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7800 Emulation is horrid


liquid_sky

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grrrrr.... i was an avid atari 7600 gamer. my system bit the dust back when i was younger and i didnt realize i should have cept it so i sold it at a flea market (the on/off switch broke, you know how it like clicked down and stuck then you pushed it again and it popped back out? well it never stayed down). now i realize how bad i miss my baby so i looked up 7600 emulation, found out all there is is MESS. i download mess, and the atari7600 rom.. whoever did this BLASPHMEY of a coding job should be shot. the colors are all horribly wrong, i didnt remember pole pos. 2 being black and pink.. not to mention the score never seems to work, the framerate makes me sick, im an a high-end come i would expect better than 6 f-in frames a second. if i knew was i was doing i would make a better emulator, but until then i am going to play my 2600 and wish i wasent so stupid as a kid. At least the 2600 emulation community has a true love for the games and isnt just interested in emulating more than one console

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Hmmm..this is confusing me..

 

I run the Mess emu for my 7800 emulation and while it is sorta a pain to get working...it does work..and really well. I am using a Celeron 300A at 450 and only 192mb of ram. The colors are fine...and the gameplay is smooth. Only game I have issues with it Choplifter...and I suspect a bad dump in my hands for that.

 

So...please be more specific and perhaps we can assist you getting the 7800 emulation working.

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the problem is a hard one to explain... the colors pop in and out of good and bad, like in pole pos, if i make a sharp right turn the colors turn normal, but then it goes back to this weird pallette... and as for choplifter, i actually had the cartridge and it did what you describe, like when you start going right everything goes really really blocky.. thanks for the help.. i have tried messing with different resolutions and i still get the weird pallette.. i tried 256 and 16 color bit modes, i have more success with 256 color, im proud i have xevious working now, so i guess mess isnt all that bad

 

p.s.. it was late at night, i dunno why i called it the 7600 in the first post :P

 

[ 06-09-2001: Message edited by: liquid_sky ]

 

quick note.. i try to take screenshots of the weird pallettes and it takes screenshots that look normal

 

[ 06-10-2001: Message edited by: liquid_sky ]

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Hello,

 

I'm the one who did this "BLASPHMEY of a coding job"

 

There is a good reason there is only one 7800 emualtor, this system is a pain to emulate and there is very little tech info out there on it. I got the tech info for the system a few years ago and passed it onto two other people to write the emu (since I had to many other projects on my plate), but in the end, ended up doing it myself.

 

Altough I say it myself, I think they quality of the emulation is quite good considering what I had to work with. Colors are always a big problem since with console systems there is rarely an objective way of determining "correct" colors. The only way to really do it is to observe the real game, determing the curresponding color code in the emulator and tweak it until it looks correct. This is a VERY tedious process.

 

As for the frame rate in MESS, 6fps seems a little low to me unless you have a really old computer. The 7800 emulation does require a pretty hefty machine to run at full speed (the video system is quite complex to emulate), but it should run ok on even an average system by todays standards.

 

"At least the 2600 emulation community has a true love for the games and isnt just interested in emulating more than one console"

 

I DO have a true love of the games, and the machine. Most of the systems in MESS are maintained by a single person, so each does get personal attention even though they are all in the same program. People often ask my why I stopped writing my standalone 7800 emu and moved to MESS. For a programmer it's quite simple. MESS provides the entire infrastructure for writing an EMU so I can conentrate of just coding the emulation and not have to worry about all the details of handling video modes, sound cards, file loading, differnt type of controllers, etc. Plus by putting it in MESS I get automatic cross platform support. My standalone was great if you where a PC user, but you were out of luck if you had a MAC.

 

Dan

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out of all things, it was my video card that was making my fcolors go bad. i just bought a new nvidia tnt2 and everything looks great now. i guess i was just pissed at the time and i was gettin z26 to work. and my low framerate. i dunno what was causing that low framerate but i can get a good rate now. thanks for the help everyone, and mr 7800, sorry for getting so angry, although command line isnt my fave, i did get mess32 and i feel a little more at peace with my inner bankswitching of a mind.... you might want to add that liner (sp?) accelerated trident video cards are incompatible with mess.

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I would just like to add my $.02 and tell Dan that I think it's wonderful that he decided to move over to MESS. I'm an avid Mac user and it irks me everytime a new emulator is announced for "the dark side" with no ports announced (or more often, impossible to make due to assembly and DirectX code) for the Mac.

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Dan,

 

Are the bankswitching modes that are used on the Activision carts a pain? I can only assume that is the last hurdle preventing the last 10% or so of the carts to be playable on the emu.

 

Has there been any development on the 7800 driver in Mess? It has been awhile and so I was just curious. Doesn't matter a lot to me..as I can just play the stuff on my actual 7800 here. But it would be nice to know if Tank Command and some othe other games are worth the prices they command on Ebay sometimes before just getting them and being disappointed.hehe..

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-^Cro§Bow^- brought up a good point. many people view emulation as a way to get free games. i view it as a way to preserve gamesfrom wear and tear, an interactive museum in a way, and a try before you buy thing. its like going out and renting a game before you decide if you want to buy it or not

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I used to think that way about emulation. I used to think, hey, cool, I can get free s*it.

 

Nowdays, after I have realized that this is wrong, I have moved more into the appreciation of classic games. My rom collection no longer grows in leaps and bounds but rather, with what I can't find, or have always wanted. It's more that fact that I can't afford to buy anything (I'm only a poor, starving student), and emulation is a way to sort of capture what I missed as a child, and now as a broke, destiture student.

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Dan,

 

quote:

Colors are always a big problem since with console systems there is rarely an objective way of determining "correct" colors. The only way to really do it is to observe the real game, determing the curresponding color code in the emulator and tweak it until it looks correct. This is a VERY tedious process.


 

I've used an other way to determine the SECAM palette fot Z26.

This requires a little hardware, but allow to have the most accurate color palette almost easely.

 

I've plugged my VCS into the capture video card if my PC, i've taken screenshots of games with a screen capture shareware then I've used paintshop pro to determine the color palette.

 

hope this might help

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  • 4 weeks later...

It simply fell victim to time. When 7800 Klax was ready Atari had all but stopped the support on the 2600, and 7800 by then. I guess they figured there wouldn't be a point to it not to mention they would have rathered focused most of the money and attention to the Lynx and Jaguar by then.

 

I wonder why it hasn't been released lately? I would expect the DP guys or somebody to get this setup and release the game officially in limited quantities.

 

Oh well...perhaps next years CGE?

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