Hatari 1.3.1 For Wiz

[skeezix]

I did a relatively quick port of hatari (a very good Atari ST/STE/Falcon emulator) to the Wiz; had to work around a few GPH SDL bugs that crashed it, but managed to get it working 'ok' (with no port frills .. no keyboard, no disk picker, etc). The good news is she runs (with overscan display removed), and can mount the SD card as a hard disk image, and other cool stuff. (hatari is much more advanced than my own OutcaST emu.) The bad news is shes bloody slow (theres a reason OutcaST is handicapped so bad, its cut to the bone for speed
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If anyone wants a copy and some setup instructions, let me know; overclocked to 800mhz, it still needs about frameskip 5+ to get anywhere (and in hatari-speak, that means going on 'autoframeskip, pray to the gods')

The touchscreen for GEM desktop does work, which is handy. Sound works, but is pretty garbled due to the frameskip handicap (though works well in simple apps; hatari has much better sound emulation than my own emu.)

To speed it up, I'll have to look into recoding it to the metal instead of using GPH SDL (which is a slow beast), maybe replace the cpu core code with a faster one (big pita), maybe change how the display code works (its very cool stuff, handles overscan etc, but it alsao does multiple copies before blitting I think, which slows things down terribly on the Wiz.)

Anyway, so if anyone wants it just to screw with, let me know. Its pretty raw.

But if I get time, I'll keep on it

jeff

 

[slaanesh]

If you were willing to stick with basic 68000 emulation then Cyclone would surely help?

I know this isn't that straight forward but i'm sure it would give a substantial speed increase.

SDL... it's often just too slow for our poor handhelds. I know how you feel.

 

[skeezix]

I forget..

Did anyone write a good sdl for wiz? He accel etc?

What about a good low level API? Orkie was hacking on one a year or two back and got pretty well in, then got a life iirc how stable was it?

With time as it is, I prefer not to reinvent the world anymore

jeff

 

[DrPreston]

I think I heard somewhere that there's been some success with OpenGL ES. I also understand that with OpenGL it's alot easier to get around the vsync issues.


Good work so far though. It seems the only thing the Wiz has been missing that's older than an N64 has been good Atari stuff. Does this mean we get to play Custer's Revenge? I'm sorry I just had to bring it up. ;-)

 

[skeezix]

Atari ST has long been available on the Wiz (see OutcaST); I'm just fiddling with Hatari as well, since I'm an ST whore The ST is not descended from 8bit lines (2600, XE, XL, XEGS, etc)..

For Custers Revenge, there is at least 1 or 2 Stella ports for the Wiz already

As to opengl, theres not a lot of point in my porting to that; most likely I'll have to go to the metal myself, but just seeing if someone had already done an accelerated SDL, which would just save me lots of work

Ah, to have free time again...

jeff

 

[Alex.]

Hi Skeezix,

I'm wondering what bugs did you find in GPH SDL? Just curious about things I should avoid. Is it screen resolution stuff or more?

Hatari running slow should make people all the more appreciative towards performance-tailored programs like your outcast, right on

 

[skeezix]

GPH's SDL generally seems to work for my other work, but it isn't a speed demon. (Still, with BattleJEwels and such its plenty fast enough, so it depends how many surfaces you use and what you're forcing it to do .. depth changes and so on.)

Anyway, theres SDL_SetVideoMode to obtain a surface which seems to crash depending on various requess you give it .. ie: widht-height combinations, possibly with depth, and perhaps depending which flags (hardware/software surface, etc.) I ended up turning off overscan support which reduced the width to 320 and it stopped acting very weird or crashing outright.

jeff

 

[Exophase]

I forget..

Did anyone write a good sdl for wiz? He accel etc?

Wiz doesn't have any 2D acceleration.

Using OGL ES for a fast framebuffer is questionable because texture uploads are going to be slow. If you have to perform a full framebuffer copy, even a fast one, you're no better off than rotating the screen in software.

Unless you're GPH, because apparently they can't do screen rotation without making it extremely slow in the process.

What about a good low level API? Orkie was hacking on one a year or two back and got pretty well in, then got a life iirc how stable was it?

From everything I've seen of libcastor it should be fine. If anything is busted it'll be fixable, it's not some binary blob.

With time as it is, I prefer not to reinvent the world anymore

jeff

The work that goes into doing straight video on the Wiz is very minimal, and if for whatever reason you don't want to use libcastor straight you can still learn whatever you need from it. One of the reasons I didn't use it is because I wanted quad buffering. I can help you with it sometime if you need it.