placeholder in there do that. I think you need something in there to begin with. I am no expert on pnds ask ED or Skeezix, they will know.

So you tried to override it and that doesn't work? Sounds odd. If things need to be present in the PXML for them to be overridden, how does one go about overriding other settings (e.g. clock speed, etc.)?

 

[DaveC]

How about a rendering mode that actually tries to simulate the Lynx' display?
So why would this be a good idea? Well, one case would be if a Lynx game used subpixel rendering. Not sure any of them did, though... Also, it might look closer to the original grainy screen if done right. I'm not sure how well it would actually work but it might be fun to try...

That would work well except for one thing. The 4th column of pixels would be black not white. With white you could never have black backgrounds. Doing it dynamically would probably be too much work. LCDs did have a slight black vertical line between pixels anyway.

While this would be nice it doesn't sound like Steve wants to put that much time into this unfortunatly. Hopefully someone will but unfortunatly Lynx is one of those emus that usually no one bothers with. Honestly we are lucky to have this, I bet this may be the only Lynx emu on the Pandora ever.

 

[DaveC]

Well there is no preview now. So there is nothing to override.

Even if you just put a placeholder in there do that. I think you need something in there to begin with. I am no expert on pnds ask ED or Skeezix, they will know.

So you tried to override it and that doesn't work? Sounds odd. If things need to be present in the PXML for them to be overridden, how does one go about overriding other settings (e.g. clock speed, etc.)?

It doesn't work. I suppose there must be something there first.

If you want to use this image below then you can. If not maybe you could just put a blank sceen in there so I can override it with the pic.

 

[trooper]

Here's another one, Though it need rotating before use.

Trooper

 

[laurens]

Love the port, thanks so much!