Vcs And Vectrex Emu....

[Grim-Fandango]

Hi all,

yesterday i tried to play some good old VCS-Games like Smurf, Pacman, Space Invaders, Pitfall etc. and was a little bit confused....both VCS-Emus did not work well. Many games could not start, sometimes my GP hang on and i had to restart him.

I´ve read something that this is normal cause there are no more VCS-Emus at the moment. Is that tru or does someone know something about other VCS-Emus??

Same with these Vectrex-Emus. One of them does not work with many games, the other one is very slow if i play a game with it....damn slow.

I´m happy with every information

 

[evil_king]

Apparently the vectrex is extremly hard to make full speed as emulating the analogue parts of the machine are too much for the gp32's processor. The project was dropped. The vcs project was also dropped, for what reason I don't know but it was probably very difficult. Remember all emulators take a lot of skill and knowledge to port. Just don't expect to be playing any vcs or vectrex games on your gp32 at any playable speed in the near future.

 

[Sdw]

I'm the coder of GP32Vecx (currently at v0.2) which I assume is one of the Vectrex emulators you tested. Currently it runs at about 40% speed of the real thing, and just as evil_king pointed out, the analog circuit emulation is what is dragging down performance. For every emulated cpu clock-cycle, you have to run A LOT of analog stuff (we're talking 50+ lines of C-code if I recall correctly).

 

[Grim-Fandango]

Hi,

thx for your answer.

I have another "big " Problem by using this nice Atari ST-Emu. I started a game called "Legend of Faerghail" and came up to a green Screen. I saw an open Window with two Files in it: Install.prg and faerghai.Prg.

I am not able to start one of these Files. Can someone tell me how this works? I have not found anything about it in the Readme.txt.....and i never had a AtariSt....only Amiga

 

[SvOlli]

Just wanted to add my 2 Euro-Cent:

I'm the developer of the DCStella emulator. It's a port of the Atari 2600 emulator "Stella" to the Dreamcast. I chose to use Stella as a basis, because it's the one that best portable. On the DC (200MHz SH4-Processor) I can't get 60fps all the time in every game. An arm cpu is not faster (on the same MHz-clock) than an SH4. So the emulation will be too slow, even on an overclocked GP32. Imho, the only emulator that could lead to a near 100% VCS emulator on GP32 would be to take Z26 and port all assembler stuff (~80% of the sourcecode) by hand from x86 to arm. And I don't think that's a fun thing to do.

Greetings from Germany,
SvOlli

 

[skeezix]

Hi,

thx for your answer.

I have another "big " Problem by using this nice Atari ST-Emu. I started a game called "Legend of Faerghail" and came up to a green Screen. I saw an open Window with two Files in it: Install.prg and faerghai.Prg.

I am not able to start one of these Files. Can someone tell me how this works? I have not found anything about it in the Readme.txt.....and i never had a AtariSt....only Amiga

Depends on the game and all; I've not ever tried that one. What happens when you run the non-Install one?

(ie: ST's coudl have hard drives of course, so some games came with install tools to set it up on hard drive; others required you to run a character creator or the like to create files on another fisk; I'd say 99.9% of ST games didn't do either of thsse.. just boot and go, but maybe you picked one of the funky ones

jeff

I dont' think you need to do all the Vectrex stuff on every cpu-tick..

 

[Tobriand]

No idea about the Vectrex/VCS issues, but re: Legend of Faerghail, I think I've ran it before with no problems - but from a set of disks released by one of the various pirate/cracker groups rather than from the original ones. Can't remember which one, though - possibly the D-bug version, if there was one. Not sure, though.

EDIT: Checked the lists for D-bug and Pompey Pirates and it isn't there, so must be a different one. I'm sure I had it working, though...

 

[damaki]

Yeah, that's not surprising, I read, several yeas ago, that the video signal of a VCS was generated by the processor itself, as far as I remember. To achieve such a process, the synchronisation of the processor to the display must be quite amazing.

 

[DaveC]

I'm the coder of GP32Vecx (currently at v0.2) which I assume is one of the Vectrex emulators you tested. Currently it runs at about 40% speed of the real thing, and just as evil_king pointed out, the analog circuit emulation is what is dragging down performance. For every emulated cpu clock-cycle, you have to run A LOT of analog stuff (we're talking 50+ lines of C-code if I recall correctly).

I am not a coder but couldn't the analog part be simulated rather than emulated? Maybe a vector engine could be made and have the program output to that. Since the GP32 display is not analog maybe alot of those "in-betweens" could be skipped?

 

[Grim-Fandango]

Hi all

Thx for your answers! I have found out how it works...my problem wasn´t Legend of Faerghail, i had a problem with EVERY Atari ST Game... But now i know how i have to start them all