A7800 5.0 release

[RevEng]

A heads-up that a7800 v5.0 has now been released at github. 

 

Whats new in this release:

• graphical register updates made mid-scanline are now displayed mid-scanline.
• bankset bankswitching support added.
• pokey emulation quality improvements.
• improved lightgun emulation accuracy.
• a7800dev and a7800pdev machine targets added, which display DMA usage per-scanline.
• balanced palette brightness and saturation.
• pokey@800 added for non-banked, supergame, and bankset formats.
• os x build now defaults to opengl video. (bgfx video may not work on recent os x releases)

 

@Trebor and I hope you enjoy it!

 

[+Muddyfunster]

Great stuff, Thanks Mike!

 

[edit]

 

Wow, I just tried this with EXO and the POKEY sound is massively improved! I also love the developer mode showing the heatmap for the DMA per scanline. 

 

 

 

[+Philsan]

Thank you Mike!

[RevEng]

2 hours ago, Muddyfunster said:

Wow, I just tried this with EXO and the POKEY sound is massively improved! I also love the developer mode showing the heatmap for the DMA per scanline. 

Thanks! I'm going to tempt fate and say that all of the testing we've done so far indicates the pokey emulation is 100% accurate, in terms of existing 7800 pokey music anyway, and any slight difference would be due to the signal path outside pokey. e.g. listening through headphones on a laptop is slightly more bright than listening to real hardware over a TV speaker.

 

Thanks for the kind words on the DMA display too. I'm going to mull over what other stuff might come in handy to display in developer mode, and expand it in later versions.

 

Just for the curious, I'll drop a screenshot of the current developer mode display here...

 

 

...the brightness of the bar on the left indicates how much DMA is being used. The yellow lines indicate that scanline has hit the 100% DMA threshold.

 

[Cyprian]

thanks @RevEng

[Synthpopalooza]

This is a major improvement in POKEY emulation.

 

I'm going to run it through its paces in the next few and post results on my test thread, but early tests have shown improvements, with some of my test cases now being 100% to real hardware!  

[mono]

Does A7800 emulate 2 POKEY chips at $450 and $440 at once?

[RevEng]

No, not presently. Unless I'm mistaken, the only target hardware that supports pokey@440+pokey@450 presently is the DF cart. At present I'm targeting cart hardware that games have been released on, or will be released on shortly.

[+Muddyfunster]

@RevEng Mike, is there a command line option for the dma display? (target machine?). 

[Trebor]

NTSC:
a7800 a7800dev -cart /path/to/myfilename.a78

PAL:
a7800 a7800pdev -cart /path/to/myfilename.a78

 

[+Muddyfunster]

Thanks @Trebor!

 

 

 

[Synthpopalooza]

8 hours ago, RevEng said:

No, not presently. Unless I'm mistaken, the only target hardware that supports pokey@440+pokey@450 presently is the DF cart. At present I'm targeting cart hardware that games have been released on, or will be released on shortly.

It's better to improve POKEY emulation first in A7800 before targeting double POKEY in my opinion ... and this release is a major step in that direction.