Home
Deunan
Goodies! #3 
17th-Mar-2008 08:47 pm
Deunan, Knute
Another batch of pictures. Seems like people enjoy them, and I have to run every GD image at least once to get MD5 and see if it boots at the very least, so why not capture few screenshots along the way?

My Merry May is another one of those titles that go above and beyond simple VMU animation. I have to say SEGA idea behing VMUs was simply brilliant - too bad they had to make them cheap and so two CR2032 lithium cells last only what, 3 months? Assuming you do not play on your VMU or else it's a week tops.
That reminds me - is there a good VMU emulator out there? Preferably one that runs on 2000/XP systems and doesn't look like 16-bit Windows 3.1 application, but I'll settle for anything that works. No KATANA dev utils please, those aren't free, or even legal.

Makaron 2008-03-17 My Merry May #1Makaron 2008-03-17 My Merry May #2
Makaron 2008-03-17 My Merry May #3Makaron 2008-03-17 My Merry May #4


This is Exodus Guilty Neos. Don't ask me. Title aside, it has nice graphics - those sharp edges seem out of place at first but soon you get used to them. I think it gives the game less cartoonish, more comic-like look. Oh, and it seems Exodus doesn't like alternate sorting mode much - some texts go missing. Too bad, I guess only D32_FLOAT_S8X24_UINT format can save us now. But that's DirectX 10 and up. I'd tell you to petition M$ to create DX10 runtime for Windows XP but we all know once you earn some fifty billion dollars or so you just don't care that much about puny hyu-mans anymore :)
These screens also show you can easily switch to and from built-in Internet browser (no actual modem/BBA emulation yet), and that PuruPuru pack is being recognized.
Makaron 2008-03-17 Exodus Guilty Neos #1Makaron 2008-03-17 Exodus Guilty Neos #2
Makaron 2008-03-17 Exodus Guilty Neos #3Makaron 2008-03-17 Exodus Guilty Neos #4
Makaron 2008-03-17 Exodus Guilty Neos #5Makaron 2008-03-17 Exodus Guilty Neos #6


And now time for Giant Gram and some sweating masculine torsos. What's not to like? Feel free to watch, I'll be waiting at the next paragraph.
Makaron 2008-03-17 Giant Gram - Zen Nippon Pro Wres 2 in Nippon Budokan #1Makaron 2008-03-17 Giant Gram - Zen Nippon Pro Wres 2 in Nippon Budokan #2


Not exactly my taste either, but it's a progress :) Canary has one long, boring intro let me tell you... You get served with centered lines of white text on black screen for several minutes - now this would good for building atmosphere in some dark cyberpunk but not this game?!
Makaron 2008-03-17 Canary #1Makaron 2008-03-17 Canary #2


Some folks dancing. Sort of. Wait, does this prove people walk on their hands on the other side of the planet?
Now this is funny. SF Alpha is called Zero in Japan. Who knew? Not to mention this is a special version (full name Street Fighter Zero 3 - Saikyo-Ryu Dojo for Matching Service) and the plain one won't boot. Some SH4 bug it seems. This should be easy to find, and let's hope easy to fix as well. Won't be so funny if it turns out to be another GD-DMA problem, but at least it's easy to spot and trips Makaron every time.
Makaron 2008-03-17 Street Fighter Zero 3 - Saikyo-Ryu Dojo for Matching Service #1Makaron 2008-03-17 Street Fighter Zero 3 - Saikyo-Ryu Dojo for Matching Service #2
Makaron 2008-03-17 Street Fighter Zero 3 - Saikyo-Ryu Dojo for Matching Service #3Makaron 2008-03-17 Street Fighter Zero 3 - Saikyo-Ryu Dojo for Matching Service #4
Comments 
17th-Mar-2008 10:57 pm (UTC)
So "Street Fight Alpha 3 (non-matching service edition)" is broken? It was working perfectly in last build. Yeah, hopefully just an easy fix and can get addressed before next release. It was that game that got me into Makaron in the 1st place. One of my favorites and NullDC doesn't boot it.

Nice new screens also!!
18th-Mar-2008 12:04 am (UTC)
"Street Fighter Alpha 3" works (or at least should unless I broke it). "Street Fighter Zero 3" does not even boot.
18th-Mar-2008 01:10 am (UTC)
No idea on the VMU emulator. I don't even see how you could get one to work that wasn't part of an existing Dreamcast emulator.
18th-Mar-2008 02:07 am (UTC)
Anonymous
Marcus Comstedt wrote a VMU emulator.
18th-Mar-2008 02:55 am (UTC) - DirectVMS
Anonymous
Here you go, Deunan:

http://dcemulation.com/legacy/emu-directvms.htm

Best VMS emu to date... a directX port of Marcus' VMS emu as someone else noted above.

Enjoy..

Shoegazer
18th-Mar-2008 02:56 am (UTC) - Ha...
Anonymous
I said "VMS" instead of "VMU" funny you can tell I've been doing a lot of legacy work lately.. ;)

Shoegazer
18th-Mar-2008 02:58 am (UTC)
Anonymous
The only VMU emulator I know of is SoftVMS. But it only runs the VMS software that can be uploaded to the VMU. It's open source though so it could probably be adapted to read the VMU files produced by Makaron, as well as a VMU BIOS. Apparently there's also a Dreamcast version that could very well be run through the emulator.

You can get it there:
http://www.zophar.net/vms.html

Would be a nice add-on to Makaron... I'd love to be able to get the extras that come from playing the VMU mini-games.
20th-Mar-2008 02:30 am (UTC) - Yuki
Anonymous

Image
(http://www.underground-gamer.com/imagebucket/DC_DREAM_PREVIEW_00.jpg)I have all "DREAM PREVIEW".
Some operation checks were done.
"vol.2~vol.4"
These end because of the error.
Is it the same problem as MIL-CD?

20th-Mar-2008 11:19 am (UTC) - Re: Yuki
I've just tested Vol. 02 - it's not exactly the same problem as MIL-CDs, but it's also GD-DMA related. It's again that software MPEG decoder library doing crazy things...
Unfortunately there is no quick fix for that. The only solution would be to get the DMA actually work in parallel with SH4 code and that is both difficult and very slow.

I need to come up with some clever solution to this, perhaps even another code path for the affected GD-ROMs. The problem is right now if I change the timing to make MPEG library happy it will break some games (for example Street Fighter Zero/Alpha series).

I guess for now you have to wait :)
20th-Mar-2008 12:54 pm (UTC) - Samba de Amigo
Anonymous
I've been playing a little Samba de Amigo and it feels off. When I play on the actual Dreamcast the dots follow the music's beat exactly and I can use the audio cues to know precisely when I should hit. In Makaron (and nullDC for that matter) the music is a little bit out of sync with the dots and it makes for a very tough game to play.

Could the sync of the game vs the audio be another DMA related problem?
20th-Mar-2008 02:16 pm (UTC) - Re: Samba de Amigo
This is a bit different thing. See, on a real hardware there are several things going on at once. On emulator you do a bit of this, then switch to that, and so on. If you switch frequently enough you get seemingly parallel execution. This is the idea behind every modern operating system, where there are more processes running than the number of physical CPUs available.
Problem is, switching tasks is not free. At the very least you loose precious L1 cache which needs to be reloaded with different set of code/data. So in order to maximize speed you'd want to switch as infrequently as possible and that causes lag. That's mostly because only when you switch the data exchanged between processes is actually being acted upon. Example: if SH4 tells AICA's ARM to play a sound, it will not get to do it until you switch from SH4 emulation to AICA emulation and process that request.

Also, real AICA outputs sound data at the moment it is computed and mixed together into 2 stereo channels. On Windows (and any other OS with Hardware Abstraction Layer API, really) you don't get to output anyting directly to hardware I/O space. Rather, you create a circular buffer and fill it with your data - OS will process it through it's kernel level driver and that's the moment it will drive speakers. The bigger the buffer, the bigger the lag between what you write into it and is being output. But at the same time you can fill the buffer less frequently with more data at once, and that is faster than doing it often with little data.

The lag present in Makaron will always be there. It could be made smaller, but it will require you to have a powerful PC to handle faster context switching within the emulator. If everyone had 16-core CPU then I could "waste" some of them to run only specific tasks, continuosly, so that there would be as little lag as possible. Buf unless we have these...
20th-Mar-2008 10:15 pm (UTC) - Re: Samba de Amigo
Anonymous
I just realised that I was using the non multi-threaded version of Makaron when I was testing the game. I tried again with the MT version and things are close to perfection.

Are you planning on taking advantage of quad-core CPUs at some point? That would probably help even more with accuracy.
21st-Mar-2008 10:17 am (UTC) - Re: Samba de Amigo
Yup, it's in the roadmap. Problem is I have "only" a dual core myself so getting this to work as it's supposed to will be tough.
Right now I'm (slowly) trying to implement a workload split for a tri-core systems. This would still make rather poor use of the CPU but I figure it's still worth it if Makaron runs better, right?
This page was loaded May 9th 2008, 6:09 pm GMT.