Guest Croccy22 Posted June 2, 2003 Report Share Posted June 2, 2003 WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!! SPECTRUM EMULATOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :shock: :lol: :shock: :D Oh space monkey god of the SPV. (Calm Down) OK now all I need to do is get the hell out of work because I left my usb cradle at home today! Typical!! Anyone tried Chaos yet??? Dunno about the key situation? Matt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest spacemonkey Posted June 2, 2003 Report Share Posted June 2, 2003 Just tried a few games... (it's lunch time) Manic Miner 1 seems to run quite well, the screen where a big foot comes to stomp you when you loose and the colour of the background flashes is very slow tho... I might try and get a more direct hookup for graphics into fuse... The original pocketclive guy built lots of wrapper functions and I think left fuse fairly much as it stood, maybe by hacking fuse some better speed can be had... I might also look at updating the fuse engine to the latest version, but I'm not sure how easy/useful this would be. I also had a quick look at chaos... I can't tell what the hell I'm supposed to do in this game... the virtual keyboard works for getting through the menus, but a better configurable keys system would be better... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Matt Whitfield Posted June 2, 2003 Report Share Posted June 2, 2003 Truly excellent job Space Monkey! Especially after I found some "ZXA Mega Packs" of ROMs sitting around on the net ;-) Just had a go with the following: Alien 8 - it seems to run a bit slowly when there is a lot going on, although it's fine apart from that Arkanoid - you only see the ball just when it hits the bat (although not always...) I'm gonna have a go with a few more games and see how it goes... Looking good tho :-D [EDIT] Bobby Bearing is really fast! I'm guessing that anything that was really pushing the speccy CPU or anything that was a bit inefficient may be a bit slow on this emulator as it stands, but some games should work well... [/EDIT] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Paul [MVP] Posted June 2, 2003 Report Share Posted June 2, 2003 Any thoughts on how to improve the display quality or speed SpaceMonkey? Great work tho :lol: P Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest midnight Posted June 2, 2003 Report Share Posted June 2, 2003 well, cos of the slow speed it makes several games easier, chuckie egg being a prime example :lol: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest spacemonkey Posted June 2, 2003 Report Share Posted June 2, 2003 I've definitely got to look into the display stuff a lot more... I just noticed the things dissappearing problem (similar to the ball not being visible in arkanoid)... What I think happens is that the screen refresh code and the speccy emulation aren't synced up at all, so it may be copying the spectrum screen to spv screen when the frame is only half drawn. This is also the area most likely to be improved performance wise as well... (and there was me thinking this project was almost over :lol: ) As to overall performance... I can look around and hopefully improve things a bit, but at the end of the day it may end up like the other emulators where the only real answer is play what's playable now and wait for faster phones... Just like gnuboy using QuickClose or TaskManager to close apps before running PocketClive makes a noticable difference to speed. Chuckie Egg does seem particularly slow... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest CamperBoy Posted June 2, 2003 Report Share Posted June 2, 2003 Excellent work though mate Imagine playing Daley Thompsons Decathlon on it though!! Poor old keys!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest agent.m Posted June 2, 2003 Report Share Posted June 2, 2003 Anyone tried Chaos yet??? Dunno about the key situation? Matt yeah tried it! did my head in!!! too having to go out the menu to make move all the time. although i only played it four 2 mins :D gonna try again soon after dinner. :lol: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Martin@Home Posted June 2, 2003 Report Share Posted June 2, 2003 Bobby Bearing is really fast! Â I'm guessing that anything that was really pushing the speccy CPU or anything that was a bit inefficient may be a bit slow on this emulator as it stands, but some games should work well... Matt, when you say fast...... Do you mean full speed, ie the same speed that it was designed to run at or just noticeably faster than other stuff running on the same emulator ? Just as an experiment I have downloaded the ZX32 emulator and have had bobby bearing running at the same time as on the smartphone. The smartphone version runs a good 50% slower than it should do IMO. BUT........ Saying that, it seems to run the same amount too slow as any other game I have tried on there (Cybernoid2 manic miner jetset willy etc). Bobby bearing is going to be quite cpu intensive because of the maths involved getting bobby to roll around convincingly ie inertia calculations, curved surfaces etc So I would have expected that to run a good deal slower than something simple such as manic miner for example. Have tried Wizball spacemonkey and that is slow as well. I am of course in no way criticising. This is great work and I guess any feedback will be usefull ? :lol: :D :lol: :D :lol: :lol: :lol: :D :o :o :o Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest spacemonkey Posted June 2, 2003 Report Share Posted June 2, 2003 No, all comments are cool... at the end of the day, I didn't write most of the code, just hacked it enough to get it working... I never owned a spectrum, they weren't so big in new zealand (I had a lot of different dodgy computers) and I felt that wizball was fairly similar to how it ran on my friends amstrads. As with the other emulators... emulation is always processor intensive and the step up to faster XScale processors will definitely help a lot. I'm gonna try and profile it up a bit and see what I can do and certainly I need to do some work getting the graphics working smoother and better synced to stop dissappearing things (like the ball in arkanoid). I also run a very clean phone with almost nothing installed on the phone itself and always do a quickclose or similar before kicking stuff off. I've noticed that pocketclive often gets the hourglass thing flicking on while it's running (a lot more often than anything else I've seen anyway)... We'll see where this goes over the next few weeks anyway, it's quite a lot rougher than gnuboy and pocketsnes so hopefully mean that theres more room for improvement. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Anders Posted June 2, 2003 Report Share Posted June 2, 2003 Being the original author (or porter you might say) of PocketClive it is great to see Spectrum emulation reaching yet another platform. The intention with PocketClive was always to present a nice exterior but never to make a portable application so you have been hit with many of the design decisions (like using EasyCE). Without having looked at your code I think that the only reason 128k emulation is running slower should be the sound (which is a pity because the 128k sound is really good). The extra RAM should not present a problem (actually the 48k emulation is implemented as a 128k machine without the ability to perform a RAM bank switch). I read in one comment that some "sprites" could dissapear and that is (just as noted by the writer) that the copy from spectrum screen memory to device screen memory is not synched as it should be. /Anders Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Martin@Home Posted June 2, 2003 Report Share Posted June 2, 2003 So you're the one responsible !!!!!!! Perhaps you and spacemonkey could compare notes (if you havn't already done so) Welcome to the site :lol: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest awarner [MVP] Posted June 2, 2003 Report Share Posted June 2, 2003 Welcome Anders :lol: Thanks for kickstarting this off, two emulator gods on one site :D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest spacemonkey Posted June 3, 2003 Report Share Posted June 3, 2003 Hey, hello Anders. Thanks for your code, it's all good. Yeah, the main things I'm working with is changing the assumptions underlying the system. It's moving it to a different screen size, a different input method (no stylus, and I must say a cursor that you drive around with the joystick is a pretty poor replacement :lol: ) and lower performance processor. The 128k mode is actually not much slower so yes, it will be the sound, in the other thread where I mentioned it being slow that was at the stage where I had done nasty things to the graphics engine and it was running far too slow because of that. And I'd also just like to note that I don't really know that much about emulators... I've learnt a lot with the ports I've done but what I'm doing is ONLY porting this stuff which is a lot simpler than the guys who actually write emulators such as fuse and gnuboy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Matt Whitfield Posted June 3, 2003 Report Share Posted June 3, 2003 Matt, when you say fast...... Do you mean full speed, ie the same speed that it was designed to run at or just noticeably faster than other stuff running on the same emulator ? Hmmm, well... perhaps I was getting a little overexcited there! Bobby Bearing seems to run at a speed similar to the origional when only Bobby is on the screen! As with Alien 8, as soon as you get something else happening on the screen (like platforms moving up and down) it does slow down a lot. However, Bobby Bearing is still playable control wise, unlike Marble Madness... I really hope there are some screen draw optimisations to be found as some of these games are very close to being playable on the current SPV CPU... I'd love to relive me ZX Spectrum 48K (rubber key), Spectrum +, 128K +2 and 128K +3 days (yes, I owned everything from the rubber key 48K onwards!... although the first spectrum I used was a ZX81) so good luck with your optimizations Space Monkey! :-D P.S. Anyone fancy writing an Apple IIe emulator now?? That was my first home computer - even before my Spectrums... Them were the days! ;-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest spacemonkey Posted June 3, 2003 Report Share Posted June 3, 2003 This was my first home pc, the Dick Smith VZ200 http://www.homecomputer.de/pages/f_info.ht...mith_VZ200.html Before that we had this piece of class, the Epson HX/HC20 http://www.old-computers.com/museum/comput....asp?st=1&c=143 And I also played on a lot of mainframes that my dad looked after. After that we just had a normal progression of VIC 20 followed by many different XT/AT computers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Matt Whitfield Posted June 3, 2003 Report Share Posted June 3, 2003 Heh, I've actually used one of those Epson HX/HC20 computers before! Compared to the Apple IIe I seem to remember that they were relatively user friendly! Hmmm, check the price of the Apple IIe tho... Oh-my-god, that was a lot on money in 1983!! My Dad brought our one as an ex-demo model so he got some money off, but we had twin 5 1/4" floppies, the colour card, 64K memory expansion (I think it was) and twin paddle game controllers - what a beast! LMAO :-D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest awarner [MVP] Posted June 3, 2003 Report Share Posted June 3, 2003 Still off topic sorry but this was my first pc http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=409 :lol: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Matt Whitfield Posted June 3, 2003 Report Share Posted June 3, 2003 "Trash-80"... ROTFLMAO!!!!... Jeez, that looks sucky... but then again I seem to remember being impressed with a ZX81 when I first saw it! Hohoho :-D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest NickB&SPV Posted June 4, 2003 Report Share Posted June 4, 2003 The Emulator is a great thing!!, But I am trying to play Renegade (takes me back a few years) but it is taking ages to load, got as far as the title screen has anyine got it to work? If so then how long does it take to load? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest kingdom master Posted June 4, 2003 Report Share Posted June 4, 2003 how the hell do u exit the emulator to get back to the phone functions. weldone but what about a amstrad 464 em? hee hee kingdom Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest spacemonkey Posted June 5, 2003 Report Share Posted June 5, 2003 The Emulator is a great thing!!, But I am trying to play Renegade (takes me back a few years) but it is taking ages to load, got as far as the title screen has anyine got it to work? If so then how long does it take to load? Someone had already replied to this but unfortunately they discussed files that could be deemed piracy. The answer is that you are using a TZX file that pretends to load at the REAL speed of a spectrum tape drive, if instead you get a TAP image then it will load basically instantly, these are definitely what you'll want to use. As to piracy, Amstrad specifically allow copying of the ROMs (part of the emulator) and many game copyright holders have now come forwards, due to the efforts of some members of the spectrum community, and said that their games can be distributed free. For the purposes of Modaco I imagine an approach of zero tolerance about discussions of games in the same way as gameboy roms is appropriate, after all, this isn't the spectrum forum, we're supposed to be talking about Microsoft Smartphone. For further information about copyright status of spectrum software please visit this resource: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/permits/ to find out the copyright status for various games and applications. PS. Paul, if posting the worldofspectrum link is a problem for you please PM me or cut it out of this post. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Will Posted June 5, 2003 Report Share Posted June 5, 2003 I removed and pm'd the person in question, as the whole issues is incredibly complex, I understand that WoS has some permissions, and that they explain this in immense detail on their site, but they don't specify exactly which rom has which status. I believe that the WoS link is fine to use, but please do not specify individual files. This should help keep the references OK. Will Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest agent.m Posted June 6, 2003 Report Share Posted June 6, 2003 Hi im the person in question! Im well aware of roms and the situation with sharing etc im a mame fan and have seen many site shut down over the years. But i honestly believed that it was ok because it said so on the site. I know you have a job to do and if some fool wants to put warez and roms on this site it can spoil it for everyone :D I was actually waiting for a reply Will but your post has put my mind at rest thank :lol: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest spacemonkey Posted June 9, 2003 Report Share Posted June 9, 2003 Sorry for the lack of progress (again) on this... it still has the not handling calls bug etc... I've been busy again and not got to it and on top of that now, my phones stopped working with the debugger... It's an absolute pain because the phone is now so loaded down with apps etc that hard ressetting (which is what I think it needs) will annoy me no end... Bring on the end of the year when my SPV can be relegated to a purely development device... I think to get on with it, without the pain of resetting up everything, I might build a IPSM backup SD Card for development and another of my live data... that way I can flip backwards and forwards.. an absolute pain anyway. I've got save states right now, with a persistant state that automatically saves and reloads when you quit and restart but I really want to get the thing to play nice with the phone functions before I release it again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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