SNES4ALL Beta-1

I just finish the new beta release of my SuperNintendo emulator for Dreamcast:



It has a very important speed increased and VMU/SD-Card support for Savestates and SRAM. At the future I want to implement a OpenGL/PowerVR tile rendering and assembler PPU code because I think that it is the way for avoid frameskip.

MORE INFO AND DOWNLOADS AT SNES4ALL SITE

In the meantime... SNES4ALL

Fox and me are trying to fix our Motorola 68000 CPU core when STOP+Interrupt happens. I have located this bug and traced it using DCaSTaway but right now Fox needs some time for fixing in FAME/SH4 generator. Guru meditation? DCaSTaway and UAE4ALL releases are waiting this fix.

And now I can not stop, so I am working on SNES4ALL since a few days. The main work is to improve the Marcus Comstedt assembler code for CPU, the sound render and the tile blitters.

I have gotten freeing 2 CPU registers for other uses and speed up using pipeline slots and cache alignment. About the sound render, I have rewrited it using 6 different methods (ALTDECODE based) but needs tune it, and the tile blitters, I am coding (trying really) a new set of blitters for drawing block by block instead by line.

Also, now supports Dreamcast SD-Card for loading ROMS and savestates, but I have to able to write savestate support for VMU yet.

I did it !

Awesome! I have could speed increase (even more) for Dreamcast and Dingoo A320:




A lot of games run very close to full speed and also it support SD cards for savestates and load/save diskimages.

The secret has been disabling the redundant code and getting that it is processing (blitter and render) only exact lines to draw. This has been more easy to say and think than to do it. I have spent years to do it finally because the architecture of Amiga machine is very complex.

Now, I need some time for releasing it because we have found a new bug on FAME Motorola 68000 CPU core. I hope that we can fix it in a few days, almost before of RetroEncounter event at April 9th.

I really love this emulator! It is the most hard that I have worked on it.

Preparing UAE4ALL

For RetroEncounter event, I intend to release a new version of UAE4ALL for Dreamcast and DINGOO-A320.


Right now I have it updated it with latest FAME (our Motorola 68000 core), Dreamcast SD-Card support including savestates and fix some small bugs like dirty sound after loading a savestate. Also Dreamcast version has been more updated because ReleaseCandidate-2 version only was released for Dingoo-A320.

But I will want more (and more) speed and I think that I will get it If I get improved blitter functions. For now I get around 2 fps but It is needed to change blitter functions table too. I hope get 5-7 fps more.

Can I get it?

Neverball for WIZ/CAANOO handhelds

After Craig Copper wrote me about the possibility of porting Neverball to WIZ/CAANOO handheld, I proposed him to open a GoogleCode project because I think that it will not be hard work if we start from the current Dreamcast port that I did it.

The GoogleCode NEVERBALL-GP2X project has been created. Do you want to participate? Visit NEVERBALL-GP2X project home.

Why not for Android too?

The main goal is convert the actual OpenGL-1.2 code to OpenGL/ES code for WIZ/CAANOO/ANDROID.

Open Blog !

I always wanted to open a blog for exposing all work doing, porting and adapting open source emulators for Dreamcast and handhelds like GP32, GP2X, WIZ, CAANOO or DINGOO. I hope that I will have enough time for writing here.

Also I have participated on others open source projects that can be searched at SourceForge and GoogleCode, and I would like continue it.

In my projects homepage can see all emulators (named like %4ALL) that I am working on it: SuperNintendo, Playstation, ZX-Spectrum, etc. But also I am working on GENS/GENS4ALL and others projects of EMUFORGE team.