Outcast (castaway Module) - First Public Alpha

[skeezix]

.msa is fine yeppers

Quitting should return to the launcher; I tested it last night, unless I went and broke it afterwards

Note: Had my GP2x 4 days now

jeff

 

[ThorC]

Quitting should return to the launcher; I tested it last night, unless I went and broke it afterwards smile.gif

Hmm, interesting. I've tried it multiple times in multiple scenarios, whatever I do, I cannot get this to work. Everytime I quit, Outcast disappears, but I am left with a blank screen, and the launcher doesn't seem to reload.

 

[halo9]

It's looking very good so far, just had a game of Magic Pockets and a blast on Xenon II. Yes!
Still can't get any of my llamatron roms to work though..

Good work skeezix!

 

[tobytyke]

Skeezix your the man. I loaded OutCast and it ran
Crazy Cars
Crazy Cars 2
Xenon
Xenon 2
Kick Off 2
Stunt Car Racer
Populous
Sensible Soccer
SpeedBall
SpeedBall 2
StarGlider
Rick Dangerous
Frontier - Elite 2
Barbarbian

It seems to have a problem loading multi-disk games, But hey its an Alph.

What a great job.

 

[skeezix]

yeah, disk handling should be a little flaky; you can hit Start to bring up the main menu during runtime and screfw with things, but I expect it won't actually load the disk changes if you do; savestate is broken, and disk saving to SD is broken, so dont' start up an RPGs..

Will have the GUI fixed up soon for them. (The emu is solid, just the GUI menus are screwy mostly.)

jeff

 

[JyCet]

Very good start skeezix !
My xenon2 doesn't work so I'm just taking these picture:

 

[IanJ]

This is just ace! All the .st files I've tried work wonderfully. How do I use .msa's ? Superb work!

 

[Eolair]

.msa's doesn't seem to work yet

I'm also having trouble loading Xenon 2. It gets stuck on the intro boot screen (with the big white xenon logo and the small bombs or whatever they are). Probably just need the right rom version for it to work (since lots of other games work).

I'm also having problems quitting the emu. It gets stuck on a black screen.

I'm going back to play some Rick Dangerous now

 

[skeezix]

I'll check the 'not quitting' and 'msa' issues; MSA should work fine, but I may have broken it; I've been moving fast as you can tell

jeff

 

[Watto]

Finally had a bit of a play, Llamatron runs lovely and smooth, but damn its fast, sound on the game is so-so, I think this is due to them being samples. Starglider II runs real nice, will be more playable once we can access a virtual keyboard.

Jeff, all in all a minor miracle of programming is what you have produced, considering you've only had the GP2x for 4 days. There's emulators that will never get this good and you call it an alpha release.

I take my hat off to you .

 

[Belgarath]

Yeah this is excellent work considering you've not had it long. Hell I remember on the GP32 we were excited when we first saw a screenshot of the st desktop!

 

[steveoath]

Speedball 2, Turrican 2, sensible soccer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! When I get paid at the end of the month.....

Can you save on this emu yet? I was hoping for some Populous/Sim City action also.

Steve

 

[torpor]

What about MIDI? Think if we get MidiShare onboard the GP2X, we can run Cubase on it?

 

[skeezix]

steveoath - read up, no save/load-states in the first alpha .. should be very soon; its all coded, I just need to fix up the UI

torpor -- I'm not anticipating it, but if theres a demand we can see

jeff

 

[steveoath]

steveoath - no save/load-states in the first alpha .. should be very soon; its all coded, I just need to fix up the UI

jeff

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Wow, that sounds ace! Keep up the good work!

Steve

 

[Radek]

Thank you for your effort.

This program isn't in usable state yet but shows promise for sure! It's fast and ST graphics look great on the gp2x's screen.

I have a question - outcast is supporting the raster effects, right? What about so called "sync-scrolling"? It will be possible to run games like xlethal excess or enchanted land? Yep, I know those are the most advanced software made for ST but i'd be teriffic!

 

[skeezix]

radek - the CaSTaway module won't do the crazy effects; ie: This is why the emu runs so fast.. we cut a lot of corners to keep it tight and quick, but at the expense of supporting crazy effects. (Besides, I still need to research more how a lot of these effects work .. they abuse the hardware quite a bit

The other modules help to varying degrees, and I'll modify it to support some border effects, but the emu won't likely support the heavier effects since theres no good open source emus that handle them, and they tend to require muchbeefier devices anyway.

But I do have some timer and border effects to work on.

jeff

 

[skeezix]

Also see the new thread for alpha 002.

And of course, its not super usable yet, without the virtual keyboard.. but thats coming soon, when I get more free time (tomorrow likely). Its my 5th day with a gp2x or so, cut me some slack Though its already pretty darned useful

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=24468

jeff

 

[Radek]

radek - the CaSTaway module won't do the crazy effects; ie: This is why the emu runs so fast.. we cut a lot of corners to keep it tight and quick, but at the expense of supporting crazy effects. (Besides, I still need to research more how a lot of these effects work .. they abuse the hardware quite a bit

There are only few games what are depending on those "crazy effects" anyway. It'd be mostly usefull for demos so not that big loss here. Some programs were really "sadistic" with ST's hardware indeed. This game intro is insane and would need supersampling (both in spatial and time domain) of frames to display properly in an emulator...

Before ST I had AtariXE and then even in dreams I could not imagine what some programmers are doing with this 8bit old computer now.

Hopefully the gp2x will get some attention from demos coders soon. With video out it's a perfect machine for all this crazy stuff. It has many things inside what are waiting to be abused.

 

[skeezix]

*g* For sure; for the first few months, we're all going to basicly just use single core, with maybe some secodfn care simple stuff, and hardly any mmsp stuff.. but as people get into things and work out the mmsp modes, it should prove interesting.

The trick with the demos is .. stepping through the ASM bit by biut to figure out what they're "trying to achieve" is a nightmare

Back in the day I knew myt ST chops, but only very basic demo effects .. god only knows how the real demo guys figured stuff out

jeff