Squidgesnes 0.38

[johnz1]

No auto-frameskip?


Nice, the names & logos on the jerseys in Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball are viewable. Very nice improvement to sprite drawing order.
Unfortunately, the helmets when selecting a team in Tecmo Super Bowl III are still all red. Just mentioning

 

[naples39]

Wow!!!

Super mario kart near flawless with sound.
I used ram settings
266mhz
fs1 (probably didn't even need)
with sound on.


Shadows continuously flash (usually only floating characters have shadows, like the flag holder at the start of race).

Keep up the amazing work!

What kind of FPS are you getting? I tried Mario Kart and didn't get out of the teens for framerate. Was playable, but not by much.

BTW, did this release break anyone else's gmenu launcher script? I can't launch a rom directly anymore with this release.

 

[wipeout2000]

Notaz you are a freakin beast!! Great work.

 

[geise69]

One thing I noticed is that this seems to auto frameskip even though I have it at frameskip 0. I would like to say that Axelay is completely playable now.

 

[classicgmr]

Can't wait for transparencies!

This is my only real problem with the SNES emulator. This one gets most of my playing time on the emulator side of my GMenu. [Sudoku on the Games side if anyone cares ]

Great to see someone is updating it and - echoing Telco - Can't wait for transparencies!

 

[krosfyah]

Is it time for Guru status yet?

 

[prairiefire]

Fifthed. Thanks for doing this Notaz!

 

[DaveC]

Wanted to take a break from PicoDrive, so I took a look at SquidgeSNES code, because I do occasional SNES gaming. I don't like using scripts, so first I added performance options to the menus. I don't like scaled display, so I keep it off, but then there are problems with PAL games like Mario, they were just incorrectly centered, so I fixed that.

You touched the Squidge/Reesy/Yoyofr/ Pepone/ others I forgot SNES emu!! Tag - you're it!

Picodrive seems pretty complete to me anyway

You don't like scripts? I hate them too.

You don't like scaling? Scaling SUCKS!

NOTAZ for GURU, Stat!!!


If you can whip this up to decent speed you will retire from all of the donations Good luck.

 

[gaterooze]

A couple of initial reports:

Frameskip seems to be set at auto no matter what you choose.

One very minor suggestion: in the menu, when scrolling through roms, you have to keep tapping the stick to move down/up (the left/right to advance a page as well as L/R is great btw) -- maybe it would be a touch nicer to just hold the stick down/up instead of tapping it for each line?

Would it be possible to have the CPU speed choosable in increments of 5, e.g. 265->270->275? Some units can reach 265, but not 270.

Great release, thanks again!

[edit: the Final Fintasy 3 black bars are transparency related, as turning on the Transhack made them semi-transparent.]

 

[krosfyah]

Yeah I noticed the frameskip issue too.. I left it set to 0 but Super Mario Kart was showing 18 fps even though it was extremely fast.

 

[slaanesh]

changelog:
0.38
? Reversed sprite drawing order. This is better at least in a few games.

Maybe you've read this or know about this, but is this information relevant?

The SNES has 128 hardware sprites, each sprite can be made up of one or several 16-colour, 8x8 tiles. Each sprite is assigned a number which defines its pixel priority when two sprites overlap on screen, it also has a separate sprite-to-background priority value which defines whether the sprite should appear in front or behind of the various background layers. Each sprite also has a 3-bit palette number, horizontal and vertical flip flags, a start tile number and, of course, an X and Y position.

There's no way to turn off a sprite - if you don't want it to be visible you have to place the sprite at off-screen position.

The SNES hardware seems to impose limits on the number of sprites that can appear on each scanline; there are one or two games out there that rely on this 'feature' to hide sprites they don't want visible.

 

[sephiroth111]

Megaman 7 becomes messy after the intro, the graphics become garbled. almost as if its reading from something it cant handle

 

[TyBO!]

You rock notaz! SNES emulation on GP2X has gone unloved for far too long now. I'm so glad you decided to pick up on this emu. Can't wait to see what you can pull off after you fiddle with it some more.

Maybe it was my imagination, but the emu seemed a little faster than I remembered, even though you didn't mention any speed increases in the Changes list. Yay!

 

[Ranma13]

Megaman 7 becomes messy after the intro, the graphics become garbled. almost as if its reading from something it cant handle

Don't quote me on this, but doesn't Megaman 7 use a hardware scaling/rotation chip?

 

[stormyandcold]

Excellent work Notaz!

I gave up on snes emulation on GP2X months ago but your work on this has got me interested in it again

Will test during week-end when I've got more time...

Set up paypal!!!

 

[rmatheso]

Here are my tests with the following settings:

- full screen scaling = on (I like it darn it)
- showfps = on
- frameskip = 0
- craig x's ram timings = on
- audio processor = enable
- overclock = 260

Super Ghouls and Ghosts: 35-50 fps in game

Super Fire Pro Wrestling X Premium: 45 fps! Sprite layers fixed! B)

Super Castlevania IV: 50fps! Sprite layers fixed!

Ogre Battle: Battles 30-50fps. Menu 13-30fps.

Super Street Fighter 2: 20-23 fps (Definately looks like the autoframeskip is on)

Final Fantasy 6: 9-18fps in game. Battles 20-35fps (No transparencies on magic attacks. Yeah frameskip is definatley enabled)

Super Metroid: 50fps (Crap, that room is still all black! Probably needs transparencies)

and the final test:

Street Fighter Alpha 2: Garbled graphics! Doh! Sound works though. 12-13fps in game.

Yeah, sound is tiny bit glitchy and isn't perfect. But it is very good!
The screen "shudders" every now and then.
Autoframeskip seems to be forced on.
I know some people hate the fullscreen. Anyway to make it a bit less blocky? Perhaps resizing and cropping it to get a better pixel ratio?

Huge improvement on the emu.

I'm impressed.

 

[gaterooze]

A couple of bugs:

Equinox has sprite layers slightly wrong. Your character sometimes appears in front of objects when he is really behind them.

Whenever you load a rom which has been hacked with a cheat trainer which allows you to choose which level to begin on, no matter what you choose the game always starts on the final level. This also happened in v0.37.

 

[NightShadow]

In the last couple of months the GP2x scene has given a HUGE leap forward...

Now this!

Thanks Notaz, SNES emulation is the one that probably needs more work (along with the Amiga emu), and this version seems to be a great start.

I'll give it a try as soon as possible, and report back any bugs found.

Thanks for your effort, and Notaz for GURU!!!

We seem to have even more exciting times ahead!

 

[notaz]

Shadows continuously flash (usually only floating characters have shadows, like the flag holder at the start of race).

Which game? Super mario kart? Which level?

Super Metroid: 50fps (Crap at that room is still all black! Probably needs transparencies)

What room? Which level?

Whenever you load a rom which has been hacked with a cheat trainer which allows you to choose which level to begin on, no matter what you choose the game always starts on the final level. This also happened in v0.37.

What ROM? Which hack?

Please, be as specific as you can so I can find the glitch as fast as possible. Use GoodTools to rename your ROMs whenever you can:
http://www.emuasylum.com/index.php?page=goodtools
Try to use ROMs which this tool can recognize. It will give a unique name for the ROM and I will know exactly which ROM or hack you are using and it will ease my work. Thank you.

Equinox has sprite layers slightly wrong. Your character sometimes appears in front of objects when he is really behind them.

But the sprite priority change fixed more games then it broke? In general, I should not revert the change, or should I?

Maybe it was my imagination, but the emu seemed a little faster than I remembered, even though you didn't mention any speed increases in the Changes list. Yay!

Yeah, I removed the unused gamma code so it might be a little bit faster.

Maybe you've read this or know about this, but is this information relevant?

The SNES has 128 hardware sprites, 
...

Yeah I have that doc. It has some nice info about SNES hw.

 

[moxie]

Gahh! How come all the emulators suddenly takes Huge Leaps Forward at the exact week my geep decided to go all weird and need-repairs-y on me? I suspect Notaz gains his coding powers by remote black magic voodoo against my poor Geep...

...No, I don't It sure looks like I'll have a lot of fun when my unit comes back from the repairs people. WOOT!

And, sure: Notaz for guru!