Something...

Okay...

After about a couple of hours messing with MSVC2008, I came up with something:
For the unenlightened, its a music player based on blargg's Game_Music_Emu. With his patches for cycle accurate emulation. It supports every single format his player support, and it doesn't support DirectSound. I instead used only WaveOut, and so it took a bit of research to do and plug it into a simple libao interface. Not bad huh?

Its available by request. And I am planning a Windows GUI version..too.

MAME...Ugh...

This is my first real rant on here.

Its against one of my major pet peeves. MAME

Now, before MAME fanbois come in to flame me to death about my views, here them 1st.

Okay lets start this rantfest.

1) Developer Attitudes: This is by far the largest pet peeve I have. Before people quote me from the MAME licence. I would like to highlight a previous exchange with someone affiliated with Mamedev in the past. This particular person labelled emulation enthusiasts "ROM kiddiez", soley for using emulators that are different from MAME's cycle accurate approach. Now, this really pisses me off, as it shows the extreme arrogance and disrespect people have. If they didn't have this attitude, I wouldn't be so pissed! And this, is one of the biggest problems with the scene today. In that, there's the whole "accuracy versus speed" debate. Why don't people respect ALL approaches of emulation, rather than be close-minded kooks and cling to thier ways. Afterall, shouldn't we have unity on this planet?

2) Bloat: For instance, the MAME executable weighs in at around 7-20MB. Thats insane, and its a pain in the arse for dial-up users.

3) There is no individual emulators: This means that dedicated emulation is out of the question. Which plainly sucks ass. Two perfect examples of how good dedicated emulation can be is Nestopia and BSNES. No need to continue there. On top of that, you are bound to MAME's code standards and systems. Which again, sucks ass, as there goes flexibility. And all for the sake of cycle and sub cycle accuracy. Way to go....

4) The idiocy with licensing: MAME has a extremely restrictive license. Which stifles innovation. And instead, focuses development on the dogmatic and narrow minded will documenting hardware. Whereas, emulation could be so much more.

5) User friendliness: Need I say more? It looks quite absurd, not to mention, its handling of required BIOSes is utterly terrible....Can go on about SNES emulation with this thing, when with MESS...

6) Game lists: This locks out support for unknown titles. If it is truly a documentation project of hardware, these would be unneeded and irrelevant. Thus, this locks the emulator into ONLY supporting games that MAMEdev desires to be supported. Which is quite idiotic IMO.

7) Lack of modularity: If things were modular, size would be less of a issue. But due to the insistence of locking into specific release builds, size will always be a issue.

Thats enough for now....

Have fun....

Some notes..

1) Source code for NDS FE is there for people to tinker. Basically, its finished, bugs need to be fixed. I am currently too busy with more important things than work on it at this point in time.
2) New VBA-M update. Has more optimizations to the core. Please try it.
3) University has began again. So my spare time has went down a bit. Please keep this in mind when asking about release dates, and this is why things are released when its done. I can't stress that point enough. Plus, I generally do things when I feel like it. So don't pester me for things, as I wouldnt listen.
4) Don't ask for ROMS. Please...

VBA-M and Qt

I managed to get stuck into rewriting the main options dialog of VBA-M.

Oh you don't know what VBA-M is? Well, it is a project aimed of taking all the good bits out of every VBA fork, and sticking them in one, thus, end users no longer have to stuff around with heaps of useless builds.

BTW, as part of this progress, its decided we rewrite the GUI into something a little more flexible for cross platform code: Qt. So far, we have a basic window widget, plus a nice cheat widget too. I am currently working on the main settings dialog, making a tabbed options box with the main options in there. This was done to fix the insane mess in there currently with the *shudders* MFC GUI...

We still have a long way to go, at least it WILL be worth it in the end.

NDSFE Source Code

Okay, decided after a sudden change of thought, the thing's getting open-sourced:
http://vba-m.ngemu.com/personalfiles/ndsfe-src.zip

Licence is in the NDSFE2.CPP file, under a BSD licence. This should allow for a Qt4 port now.

One final thing...

I have managed to slowly, but steadily work more on the firmware editor. One final thing remains. Unicode text input with my hack. If I can get this to work, then the NDS firmware editor will be released in public beta form. Otherwise, I might just disable it for now, and release anyway, until that is done, then release proper. After this, there is plans for a Qt4 GUI, and unfortunately, that involves opensourcing the whole thing...Which I dont want to, as this is special to me...

More updates...

Did some further work on the firmware editor...

Now, the number fields are locked to 2 characters in size. Rather simple

Not to mention, Drag N' Drop works now too for file handling :)
The file input box only accepts filenames with the *.bin extension, so that you don't load the wrong type. Also, there will be bytechecks post release to see whether a file is a real NDS firmware or not. I might need some people to help test it though, and I might need some testers to see if things work alright when release time comes. Which I am hoping to be extremely soon, as I know plenty of people are awaiting this, and I don't want to dissapoint.

Upcoming Glide64

Just thought I'd post some of my experiences with the new Glide64 version.

There are some pretty major updates to emulation. Here's just a few:

* Conker's Bad Fur Day is now emulated perfectly. Yes you heard right: This game, when emulated, now looks 100% identical to real N64 hardware. Considering this is the most technically taxing and impressive N64 game out there, this is saying something.
* YUV texture support. These framebuffer textures are now natively supported. Games like Bottom of the Ninth use this for image representation purposes.
* 32-bit texture support. Needed for the Japanese version of Pokemon Stadium.
* rdphalf microcode commands are emulated. This is used for Perfect Dark and GE 007 sky. Which also means Perfect Dark is, perfectly emulation.
* Not to mention on top of that, full high resolution texture support.

There's loads of other nice things too, but it will take all day to list them....

Recent stuff

Well what can I say? I have been very busy with my personal life and all, yet I still find time to work on things. :)

Here's a little preview of what is my recent work
Not too shabby eh? For those that wonder, this is a Nintendo DS firmware editor. This is written based off a idea Squall made. Of a automated way to edit NDS firmware. Currently I'd say the thing is 80% functionally complete. What is left to do is:

* Add support for Unicode strings (bleh)
* Implement CRC16 modbus calculations on the required data

As you can see it uses Windows XP themes. It does so without requiring a manifest, by embedding the manifest inside the executable. Its also coded in pure Win32 C++, which I am proud of. Sadly though, due to the Unicode routines, I have my doubts this will run on legacy OSes. But thats not that important, considering it runs fine on Vista and XP SP2/SP3...

New post

Finally got a decent blog...Oh my....