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New gnuboy update - finally


Guest spacemonkey

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Guest spacemonkey

The exe can be got from the usual place:

http://www.davemoller-nz.demon.co.uk/gnuboy.html

This is a total re-port of the code from a newer cleaner windows CE version. The speed seems to be better and I've spent time nailing down a few niggly bugs as well.

IMPORTANT********************

If you are continuing a game that you were previously playing in 0.95 it may load it with stupid sound/key settings on the first load. I have changed the way this stuff is saved so the upgrade can be unpredictable. If you have this problem either delete the state file (.000) or if you want to keep your game in progress, load it and then go to the menu (voice record button gets you to menu) and re-setup the controls.

The sound has maybe been improved, their are a number of sound settings you can play with that may make it sound nicer. There is a new option for showing FPS. This is good as an indication of how a game is running relative to a real gameboy and also whether you're frameskipping is right. The fps number would be 60 if the game is running exactly the same speed as a real gameboy. I'm normally getting 25-30fps on most of the games I play. Try more frameskipping, but if more skipping doesn't increase fps you're better off with less skipping for a nicer image. I don't recommend autoskip, cos the spv is too slow this just pushes skipping out to 23/24 frames skipped which looks nasty but doesn't really help performance. Running with FPS showing, while interesting probably slows it down as well, so just use that for checking things out.

That's all for now....

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Guest Coolboy1982

wicked

at least worms runs now without messing up graphically...

about the sound though: is still quite bad. good enough for small

effects, but incapable of playing music.

I noticed though that after pausing the game and restarting, it plays

the first few (probably buffered) seconds in perfect speed and quality

before getting slow and messed up.

Is there anything you can do fo that?

Thanks anyway for the great and quick release!

PS: these findings are based on Mario and the sound only got

better for a few seconds, if the audio settings were changed during the pause!!!

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Guest HelloDave

Nice update spacemonkey. Unfortunately it seems to crash my SPV every so often, requiring me to pull the battery out :) It's only happened on the screen between levels in Mario so far (haven't tried any other ROMs yet).

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It crashed with me on supermario when I tried to switch the sound on, resulting in me having to pull the battery.

later worked fine without sound though.

still a great app though.

davy.

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Guest fumaras

great version spacemonkey :)

speed is little better and some game support 30 fps ;) .

I have no crash problem but sometime it's very long to have the hand specialy if i use gzip file.

Gzip work ok but are very very long to load and start (with 0.95a gzip start quickly).

For exemple Mario Tennis Gzip start after 7min25s :!: (at begining i think my spv is crashed but i just stand by and i see that itsn't)

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Guest spacemonkey

OK... I'm gonna start hunting the crash down. Hopefully I'll get it today sometime as I usually run this for about 3 hours on a work day :)

Gzip... I noticed that this seems to be significantly slower in the new version. They've used a different version of zip in the code. If I have time I might try and swap the zip library from the previous source in and see if that helps.

edit - A question about the crashing, (I seemed to get it too once so far in mario), was it coming back from the pause menu (or on load)? Was the sound on? Anyone had it in any other games?

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Guest spacemonkey

That's certainly what I seemed to get, if the sound was already going but I went to the menu and switched it off and on it seemed fine,

If sound was off (and had been off since I started), when I go to the menu and switch it on it hung. Although on a later test it hung for a while but eventually came right. I'm thinking it's maybe processing stuff that built up while it was running... don't really know... I'll have a hunt through the code tonight.

So, assumption at the moment... this is sound related (and specifically switching it on). If anyone has a hang or crash that seems different from this, please post as that would definitely mean something else.

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Guest spacemonkey

v_patel, your crashes, are they in Super Mario as well? On the screen in between levels or anywhere?

Please post full details of the crashes, I don't play Super Mario much but I have got it to crash once. The other games I've been playing are running perfectly. As much detail about when and how it crashed would be useful.

Also, when it crashes, the game may freeze and become unresponsive, if you press voice record, does it go back to the menu? If it goes back to the menu and you exit it should save the crashed state. If you then re-run it is it still crashed?

Until I can realistically recreate the problem while connected to my PC it is very difficult to figure how it's going wrong.

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Guest spacemonkey

No joy on finding your crashes I'm afraid. Played a couple of hours of Pokemon Gold and had no problems what-so-ever.

I'm afraid I won't be able to find the problem/fix it until we can determine a situation that makes it crash. If you get crashes try and think about anything that may be relevant. Certainly if you are getting a consistent crash every time you do a specific thing then take a copy of the state file and send it to me with a description of what to do to make it crash...

gideonnorel - Did you have it working with the previous version? The list comes up and you select a game, did this particular game work in the previous version? Have you tried other games? Have you tried copying gnuboy.exe from my site and putting it on your phone again in case it's corrupted? I have it definitely working on Zelda-Oracle of the seasons, Pokemon Gold, Dragon Warriors Monsters, Final Fantasy 3 (black and white).

So try different ROMS... if it's a specific one not working, tell me which ROM is failing and I can have a look at it.

Basically as it stands at the moment gnuboy is the final release. I can't see much more functionality/performance changes that I want to make to it, so it's only bug fixes if we can track down the specific bugs.

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Guest spacemonkey

To be honest, I think the mojority of the sound problems are because the emulator isn't full speed. As I can't see major speed improvements without recoding the main emulation engine in assembler, there's not much to be done.

When faster Smartphone 2002 devices become available, based on the 200Mhz XScale or whatever then I may revisit sound and try and tidy it up.

I'm also working on PocketSNES at the moment, and I'll see how it's sound emulation goes (especially as it's much slower). If there's any changes I can bring across from that then I'll do them. Remember, it's open source. If anyone cares more about sound and thinks they know a solution to it, feel free to download the code and do it.

Another important factor is that I generally play games on the tube while listening to minidiscs anyway... the primary person I am developing for is of course me :lol:

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Guest Coolboy1982
ok thanks anyway do you know anywhere i can download gnuboy 0.95 i will be happy using that version

link is on first page of this thread!

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Guest spacemonkey
ok thanks anyway do you know anywhere i can download gnuboy 0.95 i will be happy using that version

I have updated my page (linked at the start of this thread) to now offer a download of the 0.95 binary as well as the latest version.

Sorry that the new version won't do it for you... but it is VERY hard with intermittant errors like it sounds like you're having to track down what causes them. When something happens consistently every time you do task x (such as, everytime I go to the pokemon centre and recharge my pokemon it hangs) then it's quite easy to track down and fix. If it's "it just crashes sometimes, I don't know why or when, it's all just random", it's almost impossible to find. It could even be something unrelated conflicting with it, like going in and out of a reception area (although mine works through that particular one :lol: )

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Guest gideonnorel

still no luck spacemonkey. tried the games with the old version 0.95 and they work sweet but with new one nothing. tried a bunch of roms but still nothing.

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