LJX development updates

[Tinnus]

Hey there! I've decided to create this thread to post my everyday accomplishments with LJX for those interested, and I suppose it will help me get ideas for solutions to problems and suggestion of new features

You may have seen I updated the website yesterday with the current (er, yesterday's) status, if not, go check www.little-john.net now!

Anyway, now for the (today's) update: got the new port/NES working. Seems like the base execution path in the IDE was setup wrong and the emulator couldn't find the config and ROM files. *ahem*.

Next stop: launcher or SMS? I will continue doing some cleanup while you guys think about it (the idea is to answer here ;D ). If I don't come to any conslusion until I finish cleaning up, the option is to do the launcher.

[Tinnus]

Too late! SMS is already working, with sound and all of the screen modes stuff etc. Amazing how everything just works once you plug the right wires in

[tgwaste]

is it done yet?

[maxer]

Way to go Tinnus!! I havent posted much on the board over the past 6 months, but I have kept an eye out for the latest happenings from time to time ...

Having an official hole to plug all LJX dev updates on is BIG NEWS! ;D

This gives us major hope for an official release of LJX in the (shall i dare say) distant (hopefully not too distant) future!

And something that is long overdue ... A big hearty THANK YOU out to metaview for all of the release candidates he has worked on! I have yet to download and start playing with rc9, but from everything i have read it stands to great! (im so far behind, im still using rc3 myself )

Thank you again to everyone who posts, supports, and brings this app to life ~

Happy New Year!

[samphex]

please try to have the psp interface for the palm. Pretty please. But forget it if palm can not do that.

[maxer]

Tinnus, were you serious about an Easter release? Is that feasable at this point?

[Tinnus]

Not complete, but some working modules (NES and SMS/GG are working, having problems with Genesis) and hopefully a launcher.

All of that for the SDL version though, which will always be the first to have features since I can debug in it

[xavs]

hi, if you need help with testing i ofer you my device, life drive with ir keyboard, and some free time ;D

[_Em]

Tinnus: either I or some people I know would probably be interested in doing an OS X port when you feel ready to release the SDL version
Also: is there any chance of implementing rewind as a feature?

See Mednafen as an example of an open source portable SDL-based emulator that supports rewind.

[Tinnus]

It's not that rewind is implementation-dependant, I think =P

I'll take a look though since I don't have a good idea of how to do that.

[_Em]

Well, in Mednafen rewind is a feature in all emulators, and yet it implements emulator cores that did not have the feature as an individual build. Rewind does require save states, but the actual working out of it is that it just makes multiple save states as you go along. It is possible that there are no POS devices fast enough to implement this feature in a usable way, however.

[Tinnus]

Might as well make it optional, if I ever get around to it.

In the good news area though, Genesis is just fully working, now I'm just sorting out some control issues in the SDL framework (which I seem to have inserted notknowingly).

This is pretty cool though since the Genesis is my personal favorite I'm probably off to 2xSaI-Sonic playing on my TV in some hours

I don't have a HDTV, but playing 4x-scaled-smoothed Sonic on a HDTV sounds VERY cool to me! For now I'll just stick to my regular old tube TV, although it does look a lot nicer than the original in VGA resolution

BTW, one of my reasons for developing a full-fledged PC version of LJ is to have a retro-casemod-pc-plug-in-the-TV-with-retro-controllers-cool-thing to play with I just have Genesis and PS1 controllers though But I'll look for someone that can donate some old SNES controllers and connectors so I can do some PPJoy-hacking done ;D

I'm still out of ideas for the casemod though. I just know I DON'T want it to look like a PC. More like a strange hybrid of all those old consoles (SMS, NES, Genesis, SNES, etc) and have the connections at the front. Any cool ideas?

I have to fit inside a P3 motherboard with a P3-800, RAM, and a Geforce2. So yeah, it has to be tall enough to accomodate the Geforce or I'd have to get VERY good at soldering to rewire an AGP slot Would be good to include the power supply although I could maybe make it external. But I'll probably do internal without the original case so it could fit someplace else ;D

[_Em]

Well... do you have anyone in your area trying to sell an old arcade cabinet? Then you could put the guts down below, your TV in the monitor window, and plug all your devices into the controller deck

As for the AGP slot, you can get adapters that let you mount your card parallel with the motherboard if you want to go that route.

For ideas for your case mod, check this page out:
www.aoaforums.com/frontpage/content/view/1279/32/

[edit]
Here's some better links:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Channelf.png
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console
The first is Fairchild's Channel F, which was the first gaming console to actually call itself a console; I figure the case is big enough to house your stuff

[Tinnus]

That adapter thing should be great, I'll search, thanks

[samphex]

O y by the way, is there any way to connect the palm to a Tv to stream whatever is being shown on the palm? I have like several videos on it. If this is possible maybe it could as well with ljp/ljx?

[tgwaste]

i dont think there is a way to stream from the palm to a tv or the like, ive looked before

[_Em]

You would need to splice your display cable -- definitely doable, but not for the faint of heart. You could also drop your LCD directly on an overhead projector (this would also mean taking your Palm apart).

[tgwaste]

would be awesome for them to come out with an app and a rca cable adapter for the bottom of the phone to do that though

[Tinnus]

I'm not sure how near the bottom pins are to accessing the video data directly though, and a software solution would probably be too slow.

I don't think it would be THAT hard to do a software solution via those pins though, assuming we have a way to control them directly (which, knowing PalmOS, I don't believe much).

[samphex]

there is another solution i thought of and it takes NO skills. Get a camcorder put it on a stand and direct it toward your palm device.

[vilmos]

There are hardware solutions that will project your palm onto a screen. They are REALLY expensive though as they are for boardroom presentations.

I can't remember what company it was, I'll have to take a look and post again. Our company was looking at getting one of them, but the ridiculous price tag stopped us from bothering. It was cheaper to buy a palm for everyone at the meeting.

[countbuggula]

Tinnus, if you're thinking of a fun case mod just to hook up to your TV for media and emulation, you should really look at Mini-itx.com. I had actually started the preparations to build a PC into my old NES case (complete with CD drive in the cartridge slot) with that hardware...and then I got married and ran out of time and money for such projects . Ah, well, such is life. Anyways, cool stuff.

[Tinnus]

My current idea is to make a big mega-zord out of a N64, SNES, Genesis and PS1

[_Em]

Tinnus, I'm not sure if you're using this already, but I just stumbled across sourceforge.net/projects/sdlpalmos/ - SDL for the PalmOS. If you're not using it, I figured it would make PalmOS compilation of LJX a bit easier

[Tinnus]

I wouldn't use SDL in PalmOS, both are far too slow already.

I just use the (still indirect) framebuffer directly.

The basic idea is using SDL for an initial 5min port for a platform, to work out major issues, then going for the specifics, especially for the mobile--PalmOS, WM, PSP, GP2X mainly. In a PC you can mostly go away with the slowness that SDL brings--although the Windows version seems particularly slow... must be the GDI driver, I'll make it use DirectDraw instead and see if it helps. Genesis with 44KHz Z80 sound, 2x scaled by LQ2X still stutters a little if something else runs along with it.

In particular, I think SDL_Wait is implemented wrong in the Windows port. I mean, it should put the thread to sleep, instead of while(current_ticks() < start + delay) which is what it looks like it's doing currently. LJ is always trying to use 100% CPU, and the OS has to force it to sleep when it wants to get other threads some time... while I'm doing a lot of time killing with SDL_Wait.

I'm probably gonna try using some OS-specific function(s) in place of SDL_Wait to see if it gets better.

BTW: Now there's NES, SMS/GG and Genesis working. I think I'll do GB(C) now since IIRC it's good and easy code, so should take not less than 30 minutes. After that I should move on to a launcher, because I'm tired of doing emudata.dat's by hand, and SNES smells like hard Although Genesis smelled worse and I managed to do it.

[_Em]

For GB(C), make sure to test game&watch games in multiple modes (b&w/color, small and with wallpaper)

[Tinnus]

The launcher is zero-ready. Except for the PalmOS one, which has a defined interface

For those who know, the default launcher interface will be similar to snes9x_TYL for the PSP.

One new system I should integrate is TG16. PS1 will be kept in psx4all and GBA is a different story altogether as well since the best GBA emulator we have is still in development too, so I won't use its code inside something else, more likely a specific PalmOS port of it (since all other platforms already have one)

[samphex]

Hey do you think its possible to implement firestorm in it? It has GBA.(Only a few palms can play the gba, and slowly) It sucks right now but you could implement it to increase the "system count"

[Tinnus]

No, and that makes absolutely no sense. Firestorm, apart from being a piece of crap, is closed source, commercial and copyrighted.

If it was for that I'd just get gpSP instead, but I don't want to take other people's WIP and use it. I mean, most of the emulators that LJP is derived from aren't developed anymore.

Anyway, _Em, I've looked at that SDL port thing and it seems it uses prc-tools and peal... and it seems it's very nice too That might get me wanting to try that stuff one of these days and scrap CW altogether--I think a lot of you will like that

(too bad I just lost my data cable AS WELL, after losing the charger months ago )

[tgwaste]

tinnus said:

Except for the PalmOS one

i think this is the only one that matters to about 80% of us.