sensiblesoccer posted on Dec 11 2003 at 03:07 PM said:
Does anyone know if an update of castaway will be released , so that i will be able to play sensible soccer on the atari st. The gamegear version is crap , but the snes version is good. I would however like to see it on the st
The only answer is "mabey" unfortunately
The ST is a pretty "big" machine, so its a miracle it can be emulated on handhelds at all at this point in mobile history. The desiogn of Castaway's core and system is to make it small and lean and fast, when normally it would require a machine twice as fast as a GP32 to get anywhere for other ST emulators. It does this through sacrificing compatability for the hardcore. So 90% of ST games work fine, but that last 10% are just evil, and you really need a serious emu core to support them, and then you need a beefier machine than a GP32 to run it.
So as to fixing it, it comes down to a lot of work (a lot!), and for extra work, my time is quite limited.
Its like this; I write both emulators (from scratch), and port emulators (get someone elses work, write a new UI, build it on a new platform, tune it up etc), among my other work that pays the bills etc. Now while I have written an ST emu from scratch (to run my BBS in), CaSTaway is a port of a couple of other peopels work, all hacked up. The original Castaway couldn't run Sensible Soccer, CastCE for Pocket PC couldnt' run it, and my CaSTaway/GP{ and CaSTaway/Palm can't run it either as a result, since although I've beaten the living heck out of the codebase, Iv'e onyl added small amounts of compatbility to it.. most of my work is in moving it to the new platforms, producing the UI and sound code, and other stuff on top. I just don't have time to be working on its emu core, as I've got my own emu cores to work on, my business apps that pay the bills, and a half dozen other projects I participate in
So I have been probing around the issue a little, I must admit Sensible Soccer is further down my list of concerns than a lot of other things.
So its possible I will fix it one of these days, or the other Castaway core guys will fix, or that none of us will fix it, for the simple reasosn that CaSTaway is not designed to be an exhaustive emulator.. it is designed to be a emulator for a big machine that works on small handhelds
jeff