palmdoogie
Junior Member
Re-living the 80s
Posts: 66 
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Post by palmdoogie on Jul 30, 2009 23:47:33 GMT 1
Well, part of the "Lite-Ness" for me was to combine all of the things I use into one launcher. The other part of the Lite-Ness was to greatly simplify the user interface and the number of screens you have to deal with. As of now there is just one launcher screen, one config screen, and one about screen. I've replaced the popup menu for the systems into what looks like a tabbed browser with large buttons on the side of the Rom List window. I'll tease you all with some screen shots very soon. I wish there was a good way to capture screenshots on the Palm instead of having to use a digital camera. I can't seem to find a Tungsten ROM for the Palm OS Simulator. I have a Zodiac ROM, but the UI colors don't look the same as they do on a real unit. I'm wondering if there's a way to extract a rom from one of my T|Ts to use with the Palm OS Simulator that comes with CodeWarrior...
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palmdoogie
Junior Member
Re-living the 80s
Posts: 66
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Post by palmdoogie on Jul 30, 2009 23:52:50 GMT 1
... Oh yeah, the Mame Module has also been lightened. Instead of the Ten modules each being about 3MB, I have only one module that is about 2.3MB. It has drivers for the most popular of the 8-bit CPU based games of he early to mid 80s. Most of the 16-bit and later games run sluggishly on the Palm anyway(Even on the T|T3 at 400MHz). Besides the ROMs selection thing, I still have to fix the code so that I can use a zipped Mame Module like the other LJP modules...
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Post by haisook on Jul 31, 2009 10:58:38 GMT 1
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Post by haisook on Jul 31, 2009 22:39:48 GMT 1
Hey palmdoogie, I was thinking, may be you could look at the source code of Phoinix [http://phoinix.sourceforge.net/] and implement the touchscreen support? Would this be difficult to implement? It's done beautifully in Phoinix; it makes playing some games, especially the non-action games, a wonderful experience. The Palm buttons are really uncomfortable. Here is a direct download to the source of the latest version of Phoinix: sourceforge.net/projects/phoinix/files/phoinix/v.1.4.2/Phoinix-1.4.2.tgz/downloadI'd owe you my eternal gratitude if you did it. I use the not-so-OS5-friendly Phoinix only because of this great feature (although to be honest, the program is neat in all aspects). Would like to hear your opinion about this.. |
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Post by cecilyen on Aug 7, 2009 5:34:32 GMT 1
Don't take SNES emu module away! Please~~~~~  SNES is one of my favorite console and runs ok on my T3. |
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Post by haisook on Aug 7, 2009 13:04:42 GMT 1
Don't take SNES emu module away! Please~~~~~ SNES is one of my favorite console and runs ok on my T3. SNES requires a lot of workarounds to get it to work, even on my T5. Even with UDMH, dbcachetool, and all the suggestions here. I stopped trying. This lite version is well,.. light. A SNES compatibility would ruin the whole idea of the program. You'd be better off with the full LJP, I guess. |
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Post by haisook on Aug 7, 2009 22:19:07 GMT 1
Well... so what's up palmdoogie?
Any news?
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Post by beavis on Aug 8, 2009 7:53:30 GMT 1
Hi palmdoogie. I'm curious about a certain aspect of PalmMAME integration into LJP-Lite. Vilmos has stated that PalmMAME cannot utilize game state saving and loading due to the version of MAME it is derived from. I'm guessing that the answer is still no, but is there any possibility of game saves in your version?
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Post by haisook on Aug 17, 2009 20:54:23 GMT 1
Hello? Anyone home?
palmdoogie?
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Post by ddddyyyy on Aug 19, 2009 8:13:45 GMT 1
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palmdoogie
Junior Member
Re-living the 80s
Posts: 66
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Post by palmdoogie on Aug 19, 2009 20:29:22 GMT 1
Um. OK no idea where the previous post came from, but here's an update and a response to some of the above posts:
1. Coder12: I got ZGrab and it's mostly what I'm looking for, but It won't grab a screenshot from a running armlet apparently. No huge deal, but Id like to show my new beltbar. I could always just grab the bmp resource and post it...
2. Haisook: Not really familiar with the touch screen aspect of Phoinix. How does it work? As far as straight B&W over the sepia recreation of the original gameboy "Spinach Green" display, that is a good idea. I could not get the color selection option working, but I tried directly manipulating the palette to try and colorize games, but the colors that looked good for one game looked funny on another. I tried to make Super Mario Land look good with green grass, blue sky, red mario uniform, etc, but other objects looked funny and other even mario games use the palatte differently and looked funny. So, I'm probably gonna scrap that idea and allow for pure grayscale option instead. I actually implemented the color as an "easter egg" you get to by pressing both A and B buttons and then resetting the machine.
3. Cecilyen: Sorry, but SNES is long gone. It had a lot of overhead, is difficult to get working smoothly on all but the fastest units (Like the T3) and in my opinion, just doesn't translate to the small palm screen very well as most games have more fine detail that makes it less pleasant to play on the small screen. You'll probably want to stick with the full LJP.
4. Beavis: Sorry, I saw in the code where the state saving and loading was commented out because it wasn't fully implemented or working in MAME 0.37 yet. I'm not sure I'll be have the time to get this working as I have really REALLY pared down the source code for the MAME module. See below...
5. MAME Update: Wow, my PMAME Lite got out of control as I was striving to get this module to under 2MB. I got it down to 1.2Mb, but heres whats left for now: Only the drivers with the most commonality were kept for now which includes Z80 and 6502 based units with only the most common sound generation chips. This brings the driver list down to about 40 drivers with no clones, so that really means 40 mostly unique games (except for the fast that, say, centipede, and millipede are basically the same game, and pacman and ms pacman etc...)
What I'm really doing is removing ALL of the JUNK that the palm platform has no need for like alternative rotations (ie thingytail mode) and non existent keyboard LEDs; as well as things I don't need in a Lite version (Like game history .dat file support, artwork, etc). When I finish with the slicing and dicing, I'll try to add in drivers that don't add much overhead(ie clones and drivers that don't add new CPUs or Sound chips). I got the best bang for the KByte out of the Z80 and 6502 based games for now.
Screen shots WILL follow, I just need a little more time and possibly a way to capture from the armlets themselves. On an unrelated note, since I've changed so much of the sources of both LJP-Lite and PMAME as well as some distinct changes to the UI of the launcher, I'm considering renaming LJP-Lite to something else, although I'll definitely give credit to LJP-Lite and PMame in my about screen. Hopefully this won't offend the original creators of each app...
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palmdoogie
Junior Member
Re-living the 80s
Posts: 66
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Post by palmdoogie on Aug 19, 2009 20:34:13 GMT 1
Wow! The autocensor for the forum changed C**ktail Mode into thingytail mode; Hilarious  |
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Post by haisook on Aug 20, 2009 15:20:09 GMT 1
<...and I was wondering what 'thingytail' actually is..> Well, palmdoogie, nice to hear back from you. The B/W GB color theme is fine, much better than that brownish one. I don't know how the touchscreen works in Phoinix. I thought the source code could help. As to taking screenshots, try my suggestion in a post above. May be it would work. If not, a camera shots would do.  Anyway, keep up, and good luck. |
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Post by haisook on Oct 27, 2009 3:32:40 GMT 1
Ahem..
Umm..
Any news?
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Post by countbuggula on Oct 30, 2009 17:24:34 GMT 1
It's died right along with the PalmOS. I still use it, only because Sprint would force me to get a plan twice as expensive as what I'm currently on just to upgrade to a newer phone. Aside from a few sticklers like myself, PalmOS no longer has a user base strong enough to support any sort of software development. As much as it saddens me, the future is in the iPhone, Android, and if we're lucky, WebOS.
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Post by haisook on Oct 31, 2009 12:28:16 GMT 1
But I thought indie developers would not easily give up, especially that in this case, palmdoogie was making it as a treat for himself. So I thought he'd really make it..
Oh well..
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Post by luckyluke on Nov 5, 2009 11:46:08 GMT 1
Well, I wonder how many LJP users are still there. Somewhere in my data stuff a VirtualBox image is placed with Win2k, CW and the newest LJP sources (by me) in it. Would it be worth? What do you think? Would enough users be happy if I dig the image out and do a last thing on LJP?
What I may try to do (by small chances):
- Creating a basic preference dialog with the most preferences hidden away and set to default values
- Stripping away stuff to decrease the size of the launcher application
What I will NOT do:
- Creating new emulation modules for LJP or fixing bugs on the old ones
- Working further on the Wiimote support; I think it works well enough now; What do you think? Well there are still nasty bugs like that preferences are only applied after a device reset on some older OS 5 devices. But I don't own any of these devices so I can't work on this really.
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Post by beavis on Nov 6, 2009 3:36:48 GMT 1
Count me in as one of the long time, current, and into the future LJP users. I think there are still a lot of LJP and Palm users who have not jumped ship and will not jump as long as the device is useful enough to carry around.
That is very gracious of you to offer to do a few more fixes. If I may offer a suggestion?
This doesn't seem like a big thing to me, but I'm no programmer so I may be totally wrong. It's somewhat related to the Wiimote. The BGP100 gamepad support is sorely lacking any button configuration. I thought perhaps some of the code for the Wiimote configuration could be used for the BGP100 gamepad button configuration?
Thanks for listening; you may be our last hope, luckyluke!
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Post by luckyluke on Nov 7, 2009 0:35:00 GMT 1
Well, the image is working and still contains the newest source codes (by me).
Now I have some questions about your opinion:
What do you think can be stripped away?
Things which make the launcher application big:
Mod playing in the launcher? (~ 300kB)
Images of emulated systems? (~50kB)
Many beltbars to choose? (~ 30kB)
Other stuff?
Which preferences do you think do we really need and which not?
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palmdoogie
Junior Member
Re-living the 80s
Posts: 66
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Post by palmdoogie on Nov 7, 2009 1:32:47 GMT 1
Hello All, Sorry about the lack of updates. Work got super busy and I'm also finishing building my house in my "spare time". LJP lite is NOT dead, however! The PMame-Lite module works and has about 30-40 games I think. I still need to implement a belt-bar in MAME and fix the belt bar in the LJP modules. I kind of got rat-holed in some scaling stuff I was trying to do, but now that the project has sat, I realized I should just leave the scaler thats already there as it's good enough. I do want to add back in some of the Zod stuff. Now that the winter rains are coming upon California, I can spend some time again. Funny that LuckyLuke brings up Virtual Box running W2K as about two months ago, I moved my development environment from a BootCamp Win XP setup to a Virtual Box W2K drive image so that I can use my MacBook Pro with SD Card Reader for quicker turnaround  One thing on screen shots, Anyone know a tool that can take screen shots WHILE one of the emulator modules is running? Zgrab seems to only work for the launcher environment. Zgrab can't grab a screen shot while an emulator is running from what I can tell... |
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Post by luckyluke on Nov 7, 2009 14:08:00 GMT 1
Nice to hear that you are still plan to work further on your LJP version, Palmdoogie! Win2K I think is the best operating system Microsoft ever created since it is quite powerful while using only few hardware resources. Growing problem is the lack of driver support. For example I just bought a AMD HD4350 graphic card and had to "upgrade" my natively installed Win2k Prof. to XP Home. (Prof. > Home) :-( Anyway Win2K runs still pretty fast and well in a Virtual machine. So I can use CW and some other Win32 only stuff while running Linux. About the screen shot stuff: We could build a screen shot tool into LJP. Everytime the user presses a specified key a function is called. This function then "simply" copies the content of the display window in a bitmap file on the SD card. ZGrab saves the screenshots as PNGs which is nicer, I know but this we could add later on. I'll give it a try. Edit:  screenshot made of LJP 1.2wiimote4 + screenshot support; GB; Pokémon About the screenshot tool until now: - works stable and quite quick - saves a screenshot of the current screen into "/LJP-screenshot.bmp" on the first card (may be the internal; but should be the SD card on most devices) - It's a 24bit uncompressed bitmap file => 300KB at 320x320 resolution - can be invoked pressing the power button (it is still hard coded) - can't be invoked in the ingame menues of LJP (yet) - Source code is mainly spread over one additional C and a header file - Small changes (~5 lines) to PNOMain.h were done Palmdoogie, if you are interested I'll upload the two files and describe the change done to PNOMain.h. |
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palmdoogie
Junior Member
Re-living the 80s
Posts: 66
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Post by palmdoogie on Nov 9, 2009 22:22:12 GMT 1
Hi LuckyLuke, Sure, I'd love to try the screenshot code! Just link me to where I can download it. I plan on resurrecting my LJP-Lite work this week and would love to upload some screenshots so that you all can see what I've been working on three out of the last 6 months(work kind of tapered off in August as other things came up...). Thanks for the help |
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Post by luckyluke on Nov 9, 2009 23:57:31 GMT 1
You're welcome! lukas-grundmann.de1.cc/Stuff/LJPScreenShotAdd.zipI hope I've not forgotten anything! Have a look at HowTo.txt and on the code if you like. If you have questions feel free to ask here or over E-Mail. (I included the address in the howto) |
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Post by vilmos on Nov 20, 2009 19:36:17 GMT 1
PalmMAME actually has a screenshot button you can use if you took the latest sources. You would have to config a button to the screenshot button and then it will put an image on the card for you when you use it. PalmMAME did already have a beltbar sort of thing, although you may have sacrificed it already. Oh and the Zodiac optimizations for PalmMAME make it way faster, and if you use ZodMAME there are other optimizations as well. |
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Post by luckyluke on Nov 20, 2009 23:57:24 GMT 1
Well I see that I spend some hours to much time on coding the "copy screen content to bitmap file" function if there had already been ARM/Palm OS code open sourced for that purpose. Yeah doesn't matter since nuts happens. It's ok.
I've taken a look at the download times of LJP 1.2 wiimote 4. Taking them as indicator the interest in LJP decreased obviously. For the at most amount of 200 users LJP 1.2 wiimote 4 should really be enough what Yoyo, Tinnus, Metaview, Palmdoogie and I made so far. But the bigger problem I see is following: I asked for the public opinion which preferences/stuff can be stripped away from the launcher or are the not so important ones. Nobody answered. This show two things in my eyes:
- The interest in LJP dropped dramatically.
- I´m supposed to decide.
Well let me decide. I like preferences. I like being able to choose between some offers and to have a flexible game experience. I´ve a 4GB SD card and so for myself it´s regardless if LJP uses 32MB or just 1MB. I mostly use only the Gameboy module of LJP and this is working perfect on my Centro. I have great FPS with sound, auto skip, smooth scaling and even Wiimote support. You see in my own opinion LJP is just great and satisfied. This is my decision.
Well I´m just a little bit upset and had to speak it out. I really hope I didn't annoy anyone with this post.
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Post by mrpropre on Nov 29, 2009 18:41:15 GMT 1
I own a zodiac, so I would say that all zodiac specific stuff is under interest But I don't pay much attention for the beltbar stuff. The interest in LJP dropped dramatically because there is no news since a long time... I am sure that if someone can bring it further, a lot of sleeping users will come! |
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palmdoogie
Junior Member
Re-living the 80s
Posts: 66
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Post by palmdoogie on Dec 15, 2009 1:04:20 GMT 1
I've gotten back to LJP-Lite, although it has a new name: GameDog! Don't ask why, it came to me in a dream  I reverted my pMAME Lite module as I had reduced it down to only 37 base ROMs (Not including clones). My goal is to stick with 50 Parent ROMS and later add back in anything that doesn't require additional machine support. I plan on posting screen shots within the next week and If I can clean up the MAME integration, I'll post a Beta over the holidays. Sorry about the Looooong Hiatus, the last 6 months got real busy... |
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Post by haisook on Dec 15, 2009 21:58:52 GMT 1
Thanks palmdoogie! GameDog,... I think it's not bad! I wonder if you could as well fix some bugs in the original LJP, like 1. autofire not getting saved per game, and 2. no color schemes in GB non-color games. |
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Post by blackylol on Dec 22, 2009 8:00:41 GMT 1
I'm a Palm T|T user, and I can wait for a release >.<.... I hope to c snes in ljp asking less than 12mb, its annoying delete apps to play snes, and when I stop playing it only used like 5MB D: . Are you going to release the app soon? i want a xmas present xD
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palmdoogie
Junior Member
Re-living the 80s
Posts: 66
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Post by palmdoogie on Dec 24, 2009 10:37:46 GMT 1
I'm a Palm T|T user, and I can wait for a release >.<.... I hope to c snes in ljp asking less than 12mb, its annoying delete apps to play snes, and when I stop playing it only used like 5MB D: . Are you going to release the app soon? i want a xmas present xD Hmmm, truly sorry to disappoint you, especially at XMAStime, but the SNES module has been stripped out of LJP-Lite(AKA GameDog). It really has too much overhead especially for an original T|T. All of the specialty hardware in the SNES requires a lot of code to emulate, and the speed requirements are pretty heavy. GameDog only has the Original NES, GameBoy, Sega SMS, Atari VCS(not very good quality), and (New!) a MAME-Lite module which supports about 50 base ROMs(Mostly old 80s 8-bit classics.) In addition, I've greatly reduced the configuration screen down to a single prefs panel. I hope to post screen shots soon, but I'm also trying to finish construction on a house on my holiday. Bear with me. I hope people will still be interested by the time I finally release. BTW, this is my first AND last Palm project. My hope is to Port or really Re-Create this app for the iPhone/iPod touch and continue development on that platform. I figure after the PAIN of developing for Palm and with CodeWarrior, developing for OS-X with X-Code will be a joy |
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I reverted my pMAME Lite module as I had reduced it down to only 37 base ROMs (Not including clones). My goal is to stick with 50 Parent ROMS and later add back in anything that doesn't require additional machine support. I plan on posting screen shots within the next week and If I can clean up the MAME integration, I'll post a Beta over the holidays. Sorry about the Looooong Hiatus, the last 6 months got real busy...