New Squidgesnes & Picodrive Are Out

[daclassicgamingmaster]

Notaz, do you have any idea if megacd is optainable?

(See this thread: http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=33865 )

Why? Mega CD sucks....apart from the driving section of Batman Returns.

Sucks? What about Lunar 1 & 2, shining force cd, vay, popful mail, etc? Lots of fantastic RPGs are available for the system

 

[DaveC]

Mega CD is not worth the trouble. For one it would run like crap as you have to emulate too many CPU and custom chips. It would not be worth the huge development time, there is more bang for the buck elswhere like SNES etc.

 

[Hanz™]

Yay, save confirmation! I got really pissed off when I accidentally saved right when I died with no lives or continues, at the final stage in Sonic 2

lol. I thought I was the only person who did stuff like that.

 

[Amon_Re]

Amon_Re: I seriously wouldn't get your hopes up, unfortunately. There isn't likely enough CPU horsepower to emulate both 68000s (one of which is 50% faster than the MD's existing 68000, which is one of the more taxing parts of the emulation), plus the Z80,

True, the two 68k's could be a big problem, i don't know if picodrive uses a dynarec or not, nor do i know if both 68k's are actually in use at the same time, didn't find any decent info on how the machine really operates.

As for the Z80, that one shouldn't be that big of a hurdle.

the MegaCD's custom video hardware will need very highly optimized ASM code to work effectively ..

I dunno, i know the ASIC features rotation and such, but i honestly don't remember if those more advanced features were ever used in any game...

there's also the issue of audio decompression/playback, which is a huge CPU strain-- since I doubt there are many people who will agree to putting uncompressed audio on their SD card, resulting in using 2/3 of a 1GB SD card for one game.

I wouldn't mind wasting an SD card on lunar ....

Amon_Re: there's also the issue of audio decompression/playback, which is a huge CPU strain-- since I doubt there are many people who will agree to putting uncompressed audio on their SD card, resulting in using 2/3 of a 1GB SD card for one game.

The Fusion emulator (emulates Genesis and Sega CD) used MP3 versions of the audio for playback... this probably won't be an issue.

Actually, using MP3's would increase CPU load, and thus leave less CPU cycles to do any actual emulation, uncompressed audio would be more feasable, that is, if an SD card is fast enough for it (more data to read).

I guess it all comes down to how exactly the megacd works, how the CPU's are used, if what i thought is correct (that the 68k in the megacd "replaces" the one in the genesis unit) then it should be feasable, if both are used in parallel, then it would probably be close to impossible

Sofar google hasn't given me any decent awnser into how the megacd interacts with the genesis unit

Edit: I just thought of something that might support my statement that both 68k's aren't in use (this is based of my memory, which has been flaky lately ) Since the 68k doesn't have an MMU, If i remember correctly, the MMU was only available starting with the 68010 models & higher), so making a dual CPU system in those situations seems unlikely, even if both CPU's had their own unique memory spaces, you'd still need a way to interoperate both of them in, seems rather unlikely

Why? Mega CD sucks....apart from the driving section of Batman Returns.

Sucks? What about Lunar 1 & 2, shining force cd, vay, popful mail, etc? Lots of fantastic RPGs are available for the system

Precisely the games i'd love to play

 

[b._.o._.b]

Save confirmation for Picodrive! And command line loading for squidgesnes. Great.
These small improvements make good emulators the best!

Thanks Notaz!

 

[vampire8bit]

forget megacd I want perfect pcengine cd first

 

[Amon_Re]

Mega CD is not worth the trouble. For one it would run like crap as you have to emulate too many CPU and custom chips. It would not be worth the huge development time, there is more bang for the buck elswhere like SNES etc.

Shht, you'll get Zoddtd to go out & create one before you know it!

 

[gaterooze]

forget megacd I want perfect pcengine cd first

Have you tried the latest gp2xengine(v1.3k3)? Dracula X runs perfectly with full sound on it.

 

[vampire8bit]

forget megacd I want perfect pcengine cd first

Have you tried the latest gp2xengine(v1.3k3)? Dracula X runs perfectly with full sound on it.

I was thinking of vobbo's emulator. Does gp2xengine support bin/cue format?

 

[gaterooze]

Does gp2xengine support bin/cue format?

.toc/.iso (see the readme -- I think it's only a matter of renaming the files?)

 

[Epicenter]

lots of interesting words

It's possible both 68000s interoperate since their functions could've been specifically delegated by the hardware they supported, communication facilitated by arbiters (the MD contains one arbiter already which does appear to allow communication between the 68K and MCD-edge connector-attached devices, potentially another CPU.

As for the audio streaming idea, you reminded me of a big problem with that-- as we both agree compressed audio will add more unnecessary strain to the ARM920T (the 940T has already been proven not to work terribly well an audio decompressor, at least in current implementation, it slows down the ARM920T by half) .. uncompressed audio would probably be choppy at best and make gameplay stutter terribly. This is because there is no SD DMA support, so the ARM920T must be loaded to 100% capacity every X number of seconds to pull more audio off the SD card and into memory. If NAND access is faster and/or supports DMA, it still wouldn't be very useful without some form of compression to the audio (e.g. ADPCM) because there is only ~32mb of user-accessible NAND.

 

[Ranma13]

FINALLY, save states work properly for SNES. I was getting tired of losing my Earthbound save states.

 

[Amon_Re]

lots of interesting words

It's possible both 68000s interoperate since their functions could've been specifically delegated by the hardware they supported, communication facilitated by arbiters (the MD contains one arbiter already which does appear to allow communication between the 68K and MCD-edge connector-attached devices, potentially another CPU.

I'd love to know exactly how they interoperate, but sofar google hasn't yielded me with any decent docs on the hardware, maybe i should just download the source of one of the emulators & see what i can dig up from that, hopefully my coding skills are still good enough to actually read code

As for the audio streaming idea, you reminded me of a big problem with that-- as we both agree compressed audio will add more unnecessary strain to the ARM920T (the 940T has already been proven not to work terribly well an audio decompressor, at least in current implementation, it slows down the ARM920T by half) .. uncompressed audio would probably be choppy at best and make gameplay stutter terribly. This is because there is no SD DMA support, so the ARM920T must be loaded to 100% capacity every X number of seconds to pull more audio off the SD card and into memory. If NAND access is faster and/or supports DMA, it still wouldn't be very useful without some form of compression to the audio (e.g. ADPCM) because there is only ~32mb of user-accessible NAND.

The NAND is insufficiant, we would need to be able to stream raw audio (16bits, 44100 Khz) from the SD card while retaining enough bandwidth/cpu load to do all the other tasks, if the SD reader can't do DMA then it'll be a very *BIG* struggle to squeeze it all in. It comes down on how exactly the 2 68k's interoperate tho, imho, finding out that bit out would be cool

 

[sehs33]

I would prefer a fully playable mega cd emulator without sound at all then having one frame lost to get sound, SNES on the GP32 was almost playable, but there was a lot of time wasted over sound that would have been better if it was used to enhance the speed.
I know that some people will disagree with me, and that developers work for free, and so they should enjoy what they are doing, I know that they have hope in making any emulator they create fully playable with sound, but for "Heavy" emulators like mega cd, it will be enough for me to have the best graphics without any sounds, and although I have a 4 GB SD card, but I prefer having tons of games on it instead of three or four big games only.
Just an opinion

 

[Vollgasasi]

are you deaf? play secret of mana with and without sound and you know what you will miss.

 

[Epicenter]

Pretty much the entire point of the Mega CD/Sega CD was the audio. The games were often just ports of MD games with new audio, like Ecco 2 (Ecco 1 had some new levels)-- unless you count some FMV videos. The audio added a whole new dimension, and going without would be completely defeating the point.

The Mega/Sega CD library was also VERY small. But the best titles in it are completely reliant on their music for the proper experience.

 

[Elephant Gun]

Wow. i have no idea what version of Squidge I had on my GP2X (I thought it was the most recent) but this new one seems to be lightning fast.

 

[sehs33]

are you deaf? play secret of mana with and without sound and you know what you will miss.

Am not saying that games are worse with sound, but if having them with sound would make them unplayable then no, I don't want sound at all.

Pretty much the entire point of the Mega CD/Sega CD was the audio. The games were often just ports of MD games with new audio, like Ecco 2 (Ecco 1 had some new levels)-- unless you count some FMV videos. The audio added a whole new dimension, and going without would be completely defeating the point.

The Mega/Sega CD library was also VERY small. But the best titles in it are completely reliant on their music for the proper experience.

I disagree with you a little Epicenter, although Sound and FMVs were the most important add-ons for the Mega CD, but let's not forget how games ran on the Mega drive weren't as polished as their ports on the Mega CD (MK2 for an example).

I have a question that I have asked like zilion of times in many other topics but never got an answer to, I wish someone would be kind enough to answer it now:
What is the possibilty of using a CD/DVD drive with the GP2X? either one of those USB external drives or a normal internal optical drive with an IDE to USB cable? Not specifically for Mega CD emulation, but also for any other thing like watching avi files off CDs or even to copy data from them to the SD card?

 

[Epicenter]

I disagree with you a little Epicenter, although Sound and FMVs were the most important add-ons for the Mega CD, but let's not forget how games ran on the Mega drive weren't as polished as their ports on the Mega CD (MK2 for an example).

I have a question that I have asked like zilion of times in many other topics but never got an answer to, I wish someone would be kind enough to answer it now:
What is the possibilty of using a CD/DVD drive with the GP2X? either one of those USB external drives or a normal internal optical drive with an IDE to USB cable? Not specifically for Mega CD emulation, but also for any other thing like watching avi files off CDs or even to copy data from them to the SD card?

The games I'd play most, Sonic CD and Ecco 1/2 CD, are nothing without their music, really. So I couldn't tolerate it.

None of the MMSP2's IDE connectivity lines are wired to anything (pity) so you have to use USB-- but there's only USB 1.x available, which is very slow. Not to mention that the bus inside the MMSP2 is pretty sluggish. Also, since there is no SD DMA, there is probably no DMA for transfers of large blocks of data via USB to RAM either. So there will be enormous CPU overhead and massive performance hits.

 

[Amon_Re]

I have a question that I have asked like zilion of times in many other topics but never got an answer to, I wish someone would be kind enough to answer it now:
What is the possibilty of using a CD/DVD drive with the GP2X? either one of those USB external drives or a normal internal optical drive with an IDE to USB cable? Not specifically for Mega CD emulation, but also for any other thing like watching avi files off CDs or even to copy data from them to the SD card?

That's highly off-topic of you there buddy
Theoreticly, it should be possible, provided the kernel used on the GP2X has iso9660 fs build in (or a module for it) aswell as drivers for usb drives (usb mass storage support & some other thingies)