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dantheman
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 Posted: Tue Jul 10, 2007 2:02 am Post subject: New Genesis emu for the DS out - jEnesisDS |
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From the GBAX coding competition comes a new Genesis emulator for the DS - jEnesisDS. From my limited testing (with only 1 game I might add), it seems to run at fullspeed at the moment with no frameskip, though like PicoDriveDS, sound is disabled. It runs at full speed because it uses a hardware renderer much like SNEmulDS does in order to speed things up, at the cost of potential graphical glitches. A slower software renderer has been made but is not enabled in the released build (the option doesn't do anything).
For the record, PicoDriveDS uses a software renderer, which is why scaling is possible and why frameskip has an effect.
The only download I can find at the moment is from the GBAX page. Go to http://gbax.gp2x.de/gbax2007.html and find the entry for jEnesisDS to download it. Patch with DLDI and enjoy.
Also make sure you read the ReadMe file to find out what options to mess with if a game does not boot. |
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Covarr
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| Posted: Tue Jul 10, 2007 3:54 am Post subject: |
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Blast processing are...
GO!!!!!
This is seriously awesome.
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dantheman
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| Posted: Tue Jul 10, 2007 4:18 am Post subject: |
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He made a couple of posts at DCemu that may be interesting:
This first one is in response to someone mentioning that "Pirates! Gold" did not work:
| Lordus wrote: | This made me kind of wonder, because i know i've tested that game, so i looked into it and found out, that somehow i stupidly compiled the version i submitted with an older version of my cpu core.
I guess that my "real" current version should boot about 15-20% more games.
I am a bit too lazy atm to release a fixed version, as i didnt sleep very much lately, but i might in the next days. |
I then asked about how the layers worked with the hardware emulation, and how much the software renderer would be expected to slow things down:
| Lordus wrote: | It would be a lot easier, if the DS had 8 BGs on ONE screen. The Genesis just has 2 layers, but there are also 2 problems: It has per tile priority and can address 2048 tiles, while the DS can just address 1024 per layer.
So i am already using all 4 DS layers to make up for the per tile priority and dynamically map Genesis tile indices to DS ones. This process is not perfected and if you encounter glitches, its most likely, that the game used more than 1024 unique tiles in a layer. But i am working on improving that of course.
The software renderer slows down quite a bit. Most games run "fullspeed" with a frameskip of 1-2. When the SW renderer is enabled ill also include an option to adjust frameskip. |
Just some food for thought. |
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Metroidy
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| Posted: Tue Jul 10, 2007 4:28 pm Post subject: |
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Tried Sonic and Rocket Knight Adventures and both run at full speed 
Flink didn't boot  |
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Granville
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| Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 8:48 pm Post subject: |
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Is this the author?
http://www.workingdesign.de/projects/jenesisds.php
How did they get it to work with NO$GBA? No I still haven't got my flashcard so I can't play it on my DS.
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dantheman
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| Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 9:25 pm Post subject: |
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Yeah, that's the author. He probably used the FCSR method to create a built-in filesystem that works with the FCSR DLDI file. I tried it myself, but I could never get the image creation to work. It failed whenever it tried to inject my Sonic 3 game, which is the only one I have.
There's instructions on the PHWiki page for SNEmulDS if you're interested.
EDIT: strange... it didn't work when using DLDIrc to speed up the process, but it did work when manually creating the image. Well regardless, Sonic 3 doesn't work in no$GBA even when the FCSR image creation succeeds. |
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GoopyMonkey
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| Posted: Thu Jul 12, 2007 7:06 am Post subject: |
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This works absolutely perfectly, albeit a few graphic errors, for Sonic the Headgehog 1 and 2. With VSync off, it can go up to 81 frames per second on Sonic 2.
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dantheman
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| Posted: Mon Jul 16, 2007 2:09 am Post subject: |
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New version out that increases compatibility and also adds software rendering (through a separate binary though).
The only place I could find it was http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=68175 as the author's page doesn't have it listed. I've mirrored it at http://dannysied.googlepages.com/jEnesisDS0.4a.zip for convenience.
I'm glad he added software rendering, as Sonic 3 kept freezing on me at this one stage, which the software renderer fixes, though you have to set the frameskip at 3-4 to maintain full speed. Other areas of the game only require 2-3 frameskip to maintain full speed.
Here's what he said at DCEmu:
| Quote: | As promised, here is the updated version with the newer cpu core.
I decided to split the HW and SW renderer versions, because it makes my life a bit easier...
The SW renderer version is included as a separate binary in this release and features 2 different scaling types:
"Jitter" might look better for action games, "Blend" mostly makes text more readable.
There is also a new option in the HW renderer: Force Update
If enabled, it reduces the chance of tile corruptions, but can also lead to massive slowdowns, if a game updates more tiles than the DS can handle in rapid succession.
So "off" is basically faster. You can however switch to "on" temporarily, if the tiles got corrupted to force a one-time update (Viewpoint).
Hope you like it |
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Hypershell
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| Posted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 9:39 pm Post subject: |
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I wonder if it's at all conceivable to run a Genesis emulator with sound on the DS? I have no idea if that'd even be possible or not. The concept's great but I hate playing muted games.
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Granville
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| Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 8:17 am Post subject: |
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Emulating sound is hard in Genesis, but he said he'd try. It's a good start. And I would be grateful you have an emulator this good even without sound. If you are that mad, go download some Genesis tunes and play them on an ipod or something while you play the games. Crude, but it's about all you got for now.
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tepples
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| Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 1:30 am Post subject: |
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Would it be too hard to map the legacy SMS tone generators onto the DS tone generators to give at least some sound?
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sblur
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| Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 2:51 am Post subject: |
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| tepples wrote: | | Would it be too hard to map the legacy SMS tone generators onto the DS tone generators to give at least some sound? |
I think it would be.
Don't you only have access to those in GBA mode? Hence why loopy couldn't port the PocketNES sound core to NESDS? |
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Guspaz
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| Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 8:26 am Post subject: |
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| Granville wrote: | | Emulating sound is hard in Genesis, but he said he'd try. It's a good start. And I would be grateful you have an emulator this good even without sound. If you are that mad, go download some Genesis tunes and play them on an ipod or something while you play the games. Crude, but it's about all you got for now. |
It comes down to emulating a Z-80 on the ARM7, right? The CPU is more than fast enough to do that, so I imagine there must be some other complication? |
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Dwedit
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| Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 8:53 am Post subject: |
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| Guspaz wrote: | | Granville wrote: | | Emulating sound is hard in Genesis, but he said he'd try. It's a good start. And I would be grateful you have an emulator this good even without sound. If you are that mad, go download some Genesis tunes and play them on an ipod or something while you play the games. Crude, but it's about all you got for now. |
It comes down to emulating a Z-80 on the ARM7, right? The CPU is more than fast enough to do that, so I imagine there must be some other complication? |
Any time you have multiple processors emulated independently, you get synchronization hell. Look at all the SNES games that crash because the SPC700 emulated on the ARM7 isn't synchronized with the main CPU.
| sblur wrote: | | tepples wrote: | | Would it be too hard to map the legacy SMS tone generators onto the DS tone generators to give at least some sound? |
I think it would be.
Don't you only have access to those in GBA mode? Hence why loopy couldn't port the PocketNES sound core to NESDS? |
SMSAdvance contains a mixer for the SMS/Genesis PSG channels which works purely in software.
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Lordus
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| Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 5:05 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | It comes down to emulating a Z-80 on the ARM7, right? The CPU is more than fast enough to do that, so I imagine there must be some other complication? |
Well, i would say the Z80 is the smaller problem. It takes up far less than 50% of the needed calculation power for the Genesis sound system. Even if the Z80 would run at full speed on the ARM7, which is achievable, there is still all the synchronization AND the FM core. The FM core itself needs about the same power as the main cpu (Motorola 68000). On PC based emus the FM core uses a lot of lookup tables to make emulation faster, but those wont fit into the tiny DS ram.
PSG sound is possible in my opinion. I already have some games running with full PSG sound and just about 1-2 FPS slowdown - hardly noticable.
Those games are ones that just use the 68000 for PSG sound though (i.e. Sonic, Gunstar Heroes).
DSMasterPlus uses the DS-PSG for PSG emulation and the author was so kind to show me his code. I didnt have time to look into it yet, but ill see if it can make any difference. |
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