Pocketnes BETA! (3-18-08)

rememberthe8bit · 2008-03-01 10:59:49 am

Dwedit wrote:

It ignores the 8 sprite limit already. Actually supporting an 8-sprite limit is much harder on a GBA. I don't think I could add an 8-sprite limit.
There's a big 'hack' in there already, where it checks if 8 sprites are intentionally placed in a row, then blocks all sprites from appearing in that row.
In order to avoid graphical artifacts in Zelda 1's dungeons and Gremlins 2's intro, I had to add that hack.

Oh, thanks for the clarification. I was playing Super Dodge Ball, and it's pretty crazy, but that's probably due to their sprite multiplexing routine...

patters · 2008-03-03 6:18:17 am

Hi, firstly thanks Dwedit for keeping on improving this emulator so much. Out of curiosity I just had a peek at the source and I see that you're using gba_nds_fat.c in there, I presume for reading GBAMP cards or something. Is it much work to swap this for DLDI to allow browsing of filesystems on carts to save from having to compile up a ROM each time there's an update or you want to add another game? It would make it quite a lot easier to use on EZ-Flash cards, and DS Slot one cards too. I've recently switched to Mac, and the only way I can compile up a Goomba GBA ROM with trimmed GBC ROMs is to use a tool on the PC. DLDI would do away with this completely. Or is there something obvious that I've missed here?

Dwedit · 2008-03-03 12:58:25 pm

There used to be a "GBAMP Version" of PocketNES which ran as a multiboot GBA file, executed from the GBAMP. It used GBAMP_CF, later GBA_NDS_FAT to access the GBAMP's compact flash slot. Running the emulator and filesystem driver from RAM takes up a lot of RAM which becomes unavailable for the emulator to store pages of a NES rom.
That version is discontinued, because I've come up with a much better solution for the GBAMP. Because people know how to write to the firmware, I made all future GBAMP versions of PocketNES run from the GBAMP's firmware, so that you get maximum RAM available.

Right now, in the current alpha builds, "gba_nds_fat.c" is not included at all, it's just a file sitting in the directory.
Furthermore, in the GBAMP Firmware version of PocketNES, the file system is separated from the rest of the emulator in that it does not run from the same GBAMP firmware page as the rest of pocketnes, so it's not compiled with the rest of pocketnes's code.

patters · 2008-03-03 6:54:05 pm

Sorry, I meant to post in the Goomba Color thread and ended up in here by accident but I presume your answer still applies. Guess it'll be something that would have to wait for a dedicated DS version. Are you still planning one at some point?

Last edited by patters (2008-03-03 6:59:40 pm)

Dwedit · 2008-03-03 7:03:12 pm

Nope, you got an answer for PocketNES.

rememberthe8bit · 2008-03-04 6:17:41 am

Do PPU hacks work now? I didn't see anything in the main post that went either way. It would be nice to re-implement them, because more extra processing power is better, right? (That sentence sounds so lovely.)

Dwedit · 2008-03-04 12:32:50 pm

Still haven't added PPU Hacks back in yet. I'll do that later.
It used to be necessary to enable PPU hacks to get full speed in certain games, but optimizing PPU Status Reads and the speedup from storing the fixed page in VRAM made it mostly unnecessary.
Mostly unnecessary, but Clash at Demonhead stuck its PPU polling code in a slow page! Grrrrr...

As for the Image Ranks, yep, we have image ranks on this forum. Get 10 posts and you'll go to the next rank. Before 200 posts, ranks change every 10 posts. After 200 posts, ranks change every 50 posts.

rememberthe8bit · 2008-03-04 4:06:42 pm

Thanks for working on all this crazy GBA stuff. I appreciate it.

rob mocca · 2008-03-04 7:11:00 pm

Just wanted to report that MAgic of Shezarade is working great now thanks! I'm on world 3 of 5. Save states working like a charm, and I had to turn on vsync because the game is too fast. nice work. :D

Take care!

EFX

Dr. E · 2008-03-07 1:38:58 pm

I apologize for EFX's grand PocketNES enthusiasm Dwedit, you have kept him away from working on his game for far to long with this, your PocketNES release distractions. I apologize.

He is just enthusiastic, look, he takes lots of wonderful things in his life. It helps him keep on going, it is quite heroic really, we need more heroes like him within our NES communities. Heroes, like yourself and me, Dwedit help us all live our lives a little teeny weeny bit easier. It helps out our fellow NES emu-GPs, sleep comfortably at night. We our, you could say, NES emu-Gods. It is beautiful really.

I once again, apologize for EFX.

E

Dwedit · 2008-03-07 1:48:01 pm

I am quite amazed that you reported my frontpage news about Somethingawful and Ganon's Ass.

rob mocca · 2008-03-07 5:28:36 pm

I have stopped working on neotoxin until someone gets me a translator for Dr. E's posts LOL. I mean WTF :D

Meanwhile back in reality land, I am just about done with that game Magic of Schrezade, I am inspired enough that I think I may start work on a editor for the game, Would make a good backbone for a Mario RPG type game for the NES. :D

EFX

Dwedit · 2008-03-08 1:35:17 am

Just posting here to indicate that there is a new version in the first post.

rememberthe8bit · 2008-03-08 3:30:09 am

Awesome! Thanks.

EDIT: Playing Super Mario Bros. at 120fps is hilarious.

Last edited by rememberthe8bit (2008-03-08 4:15:50 am)

liuxiaocheng · 2008-03-09 4:00:30 pm

Finally realized has cheated the function, intensely thank the Dwedit big god! ! !

Freud · 2008-03-10 1:09:16 am

Hi - great release!

Don't know if you had this reported already, but 1942(JU) appears to have stopped working. Everything else I've tried seems fine, but that particular ROM just gives a black screen.

Thanks for all your hard work!

Dwedit · 2008-03-10 9:45:07 am

Works fine for me

Dr. E · 2008-03-12 2:34:56 pm

You sir are welcome Dwedit, Dwedit.org deserves more attention. Just like it's forefathers at Pocktnes.org did.

Without the great PocketNES applications being released and constantly developed, I fear that our dear NES emu-GPs would have no motivation to enjoy the system any further. Our dear legacy NES emu-GPs, like EFX, allow our communities to hopefully re-flourish and give us all great hope that we can see more Final Fantasy VIIs released on our NES, from some non-Asian based NES compadres.

If PocketNES is doing it's great motivational inspiration, as always, every NES-GP wins. If only their were more, if only............

E

Freud · 2008-03-14 6:31:09 am

Dwedit wrote:

Works fine for me

Interesting. I downloaded a new version of the ROM from the 'net and that one works. However, both this working version and the previous non-working version are identified as 'identical' by GoodNES, but one works under PocketNES and the other doesn't. Both versions work in the previous PocketNES.

A file compare shows only the following differences:
00000007: 44 00
00000008: 69 00
00000009: 73 00
0000000A: 6B 00
0000000B: 44 00
0000000C: 75 00
0000000D: 64 00
0000000E: 65 00
0000000F: 21 00

... where the non-working ROM is on the left, and the working one is on the right. Seems to be some kind of text in the ROM header that's causing PocketNES to trip? It's the ASCII for "DiskDude ".

Dwedit · 2008-03-14 9:38:24 am

Goodnes has a "fixnes" command, make sure you use it.

ayromantic · 2008-03-14 5:15:38 pm

This graphics fix is very good!

Rob Mocca · 2008-03-16 10:22:00 am

Hey DWEDIT, just finished Magic of Schrehazade. Good game, thanks for the fix.

Thought I would ask since it hasn't been asked in what seems like several years if DS download play was being worked on for any DS emulators. Or even possible these days with recent advances in DS programming. Thanks for any insight.

In other thoughts,

LOL, DiskDude, that's a name I haven't heard since like 1996.

When he created the utility to convert our PASOFAMI nes files to INES format, he thought
he would be cute and use the (extra space) in the header file to insert his name. Now everyone had to extract his name out for the goodnes sets and to work in some newer emulators. :)

Dwedit · 2008-03-16 10:32:24 am

If you're asking about Wi-fi multiplayer action, that's one thing. If you're asking about the ability to send an emulator to someone else via Wireless Multiboot, that's not possible. Download Play requires the NDS file to be signed by Nintendo. If you have a DS hacked with Flashme, you can ignore signing, but if you have a hacked DS, chances are you also have a flash cartridge and don't need to ever use DS Download Play.
Wi-Fi multiplayer can either be done over the internet, or system-to-system. I'm not sure how good the wi-fi libraries are right now, since DS FTP completely fails to work for me, but DSLinux's wifi works perfectly. But with multiplayer, you need to introduce lag in order to have multiple systems consume input from a buffer.

I've tried PocketNES's multiplayer once, and it sucks, it crashes a lot. I didn't write any of that code.

Rob Mocca · 2008-03-16 12:15:19 pm

Ah I see, ya Multiplayer AD HOC over short distance was the type I was referring to, unfortunate that its so hard with the DS. I believe the emulators for PSP for SNES/NES and some others support ad hoc now, but the PSP wireless code is better documented or something I guess.

Thanks for the response :)

EFX

Freud · 2008-03-17 4:07:01 am

Thanks for the hint about fixnes. :)

All seems to be good now, although I would like to suggest a possible small change:
If your ROMs are packed with NESPack, they take a second or so to decompress when you select them from the list. This is pretty quick, but it you're trying to scroll the game list all the way down to 'M' from '1', the cursor moves quite slowly past some of the games that take longer to decompress. This makes it take much longer to scroll through the same number of compressed ROMs than it does to scroll past uncompressed ones.

Would it be possible to have like a half second delay or something before decompression starts? Or to detect if you were still holding up or down and not start decompression until you release that key? That way you would get the benefits of smaller sized ROMs, and the list scrolling would be much faster.

I hope that makes sense. ;)

Dwedit · 2008-03-18 7:03:38 pm

Bumping for new version

rememberthe8bit · 2008-03-19 2:19:23 am

Updates to PocketNES GBAMP, Goomba and PocketNES in two days... You're just crazy. :)

Rob Mocca · 2008-03-19 1:20:37 pm

Excellent work, I know how much it can help inspire working on a project when you get feedback from people that actually use it. So here is my " Way to Go! " for the release. :)

I'm using my GBA flashcard on the DS a lot more lately thanks to you! :)

EFX

Peter · 2008-03-19 5:57:17 pm

I hope next version can play Kamen Raider Kurabu (fighting scene) , Ninja Gaiden 3, and Star Wars Namco. Anyway, this is the best NES emulator on GBA so far. Thanks for uploading

Seth · 2008-03-26 8:18:59 am

Just dropping a line to say how flawless this is working on my EZFlash IV on a GBA SP. I played around with it on vba before my flash cart arrived and had some concerns. But after using it on actual GBA hardware, I've had no save problems, no graphical glitches, and no worries. Just perfect NES emulation for my pocket. Thanks for all of your hard work!

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