Temper Bugs/suggestions/compatibility Issues

[Duddyroar]

I am getting anxious to try it.

Me too! Can't wait for this.

 

[Exophase]

Finally got the thing working on GP2X again. Was playing Cho Aniki. Got Tremolo building for OGG playback. At first it was running at less than 40fps (~26ms per frame) and I panicked. Then I found out that most of that time was spent on unnecessary seeking, rather than playback, which only takes around 3ms. Put in some code to avoid that, now ~13ms. Not as fast as I'd like but fast enough for fullspeed. Moving decoding to the second core would be good. Would also be good to compare speed with the bin/cue version.

I need to do some more stuff with the CPU core if I want Arcade Card games to not crash and burn. Also want to add BZ2 compression to save states (no one wants 2.5MB ones for ACD games right..) and some other options (syscard/machine type, per-game BRAM), maybe LCD synchronization would be nice sometime.

Hope to have it in the hands of beta testers by the weekend.

I feel utterly exhausted from working on this all the time and not sleeping very much -_-

 

[grahf]

I really respect your work man.

 

[Duddyroar]

Thanks for the all the work you're putting into this Exophase, I am 100% sure all your blood, sweat and tears will be more than worth it!

Thanks also for keep us informed on the progress

 

[jimid2]

I feel utterly exhausted from working on this all the time and not sleeping very much -_-

Soldier on, 'phase! and know we luv ya for it!!

I can't wait to be playing Gate of Thunder in my hands!!

 

[Tobriand]

Another supporting comment - this is sounding very very good Exophase . Temper as it stands is amazing, let alone once it has CD emulation as well. Many thanks for all your efforts!

 

[jbrodack]

thanks for your efforts. looking forward to this

 

[DaveC]

Sounds great.

Just curious, have you tried Gate of Thunder and Dracula-X ? if so, what is the speed like?

Thanks much for doing this Exophase. This emu is shaping up to be a work of coding art. Again thanks

 

[geise69]

Thanks for working on what I bought my GP2X for in the first place. I really respect your work and the fact you are making this from scratch shows your dedication to our lovely community! Thanks again. I will shower you with donations when this gets released!

 

[Exophase]

Still grinding down bugs. Some bugs persist still in my test set. Don't get sleep. Grind grind grind...

Stupid GoTzenDiener does block transfer instructions from multiple segments of memory that are not contiguous in physical space (something I assumed games would not do), spent like 3 hours revising my block transfer instructions AGAIN... simple algorithms turn into a pain when you all these instructions and different paths for them and it's in ARM ASM... would have been easy in C though (jugging registers while being careful not to step on important ones has been dragging me down). At least I don't have to worry about it coming up in another game. Unless something else is broken. Now all that I have to worry about is the PC doing this, if that happens then the game is screwed (unless I do another version of the interpreter for this, which I probably will, if it comes up)

DaveC; Yes, I've played both. Dracula X gave me a few slowdown spikes (200MHz, fast RAM timings off) and I don't know what's up with that, but bear in mind that this was the OGG version. I doubt the raw version would give any problems. It's nothing that was happening regularly at any point, just sometimes when something happened it'd take a hit... I'm not going to release until I at least TRY to improve this though.

Gate of Thunder was fine (even with debug mode on) *_*

 

[DaveC]

Still grinding down bugs. Some bugs persist still in my test set. Don't get sleep. Grind grind grind...

Stupid GoTzenDiener does block transfer instructions from multiple segments of memory that are not contiguous in physical space (something I assumed games would not do), spent like 3 hours revising my block transfer instructions AGAIN... Now all that I have to worry about is the PC doing this, if that happens then the game is screwed (unless I do another version of the interpreter for this, which I probably will, if it comes up)

DaveC; Yes, I've played both. Dracula X gave me a few slowdown spikes (200MHz, fast RAM timings off) and I don't know what's up with that, but bear in mind that this was the OGG version. I doubt the raw version would give any problems. It's nothing that was happening regularly at any point, just sometimes when something happened it'd take a hit... I'm not going to release until I at least TRY to improve this though.

Gate of Thunder was fine (even with debug mode on) *_*

Wow man, you seem to be quite the perfectionist. I have high emu standards but you are striving for more than even I would think of

If a few games don't work right that is not a big deal (to me at least). I hope you don't kill yourself trying to coax every game to work (unless it is fun for you to do of course) The emu sounds like it is shaping up great. I think most of us would be thrilled with it the way it sounds like it is. Most all emus have a set of weird games that don't work or have glitches, par for the course

Thanks again for putting the time into it and letting us know how it is progressing.

 

[Exophase]

Okay, I tried Dracula X again (first level) and noticed no slowdowns. It might have been mistakenly compiled in, or something running in the background that I forgot to kill (like gp2xmenu) or that was lingering around from something bad c_c

The 12 games I put on my SD card (960MB) are all working, at least from what I played of them, which for the most part wasn't that much but at least some amount ingame. These are the games:

Cho Aniki
Dracula X
Gate of Thunder
GoTzenDiener
Lords of Thunder
Sapphire
Snatcher
Star Parodia
Ys 1+2
Ys 3
Ys 4

I did some more looking into things and I think that moving the OGG decoding to the second core shouldn't be all that bad. I'm a day ahead of schedule, so I might throw this at beta testers earlier and try doing a 940T decoder in the extra day.

EDIT: I'll take IMs from people interested in beta testing, but only message me if you have a lot of PCE-CD games and are serious about being relatively thorough and giving save states if something's wrong. Then I'll probably send out tomorrow.

 

[DaveC]

Wow sounds great Exophase. I would like to test it but I don't have that many PCE games yet. Thanks for the great work.

 

[grahf]

Its a shame since i've got a ton of PCE CD/SCD/ACD games, but they're all back in the states.. I'd love to test this but unfortunately I wont have access to my games for another 2 weeks.

From what your describing, its going to be great emulator. I don't think many people on these boards have much of an idea just how awesome the Japanese PCE CD library is, since the TG16 CD one was so damn tiny. I`m sure excited to finally be able to store my hardware away and play on the go. Thanks man!

 

[vampire8bit]

Great Work Exophase.

Will you be porting this to the Pandora? Since the machine is just round the corner and you've got the momentum going with this emulator. It also would be a one of the great first emulators for the new handheld

 

[Duddyroar]

This sounds better by the day! I really can't wait to try this out!

 

[notaz]

I did some more looking into things and I think that moving the OGG decoding to the second core shouldn't be all that bad. I'm a day ahead of schedule, so I might throw this at beta testers earlier and try doing a 940T decoder in the extra day.

You probably already know, that ogg decoder port for 940 already exists. It's under BSD license, so should be ok for you.

 

[Exophase]

I did some more looking into things and I think that moving the OGG decoding to the second core shouldn't be all that bad. I'm a day ahead of schedule, so I might throw this at beta testers earlier and try doing a 940T decoder in the extra day.

You probably already know, that ogg decoder port for 940 already exists. It's under BSD license, so should be ok for you.


I know all about it, but it's completely unsuitable for my needs. I can't use a decoder which relies on the entire file being loaded into memory. I need something that can dynamically request seeks and reads from the OGG file.

Putting this together shouldn't be that much of a big deal, but it'll still take some elbow grease (working with the 940 seems a little scary...). I also intend to use Tremolo, which is a little faster.

Hirolaser; Originally I was saying that people would be better off porting Ootake or Mednafen for Pandora, but now I'm thinking I'll push Temper on to it. It took a lot of work, but for the most part the PC version is as or more compatible than the other emulators, and it should be much faster on an ARM platform (actually, I doubt an Ootake port would run all games that well on Pandora..)

 

[Exophase]

If anyone wants the bin/cue to iso/ogg/cue conversion program so they can start converting then here it is, have fun:

http://exophase.devzero.co.uk/bin_to_iso_ogg.zip

If you're not on Windows then just build the included source file with

gcc bin_to_iso_ogg.c -o bin_to_iso_ogg

This is from the readme:

Basically, if you use a standard program to rip a CD as bin/cue then it will
work. Then, you can use the included bin_to_iso_ogg program to convert this
to iso/ogg/cue if you desire.

NOTE: This program requires oggenc to be installed to your path (on Windows,
put it in c:\windows, on Linux in /usr/bin) to work. You can download oggenc
from http://www.rarewares.org/ogg.php.

Run the program as:

bin_cue_to_iso_ogg <name of cue file to convert> <base for output>

For instance if you did:

bin_cue_to_iso_ogg game.cue game

It would create the new cuesheet and track files in the directory game,
with names game.cue, and game_tN.* for the track files.

 

[moxie]

I did some more looking into things and I think that moving the OGG decoding to the second core shouldn't be all that bad. I'm a day ahead of schedule, so I might throw this at beta testers earlier and try doing a 940T decoder in the extra day.

EDIT: I'll take IMs from people interested in beta testing, but only message me if you have a lot of PCE-CD games and are serious about being relatively thorough and giving save states if something's wrong. Then I'll probably send out tomorrow.

Just picking a random post out of the pile as a starting point to say "EXCELLENT! IMPRESSIVE! SKITBRA!".

Ta lots.