(more wank) Atari ST.. even closer!

[skeezix]

Slowly getting there; switch emu cores altogether.. drop my own, drop most of STonX.. pulling my hair out with some issues in there.. using most of Castaway right now..

As you can see from this screenshot, I've got the ST desktop coming up; okay, so the screen is rtotated 90deg which screws it all up on the GP32, but for anyone who knkows an Atari ST... you can clearly see the desktop is renderesd fne. Another couepl days of screwing around should have some useful fruits

Currently does not run very fast at all but I'll worry about that later :/

http://www.codejedi.com/xcade/screenshots/cst001.png

jeff

 

[gary]

well done!!! keep up the good work & hope you manage to get a good speed out of the GP

gary

 

[hando]

Great job Jeff

 

[Arutha]

Ditto to the above - Kudos and good work, keep us informed and good luck!

 

[skeezix]

well done!!! keep up the good work & hope you manage to get a good speed out of the GP

gary

I doubt we can get any good speed out of an ST emu on current GP32 models.. ie: An ST emu typically runs badly on a normal PC at 300MHZ or less, so what we can do at 132MHz is rough But I'll pile in the frameskip and mess around with the interrupts, timers, etc to try and see if it can run okay. The trick is that the ST is reasonably sensitive for its timers.. messing with them much screws up the whole operation. Castaway is the base I'm mostly working with right now, and it already ignores half the timers I'd ignore to make it faster, so we'll see

If we can get 10 or 20fps it'd still be cool, if not very fun for action games. It might be good for the slower games like Empire or Empire Deluxe (turn based wargame), Colonial Conquest, Dungeon Master/Captive, etc..

Iv'e tried it out and OIDs does run but killer slow. But right now I'm abusing things like mad just to get it to work, so who knows if its slowed down by the cpu emulation, or just by bad choices in timer speeds, etc

More info in a couple of days

jeff

Maybe if it turns out fast enough to be fun (lets hope.. so many great ST games.. like Speedball, and Xenon 2 Megablast!) I can submit it to the Spanish contest

 

[Nitro]

Looking good so far. I hope it goes well from now on

 

[Tobriand]

Submit it anyway... the more entries the better generally (although speedier might give it a better chance of winning )

 

[Axeman]

Well.. if an Amiga emulator turns sout to be impossible, I'd be happy to settle for this. Many of the Amiga games available were also available for the ST, even though they were, in my opinion, inferior clones usuually (dont' mean to start a flame war ).

Anyway - ST emu would be cool! Keep up the good work

 

[skeezix]

Todays update...

See this screenshot:

http://www.codejedi.com/xcade/screenshots/cst002.png

woot

 

[Flack]

Kind of how my Windows 2000 looks after a night of binge drinking ...

Good work Skeezix, keep at it man!

Flack

 

[stickofjoy]

Todays update...

See this screenshot:

http://www.codejedi.com/xcade/screenshots/cst002.png

woot

great work!

i'm assuming it's not 320x240 because you've resized the GeePee32 window?

 

[skeezix]

Todays update...

See this screenshot:

http://www.codejedi.com/xcade/screenshots/cst002.png

woot

great work!

i'm assuming it's not 320x240 because you've resized the GeePee32 window?

Its 320x240 alright; the ST low res is 320x200, but it pads out to green for the bottom 40 pixels as thats where I write status messages, debugging, and junk like that. So its ST 320x200 shown on the GP32 320x240, with some slightly weird vertical stretchign artifacts on the ST display because my code is broken somewhere I can't find

The rela pisser is right now I can only move the mouse right and down. No idea why. Thats annoying because all the goods are on the top and left, and I'd like to goof around with the menus to see how much this actually works. Damn emulation

jeff

 

[Rico]

The real pisser is right now I can only move the mouse right and down. No idea why. Thats annoying because all the goods are on the top and left, and I'd like to goof around with the menus to see how much this actually works. Damn emulation

I get the same damn problems, mostly due to stupid mistakes...for instance in one part I had an i loop and a j loop but incremented i on both, very hard to see ... ended up with an endless loop, obviously. Since it was the tile drawing routine it just turned my screen completely white, I had no idea what it was until I isolated the code

- Rico

 

[RobertG]

Wow, nice work

On the subject of stupid bugs...:-

In an emulator I wrote In one of the cpu opcodes I had:

variable<<variable;

Instead of:

variable<<=variable;

That was hard to track down!

 

[skeezix]

The real pisser is right now I can only move the mouse right and down. No idea why. Thats annoying because all the goods are on the top and left, and I'd like to goof around with the menus to see how much this actually works. Damn emulation

I get the same damn problems, mostly due to stupid mistakes...for instance in one part I had an i loop and a j loop but incremented i on both, very hard to see ... ended up with an endless loop, obviously. Since it was the tile drawing routine it just turned my screen completely white, I had no idea what it was until I isolated the code

- Rico

I ran into some code where the original author had a function foo() (not "foo", but all lowercase short name). Looke dlike a funciton call. Turns out it was a #define macro (should've been all uppercase, right?). HJE used it in various place.s But at one point I found out it was going weird.. since the macro expanded into several lines, and he was using it like this:

if ( x ) foo();

So the if-block applied only to the firest line of the macro, and the subsequent lines were all being invoked. To fix:

if ( x ) {
foo();
}

That took hours to see at 3am!

I screwed myself up, too with this:

int foo ( char *buf ) {

/// .. stuff

{
char buf [ 200 ];
sprinttf ( buf, ... )
}

//// stuff

}

Was getting the weirdest random output, until I noticed I Was using the var twice. Doh! When porting other peopels code to GP32, you get a lot of warnings, and I didnt' see this in the -Wall output.. woops!

Ah well.. even oldby coders get caught with their pants down

jeff
}

 

[skeezix]

Wow, nice work

On the subject of stupid bugs...:-

In an emulator I wrote In one of the cpu opcodes I had:

variable<<variable;

Instead of:

variable<<=variable;

That was hard to track down!

Doh, thats a good one Easy to catch at 3pm, hell to catch at 3am

A buddy of mine has a interesting habit..

I always put the active element on the left; foo = 1, foo += 1. Like normal people. But for an "if" block, a buddy of mine does this..

"if ( 1 == foo )"

That way if you forget an equals, it errors on compile instead of warning. "1 = foo" isn't valid, but "foo = 1" is.

A neat trick to catch youirtself, though damned annoying to look at

jeff

 

[Axeman]

Ah - if only the world was full of tidy, nice to read, bug-free code.....

How BORING (but nice) would that be

 

[skeezix]

Blow by blow.. you guys like this soert of thing?

Heres a screenshot with working floppies and better screen

http://www.codejedi.com/xcade/screenshots/cst003.png

Still can't get mouse to go up or left, but got a boot disk with stuff in the right side Tried booting Dungeon Master but had a crash partway through the boot sector hack .. but getting there

I bet this coudl run Cad3d and sGEM stuff like that.. if they dont' need a mouse. Could probabyl run tos apps if I added a keyboard

jeff

 

[MrT]

Jeff

You never cease to amaze me, keep it up PLEASE

MrT

 

[RobertG]

Wow, great stuff