Coleco Emulation - What do these games have in common?

[+wavemotion]

 

2 minutes ago, Tursi said:

That's surprising to me... but I guess I don't know what's going on under the hood. However, SSA hits the VDP really hard, especially during the bosses. I wonder if optimizing the VDP draw code might help? Earlier versions of Classic99 had performance hits on heavy VDP software caused by the emulator triggering the screen draw more than once per frame in some cases.. since it was a full frame renderer rather than a scanline based one, there was no point doing so, it just wasted CPU time.

 

I’ve spent the afternoon optimizing the new Z80 core and got back about 15% of my lost speed and that’s enough to keep DDA at full frame rate and makes SSA closer… for now I’ve turned off vertical sync which renders it full frame rate and there isn’t any noticeable tearing with that game (horizontal scrollers like Cosmic Avenger have some minor tearing/screen rendering artifacts which is why I use a vertical sync… but it can be enabled or disabled by the user and for SSA I’ll default to disabled until I can get the new core fully optimized). 
 

I’m through testing about 75 of the original CV games with the new core and its super clean and all running fast enough on the DSi and above. 

[NIAD]

If only I was sitting on a stack of DSi XL systems to sell when the time was right seeing as that time has come!

 

[+wavemotion]

12 hours ago, NIAD said:

If only I was sitting on a stack of DSi XL systems to sell when the time was right seeing as that time has come!

Every time I complete (i.e. get to the 95% satisfaction level) one of these emulators, I treat myself to a new color DSi XL/LL from eBay. 

 

I now have six units (plus my original) - running out of colors

 

I got another round of optimizations in on the new Z80 core - and all known games now run at full-speed with very high accuracy on the DSi and above. 

 

And I updated my mock-cover to include all the classic systems I've worked on for the DS.  You can always keep up with the open-source offerings by searching out 'wavemotion-dave' on github.

 

 

Thanks again for the assistance, folks! You're good people - I'll let this thread fade into the AA annals of history. 

Edited December 23, 2021 by llabnip

[NIAD]

I actually hit the ColecoDS update wall last night and gave myself a timeout!

 

The pace at which you attacked this project and all the version updates makes MicroSoft look like amateurs re their Windows updates. At least with your’s, ColecoDS improved by leaps and bounds… can’t say the same about Windows. ?

 

Will def be checking out your other DS emulators offerings.

 

Thanks and Merry Christmas, Happy New Year… Happy Holidays.

[Tursi]

Congratulations! That's great work

 

[Pixelboy]

There's an error on that DS box: The ESRB rating should be "EVERYONE 30+". 

 

[Bruce Tomlin]

On 12/13/2021 at 7:04 AM, llabnip said:

For example, several emulators trigger MC bankswitching on "hotspot" writes as well as reads - but I think all documentation points to reads only.

There is no read/write signal line to the cartridge, so bank switching hardware has no way to know the difference. Triggering on both ways is correct. (even if nobody actually ever uses writes to the bank switch addresses)

[+wavemotion]

22 hours ago, NIAD said:

The pace at which you attacked this project and all the version updates makes MicroSoft look like amateurs re their Windows updates. At least with your’s, ColecoDS improved by leaps and bounds…

Thanks @NIAD - I appreciate all the feedback both in public and private on this.  I'm not the brightest nor most gifted in this (or any!) space - but an old mentor (now gone) gave me my philosophy of work.  He was a salesman and put thing in his terms:  if person A can make 10 calls and get 9 sales and person B makes the same 10 calls and only gets 1 sale, it is still possible for person B to win a sales contest with person A. How?  While person A makes 10 calls and gets 9 sales... person B will hustle and make 100 calls and get 10 sales. 

 

@Pixelboy - may as well use this as an opportunity to thank you for all you do for the community. Though I realize this year might be a bit different (with some changes in direction for you), your Christmas posts of the past have been legendary!

 

@Bruce Tomlin - Thanks for that... I will make sure the next release triggers on both reads and writes. It should have virtually no impact on the performance of the emulator given the way reads/writes are structured in the code. 

 

Happy Holidays all!

[NIAD]

Great job on the latest release (v4.7) and implementing an alternate z80 core.

 

Edited December 27, 2021 by NIAD

[+wavemotion]

14 hours ago, NIAD said:

Awesome good on the latest release (v4.7) and implementing an alternate z80 core.

Thanks NIAD - of course to keep you perpetually one revision behind, I have released V4.8

 

No Colecovision changes, but I added SG-1000 support (and SC-3000 and the DahJee RAM expander for the few bootleg games that need it). Of course that would be more exciting except most of the better SG-1000 games have already been ported to the CV (as the hardware is virtually identical with just modest changes in IO/Memory mapping).  Of course Team Pixelboy graciously releases 9 more SG games on Christmas Day - the day after I added SG-support. Had I known, I'd have just taken a nap instead

[youki]

Just a question , i did not try ColecoDS since years now.  but years ago i had noticed it did not support  the undocumented Bitmap/Text mode  , i used for my  games.

 

That's a mode like the bitmap mode ,  but where you have only one Color Table and one one Pattern Table for 256 chars instead of 768

 

The result on ColecoDS was that the game worked , but only the top of the screen was colored (line 0 to 63).

 

 

 

[+wavemotion]

Hi @youki - the baseline version of ColecoDS I started with did not support the "undocumented" VDP modes very well. That has been fixed with the new Pheonix-Edition. With the new Z80 core and the VDP fixes, I have yet to find a game that won't run correctly. Before those changes, there were a number of games that looked wrong/weird or only had the top third of the screen showing correctly.  But that should all be fine now. 

[NIAD]

1 hour ago, llabnip said:

Thanks NIAD - of course to keep you perpetually one revision behind, I have released V4.8

I refuse to update! Nope, not gonna do it. Never, never, never!!!

 

Oh, snap, did you say SG-1000 and SC-3000 with the DahJee RAM Expander support? ?