picodrive: questions on master system support

[timothee]

Hi there, 

I'm playing Penguin Land with my kids on master system with picodrive, and I have 2 minor problems. Just wanted to check if they are known issues, and if there are solutions:

1. I can't find a way to pause? In Penguin Land, pausing the game allows you to scroll through the stage to devise the best strategy , is there any way to map the master system's pause button to the pandora's start button?
2. Penguin Land has a 15-slots built-in stage editor. Unfortunately, the in-editor save/load isn't working . Is there any way to activate that in picodrive?

bonus question 1:

• is there a chance we'd see scale2x/hq2x support for 2x2 display mode, or a scanline filter? I see there's a filter section in the display options, but there's nothing in there so far. (?)

bonus question 2:

• how would I go about making 2 picodrive launchers? (one for megadrive, and one for master system) . I'm thinking about having different CPU clocks and (more importantly) different "last game played" memory.
   

Thanks in advance!

Tim.

 

[TrashyMG]

pause is generally the start button on most genesis/megadrive / SMS games.. which is mapped to the start button on picodrive.. So I'm not sure why it doesn't work... Mapping it to the pandora button may be problematic as it's generally used to quit or kill programs if held down..

- I don't have this game personally, but I guess saves were saved on a special ram, not sure if that's emulated properly as this game seems to be unique.

- You could have a copy of picodrive on different SD cards.. it would have two different appdata directories, which would save different information concerning the CPU speed / last game played.

Edit: Have you tried 8Blitter with this game?

 

[timothee]

Thanks TrashyMG!

pause is generally the start button on most genesis/megadrive / SMS games.. which is mapped to the start button on picodrive.. So I'm not sure why it doesn't work... Mapping it to the pandora button may be problematic as it's generally used to quit or kill programs if held down..

I should have tried more master system games before posting. It looks like the master system's "pause" button just isn't supported in picodrive (not specific to penguin land). I just tried Alex Kidd in Miracle World. Without the pause button, I cannot access the in-game menu, which makes it impossible to play the game in full.

I agree that mapping that to the pandora button would be a bad idea. I'd rather the start button be used, since it does nothing at all in SMS mode at the moment.

- I don't have this game personally,

Give it a try when you can, it's pretty nice . I regularly enjoy playing a round or two on it, and I was glad my kids liked it too.

but I guess saves were saved on a special ram, not sure if that's emulated properly as this game seems to be unique.

You are right. According to wikipedia: "The level editor data is stored on the games battery back-up RAM". So if picodrive doesn't support that, I realize this is a big job to add it .

- You could have a copy of picodrive on different SD cards.. it would have two different appdata directories, which would save different information concerning the CPU speed / last game played.

Ah, good idea, thanks! I suppose that means they would still have the same name though, so I'll need some way to handle that smartly.

Edit: Have you tried 8Blitter with this game?

 I just gave it a shot, and there's progress!!!! start button acts as SMS' pause button, and the editor save/load system works. The saves don't survive a restart of the emulator though, but I'm not sure that worked in the original game either (I can't remember), and that's easily solved with save states

8blitter is not perfect though. From what I can tell, the scale2x/eagle2x filters don't work, and 8blitter doesn't remember the last played game, only the last browsed directory :/

For reference, I was previously using dega for master system emulation. It was freezing my pandora on exit however, so I tried to play master system's games in picodrive instead. Dega also supports the start/pause button, as well as Penguin Land's save/load system (also not surviving emulator restart)

Anyway, overall, 8blitter is better, so I think I'll use it from now on!

Many thanks for all the good info!

Tim.

 

[mcobit]

There are a lot of emulators which can emulate the mastersystem:

http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=all&search=master+system


You might want to try a few to get the best results.


Edit: MD.emu is worth a look as it features displayfilters.

 

[timothee]

Thanks mcobit, I'll give a try to the others as well.

 

[timothee]

OK I'm adopting 8blitter, it's really an awesome app!

Just to correct my comment above: scale2x/eagle2x do work, as long as the renderer is "OpenGL ES". So the only feature I am "missing" is the "last played game", and I can totally live with that . Oh, and I just discovered the rewind and fast forward features. WOW!

Thanks again guys!

 

[ExquisiteCorpse]

MD.emu gets my vote. It has a "recent games list" which is a really cool but often overlooked feature in emulators. 

Plus it's touch based so is quite nice.