Reproducteur/Plug-in de PocketTunes SPC pour palm?

[Kuroshima]

J'ai une Zire71, et malheureusement, j'ai trop d'aplications instalées pour povoir jouer a mes jeux de SNES, mais j'aimerais pouvoir écouter les SPC.

Est-ce que tu has pensé a developer ce soft yoyofr?

[s19locke]

(wishes He knew anythinbg about frecnh so maybe he could help)

[Tinnus]

Hm... I can tell you it's something about LJP, a Zire 71, SNES and "SPC" (which I have heard somewhere but don't rember what it is).

Not that it helped much ;D

(well, usually Z71 + SNES = UDMH...)

...Google comes to the rescue! The post, auto-translated to english (some guesses and fixes by me. Italic means untranslated and underline means a guess):

"I have a Zire 71, and unfortunately, I have too many aplications installed to povoir to play my SNES games, but I would like to be able to listen to SPC. Did you think to develop this software yoyofr?"

Looks like SPC is something that's encoded into the SNES ROMs like the game music and he wants to play it in pocket tunes or something.

[jpolz]

SPC files are SNES sound files. I know LJZ has the ability to play SPC files, but I havn't tried with LJP.

[Kuroshima]

Sorry, I saw the .fr and my brain automatically switched to french mode. As for the translation, you're basically right. I'm asking Yoyofr if he's going to use the SPC engine on LJP to make a stand alone player or a plugin for pocket tunes. I'm checking the sources and it does not seem that dificult to me, since the code seems well written, as long as the plugin documentation of PT is clear and available.

The thing is that I don't want to use UDMH, because it's a paying aplication, and because my intermal memory is already half full with programs that don't run too well from the card...

However, I'm a VGM fan, and I usually have some VGM OSTs in OGG format in my card, to play with pocket tunes. If I could use SPC, not only would I free a lot of space in the card, but I wouldn't have to rip/convert the music...

Anyway, if yoyofr isn't going to do it, I will, eventually. I'm learning to program for the PalmOS platform, and porting the code from SNES9x won't be too far away from my capabilities in a year or so IMHO...

[s19locke]

So that is what the playlist option is for? If he isn't going to implement it why is it there? I guess he has to many other things to do than rewriting LJP to get rid of one small image. well darn then I guess I will take up programming too. is C and C++ so much different fro Visual Basic? I have to take it soon and was wondering if they are similar.

[Tinnus]

(before reading anything, I've been a VB programmer for some years and recently learned C/C++ and I'm learning PalmOS. So I have some background for this.)

s19locke said:

is C and C++ so much different fro Visual Basic? I have to take it soon and was wondering if they are similar.

Read the following word carefully: beware. It really depends on your conception of "Visual Basic". If it is "drag and drop controls on a form", I'm sorry, but C/C++ is completely different. This isn't programming at all really.

Now... if it is "a programming language with this and that feature, where you can do this that way and so..." and you do know VB (the language) well, learning the language (C) itself is easy. Things like variables are concepts that are used in all languages, just in little different ways.

The problem is that VB gives us some bad habits... like auto-completion, don't bother with upper and lower case (C is case-sensitive), and mainly, have a handful of functions always available.

Well, there's the C++ standard library, but...
- You need to know what to include (which function is inside which header file);
- There are some platforms (PalmOS...) which DON'T implement it. So you have to learn a new API;

Heavy differences:
- You need to be concerned about memory management... Pointers are wonderful when you use them. Do something wrong and your program crashes.
- Hard debugging... don't even dream about pausing execution, edit the code, and resume.
- No native strings... you usually use an array of bytes to represent a string in C. There's a string object in the C++ standard lib, but as you know... PalmOS doesn't have it.

Now, to me. I haven't made anything in C/C++ alone and from scratch. Only tutorials and some tweaking with some source code (LJP included hehe). The first time I opened the LJP sources, my reaction was... "dammit I'll never understand that". So wrong. After some time... just a matter of finding the starting point and following the flow of the program. After you've looked at everything you know what each function does... you can find the render function... and you can place some extra render calls there, so poof! there are filters for GB. BTW, LJP is extremely well coded as far as extensibility is concerned. Adding the "glue" between the filters and LJP was a breeze (less than one minute). The "hard" part was figuring out exactly how they work (what to pass to the functions) and making they work under PalmOS (which, you should know, has some limitations. And the two major compilers available - GCC and CodeWarrior - are too paranoid. You take much more time trying to make the code compile than coding really...).

So, if you want to add something to LJP, learn C/C++, do some tutorials for Windows/Linux/whatever with SDL (preferencially one that deals with direct pixel plotting and memory buffers... I followed on of these but I don't remember the URL. I can only tell you that it saved me when I was porting the filters). Then download the LJP sources. And study them. Note that you don't need to look at the sources of the emulators themselves (I haven't touched them) but the LJP specific parts. The files are very well-organized and you should be able to find the pertinent parts... most of the LJP hard work is done in the palmport.c/.h and PNOMain.c/.h files.

Oh yeah, and get CodeWarrior. It's the official environment for developing for PalmOS, it's a lot easier to get something going specially if you're new to it, LJP comes in a CodeWarrior project and it would need A LOT of changes to compile under another compiler. And it's commercial.

GCC is free, but as you see above CodeWarrior's a much better alternative if you can afford it.

(hope you've read it all. I'm getting this bad habit of writing gigantic posts, please sorry me for that...)

[JeremySmith]

Have you been programming in VB and then you're going to learn C or C++? The syntax looks simular (sort of). I learned C++ in school. When I first used VB it drove me crazy! I would do something that is done in C++ (like add a ; to signal the end of the line) and the compiler would instantly tell me I did something wrong. I think you should be able to pick up the basics of C++ fairly quick. From what I understand you can do more complex stuff with C++ than VB so its harder to learn. I don't think VB has pointers (those are fun to learn about and use.) ;D I think I'll stop rambling for now.

[Tinnus]

JeremySmith said:

I don't think VB has pointers

Unfortunately it doesn't. But maybe that'd make VB perfect, and well, nothing can be perfect, right...

(note that you can get the address of a variable in VB, you just can't do anything with it besides passing to API functions)

[s19locke]

Lol that is all over my head. ;D
I meant I am am fixing to have to learn visual basic for my mechanical engineering degree. I was just curious if I tried to learn C/C++ now would I even care for visual basic or if they would be umh cross refrenced. well darn I just found out that you create a form with object and create code for each of the object. Looks Like I better minor in programming instead of business or are these languages easily self taught?

thnx for help I really appricate it

[JeremySmith]

Tinnus said:

Unfortunately it doesn't. But maybe that'd make VB perfect, and well, nothing can be perfect, right...

(note that you can get the address of a variable in VB, you just can't do anything with it besides passing to API functions)

Perfect? Right... ;D I needed a good laugh. Thanks.

[JeremySmith]

s19locke said:

Lol that is all over my head. ;D
I meant I am am fixing to have to learn visual basic for my mechanical engineering degree. I was just curious if I tried to learn C/C++ now would I even care for visual basic or if they would be umh cross refrenced.

If this is the first programming language you are learning I think VB would be easier to learn than C++. Both languages are good and have different advatages to them so I don't think that you would think VB is a waste if you learned C++ (of coarse this is coming from a programmer who LOVES coding and learning new languages so it might be different for you since you're a mechanical engineer.)

I don't know how easily these languages are self taught. For me its easy but I'm also a programmer and have learned a couple of languages. I know there are plenty of resources on the net and books that are designed for people to learn on their own. So maybe. I think it just kind of depends on how your brain is wired and how motivated you are to learn the language.

s19locke said:

well darn I just found out that you create a form with object and create code for each of the object.

Welcome to the world of Object Oriented Programming (OOP)

[Tinnus]

JeremySmith said:

Perfect? Right... ;D I needed a good laugh. Thanks.

Try knowing VB inside out before you say something like this.

[Tinnus]

JeremySmith said:

I don't know how easily these languages are self taught. For me its easy but I'm also a programmer and have learned a couple of languages. I know there are plenty of resources on the net and books that are designed for people to learn on their own. So maybe. I think it just kind of depends on how your brain is wired and how motivated you are to learn the language.

Well, I'm 100% self-taught if that motivates you, s19locke. ;D

Really, once you learn one language, any other is easy. (to be exact, once you learn C/C++ style syntax and phylosophy, any language is easy to learn. That's why VB is good for starting out: it hides from you what C has in its best; at the cost of the ease of use and getting into programming. So, learn VB then C/C++ ;D)

[s19locke]

thnx wow you know this is a really friendly community I wish all other forums were like this no flamming, fanboys, list goes on ... Can't wait till version 0.8 comes out. (geez has this thread has really gone off topic) now if someone could answer my question about the playlist option was it for spc's ande we shall get back on topic

[JeremySmith]

Tinnus said:

Try knowing VB inside out before you say something like this.

Sorry didn't mean to offend anyone. I personally think VB is a good language (that's what I'm using for some of the stuff I'm doing at work.) I just don't think that you can create a perfect language (right or wrong that's my opinion) that can be the best at doing everything (hopefully that makes sense.) As much as I love to talk programming I'll get back to the subject of the original post.

It seems to me that LJP might be able to play spc files at some point. If you click the Help button in the main launcher the Help file talks about spc playback through openspc++. I think that would be pretty cool. And to think I thought the Playlist button would bring up a list of your recently played games. Silly me.

[s19locke]

I don't know you may be right about the Playlist thing. The help just talks about spc being for snes and none of the others and playlist is in every module hmm. I wonder. Going out on a limb, but maybe playlist is to let you load a rom and a save state that applies that rom? Even if it isn't that would be nice instead of launching the game then laoding you save state but I would rather have the gameplay faster than have convieninences

[Skaaj]

I program in Java, codewarrior does not support this I do not think... arrrg

[JeremySmith]

Skaaj said:

I program in Java, codewarrior does not support this I do not think... arrrg

What do you mean? Do you mean Codewarrior doesn't support Java? If that's what you mean that's true because it uses C which is the native language for the PalmOS. They're is at least a couple of Java compilers for the palm. PalmSource lists a couple here www.palmos.com/dev/tools/other_languages.html. If I'm totally off in left field I'm sorry for misunderstanding and I refer you back to my question at the start of this post.

[yoyofr]

LJZ is able to play spc files, so LJP should be too. But I had to disactivate it in order to have it compiling properly. It's something about C++ issue (openspc++ is as you can guess in c++) and new/delete operator.
I'll fix this when I've time.
The "playlist" entry isn't for spc playback, but for the recent launched roms. As it's not so useful and as it wasn't coded too :-) I decided to get ride of it in ljp 0.8
So next version won't have "playlist", but instead a "load" to directly start a game at a given previously saved slot.
A "game genie" entry is planned too in the menu and should be available for the whole 4 systems (gb, nes, snes & genesis).

Regarding pocket tunes plugin, I've already written to pocket tunes dev, but they still need some times before giving the api to third party developers. When it will be released I plan to add mikmod & spc support to pockettunes.

[Kuroshima]

Thanks Yoyofr! I can't wait

BTW, what's mikmod?

[s19locke]

wow now I really can't wait for version 0.8 the game genie option is great and it will be really nice not to load the game and then load the file. err i'm so impatient

[Tinnus]

I'm more anxious for the filters. It would be really great to play SNES with Scale2xSaI if I had a faster device

[JeremySmith]

Yeah for me. I was right about the playlist ;D (not that it matters.)

Anyways about the other stuff Yoyofr mentioned. Holy crap!!! Yoyofr has been busy. I was patiently waiting for the next version of LJP but now I don't want to wait! I know I have to though. Keep up the good work Yoyofr.