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New emulator "Felix" - help needed


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I was wondering why Reiko's robot run hangs. It has something to do with Chipper. When the code tries to switch from the intro to the actual game the sound and the Lynx hangs.

There is initialization done twice which is not a good thing. When I remove sound the game works.

 

A closer look at the game code revealed that the interrupts continue operating on the music file even though the content has changed. I wonder why the real Lynx does not crash. It should.

@karri that's an interresting test case. Save it somewhere for investigation :)

 

btw I have funny feeling that most of crashing games should also crash on real lynx but for some reason they don't.

 

When I was writing support for comlynx I was terrorized by the RedEye misbehave and I don't know how it manages to work...

Edited by laoo
11 minutes ago, laoo said:

When I was writing support for comlynx I was terrorized by the RedEye misbehave and I don't know how it manages to work...

We all come to the point to believe that. But actually it is not misbehaving ;)

If properly done, it can even be emulated properly enough to run most of the games.

@sage There is an old saying that if something seems stupid, but it works, then it's not stupid... But I saw the logs what RedEye was doing to comlynx wire and it was anything but pleasing view ;)

Edited by laoo
19 hours ago, laoo said:

@sage There is an old saying that if something seems stupid, but it works, then it's not stupid... But I saw the logs what RedEye was doing to comlynx wire and it was anything but pleasing view ;)

single wire protocol, what do you expect

 

  • 3 weeks later...

Alas!

New release of Felix is out.

And a bigger one, because it's glorious v0.5.0! So we are half way through ?

New cool thing inside. Among others:

  • Shiny GUI powered by Dear ImGui.
  • Having user interface I could implement custom key remapping and add some configuration.
  • There is preliminary gamepad support. Currently not configurable, but we will see how it behaves and what to do next with it.
  • Some bugfixes permits few more games to work.
  • Some debugging features, but it's not visual debugger yet (but hopefully soon).

Please take a look and return with feedback!

 

BTW. I can be reached from tomorrow till sunday in Gdańsk on Silly Venture demo party, so see you there.

 

 

 

  • Like 5
  • Thanks 2
17 hours ago, laoo said:

Alas!

New release of Felix is out.

And a bigger one, because it's glorious v0.5.0! So we are half way through ?

New cool thing inside. Among others:

  • Shiny GUI powered by Dear ImGui.
  • Having user interface I could implement custom key remapping and add some configuration.
  • There is preliminary gamepad support. Currently not configurable, but we will see how it behaves and what to do next with it.
  • Some bugfixes permits few more games to work.
  • Some debugging features, but it's not visual debugger yet (but hopefully soon).

Please take a look and return with feedback!

 

BTW. I can be reached from tomorrow till sunday in Gdańsk on Silly Venture demo party, so see you there.

 

 

 

Can't wait to return home and test it, thanks!

 

Unfortunately at Silly Venture 2021 I will be only a voting sofa scener.

  • Thanks 1
  • 4 weeks later...
On 12/8/2021 at 6:36 PM, laoo said:

Alas!

New release of Felix is out.

And a bigger one, because it's glorious v0.5.0! So we are half way through ?

New cool thing inside. Among others:

  • Shiny GUI powered by Dear ImGui.
  • Having user interface I could implement custom key remapping and add some configuration.
  • There is preliminary gamepad support. Currently not configurable, but we will see how it behaves and what to do next with it.
  • Some bugfixes permits few more games to work.
  • Some debugging features, but it's not visual debugger yet (but hopefully soon).

Please take a look and return with feedback!

 

BTW. I can be reached from tomorrow till sunday in Gdańsk on Silly Venture demo party, so see you there.

Would be possible to include the Lynx icon in the Windows exe file?

Currently I see a generic one.

15 hours ago, Cyprian said:

Would be possible to include the Lynx icon in the Windows exe file?

Currently I see a generic one.

Of course it's possible. I was thinking about it already and there is only one issue: what icon? I can't draw it myself. I also don't want to get anyone angry by taking some icons I like, so as the name of the thread suggests: I need some help with it.

I like stylized "X" used originally (and it's the only common letter ?) but I don't know whether it would be legal. Besides: it's already used on https://atarilynxdev.net. @Igor   what is the status of this icon?

Any other ideas?

 

 

 

I would like to have support for 4 ROM banks in the emulator. Is it there already?

 

Bank 0: CART0 strobe

Bank 1: CART1 strobe

Bank 2: AUDIN + CART0 strobe

Bank 3: AUDIN + CART1 strobe

 

This would be very helpful while I develop my Wizzy game.

3 hours ago, karri said:

I would like to have support for 4 ROM banks in the emulator. Is it there already?

Give it a try. Should work. I've implemented some scheme in analogous way as Handy does it, but I don't remember I had big enough cartridge image to test it.

Attach a screenshot of cartridge's properties windows so I could see how Felix handles it.

1 minute ago, laoo said:

Give it a try. Should work. I've implemented some scheme in analogous way as Handy does it, but I don't remember I had big enough cartridge image to test it.

Attach a screenshot of cartridge's properties windows so I could see how Felix handles it.

Thanks! I am still in the process of writing the driver for the cc65. I do have one 2MB compiled binary. But it did not work on the real cart.

 

Now I have a small batch of 20 carts in production.

 

I did discuss the logic with sage and I believe we agreed of the idea that the AUDIN pin is the highest address pin. So the logic would be:

Blocksize 0 image
Blocksize 1 image

And with AUDIN on
Blocksize 0 image
Blocksize 1 image

 

But obviously my thoughts were wrong. In Alpine Games they extend the memory by using AUDIN to extend every block instead. Sigh...

My guess is that Handy and Felix implements it by extending the block size. Could anybody confirm this?

 

What I do not like in this scheme is that the directory gets split to two ROM areas. Especially as both areas need some strange space for the bootloader before the directory.

12 minutes ago, karri said:

I did discuss the logic with sage and I believe we agreed of the idea that the AUDIN pin is the highest address pin. So the logic would be:

Blocksize 0 image
Blocksize 1 image

And with AUDIN on
Blocksize 0 image
Blocksize 1 image

 

But obviously my thoughts were wrong. In Alpine Games they extend the memory by using AUDIN to extend every block instead. Sigh...

Maybe it's time to allocate some spare bits in LNX header to define banking scheme?

Edited by laoo
10 minutes ago, laoo said:

Maybe it's time to allocate some spare bits in LNX header to define banking scheme?

It may also be my bad dumper program that assembled the file wrong.

My suggestion is to go for one scheme and modify the file dump to match it.

 

The Lynx does not care what the address bits mean. It should be the same with the emulators.

 

PS. I believe that EOTB was using 1024 or 2048 bytes per block for the rom and 64 bytes per block for the RAM for saves.

OMG! I am currently running a "failed" 2MB image on Felix. Without problems. So the error was in my first cart design. I really hope the image works in my next design! At least I have a reference that can play this! Thanks!!!!!

 

Size: (256 + 256) * 2048 B = 1048576 B
Aux Size: (256 + 256) * 2048 B = 1048576 B

AUDIn Used? Yes

 

  • Like 1

I was not able to get a screenshot but it looks like:

Size: (256 + 256) * 2048 B = 1048576 B
Aux Size: (256 + 256) * 2048 B = 1048576 B

AUDIn Used? Yes

 

I can also confirm that Felix uses AUDIN as the highest address pin in the file. Splits at 1MB.

6 minutes ago, karri said:

I was not able to get a screenshot but it looks like:

Size: (256 + 256) * 2048 B = 1048576 B
Aux Size: (256 + 256) * 2048 B = 1048576 B

AUDIn Used? Yes

 

I can also confirm that Felix uses AUDIN as the highest address pin in the file. Splits at 1MB.

Ok, Felix handles whole 2 MB image. Funny thing is I forgot what "Size" and "Aux Size" mean. I got to make it more verbose :)

  • Thanks 1
20 hours ago, laoo said:

Of course it's possible. I was thinking about it already and there is only one issue: what icon? I can't draw it myself. I also don't want to get anyone angry by taking some icons I like, so as the name of the thread suggests: I need some help with it.

I like stylized "X" used originally (and it's the only common letter ?) but I don't know whether it would be legal. Besides: it's already used on https://atarilynxdev.net. @Igor   what is the status of this icon?

Any other ideas?

 

 

 

The LYNX trademark was never renewed by Atari so anyone can use it.

  • 4 weeks later...

I just spent hours looking for a glitch in my graphics the vertical non-graphics lines in the lower screen.

138701132_Screenshotfrom2022-01-2512-39-24.thumb.png.c32a8664fd5adf7ff9540d18d753ee51.png

 

On a real Lynx and on Felix these lines do not exist! But making HFLIP in Mednafen produces random 1 pixel errors for 16x16 tiles.

Thanks for a great emulator.

Felixscreenshot.thumb.png.7bdd748f89656e96647f97b995a220f2.png

@karri This seems like a bug in Suzy sprite drawing loop. It's surprising that Mednafen has such bugs given it's improved upon Handy and I was writing Felix using knowledge accumulated in Handy.

Nevertheless I'm happy to read that and it gives me more energy to continue with version 0.6 that will have visual debugger.

Edited by laoo
  • Like 3

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