Commodore plus/4 emulation on Pocket PC! 07/04/2006

 

Pocket PC owners, that wait is over! In the last couple of months I have been busy revamping my Yape emulator for the Pocket PC platform: a real challenge! Although the Pocket PC's are getting ever more powerful, their CPU is still only comparable to that of the desktop PC's of the late '90s. Still managed to achieve a very good speed and compatibility. It will also support today's most advanced VGA devices in their native 480x640 resolution.

 

Here's a list of features:

 

* Full 7501 (CPU) emulation:

* all documented & undocumented opcodes,

* 100% correct decimal mode,

* instruction/cycle exact emulation.

* Video/Sound (TED) emulation: very fast Line-based emulation, all display modes, open and expanded borders, DMA cycles, some FLI modes, FLD effects, Timer and raster interrupts, raster line exact hardware cursor & flash, 2 channel sound supporting digi.

* Full ROM banking, support for the built-in C+4 programs

* Full joystick and keyboard emulation

* DOS-based 1551 drive emulation

* Support for.prg,.p00 and cartridges

* Support for true VGA resolution

* Redefinable d-pad

* Sticky keyboard option

* Expanded full screen modes for optimal display usage.

* Support for native and software landscape modes

* Full menus and keyboard controls in landscape mode.

* Full save/load emulator state support

* External keyboard support

 

Good news is that Commodore Inc has officially endorsed this product, so it is going to be released as "the" Pocket Commodore plus/4. For an almost full list of features and preview screenshots, visit clickgamer.com/plus4 now. The release is due shortly, so if you like Yape and the Commodore plus/4 and you're owner of a Pocket PC, this program is definitely recommended!

Source

Emulates the Atari 2600 console.

April 7, 2006

 

Stella release 2.2 for Linux, Mac OSX, Windows, WinCE and GP2X is now available. Ports to other operating systems will be released as they become available. A partial list of features is:

 

* Added new ROM browser option which works like a normal filesystem browser, allowing navigation throughout the filesystem. The old mode of browsing is still present, and can be toggled at runtime. Related to this, fixed bug whereby sorting in the ROM launcher sometimes didn't work.

* Integrated stella.pro properties into the application, resulting in faster startup time. Now Stella can be redistributed as a single binary; no external files are needed, but they will still be used if present.

* Reworked ROM properties files once again. The 'user.pro' file has been removed, and all user-defined properties are stored in 'stella.pro' instead. You should delete all properties files when upgrading to this version, to take advantage of the speed increases.

* Reworked settings files once again. Removed all references to a global settings file. Each user now gets a user-specific settings file only. If that file doesn't exist, the built-in defaults are used.

* Added 'conditional saving' of the cheatcode and settings files, so that these files are only written to disk when absolutely necessary. This doesn't really affect desktop systems, but is very useful for systems with flashram-based storage (GP2X, WinCE, etc).

* Reworked Settings class, hopefully fixing a bug whereby settings weren't being saved in certain cases (most evident in the OSX port).

* Added 'tiadefaults' commandline option, which can also be toggled from within the GUI. This option disables all TIA positioning 'tweaks' that typically make a game look better, and present the image exactly as it would appear on a real 2600.

* Added jitter-detection code for the paddle emulation, which should eliminate an annoying 'jittering' effect when using paddles with a Stelladaptor.

* Related to jitter-detection, added '-pthresh' commandline option and GUI entry, which sets a bound below which the emulation detects jitter.

* Fixed crash when adding one-shot cheats.

* Fixed bug in RAM comparitive searches in the debugger.

* Fixed bug with setting snapshot naming type from the GUI (it was always being set to 'romname').

* Re-added low compatibility CPU emulation mode, since it benefits some slower systems. This is activated with the commandline argument '-cpu low'.

* For the OSX port, added Universal binary support.

* For the OSX port, reworked the menu handling, so that certain menu options are only enabled when it makes sense to do so.

* For the GP2X port, fixed joystick deadzone issues and scroll bug in ROM launcher.

* For the GP2X port, fixed issue with PAL ROMs causing a crash because of screen size. A message is now shown indicating that PAL ROMs are not yet supported.

>> Get it HERE.

07-04-2006:

 

New MAME GP2X 2.1:

 

- Faster (optimizations in graphic and sound libraries).

- Sound improvements in some classic games, e.g. Galaxian.

- Improvements in Namco sound library. It makes games like Gaplus to sound ok. Thx, Slaanesh.

>> Get it HERE.

0.105

 

New System Drivers Supported (in no particular order):

------------------------------------------------------------

- AT 586 (not working yet) [Nate Woods]

- Nintendo N64 (not working yet) [Ville Linde]

 

System Driver Changes:

--------------------------

- [990189V] Fixed crash when taking a screenshot.  (bug #714) [Oliver Stoeneberg, Nate Woods]

 

- [EUROPC] Fixed keyboard regression introduced in 0.104.  (bug #857) [Nate Woods]

 

- [EXIDY] Added cartridge support.  (bug #842) [Robert]

 

- [FAMICOM] Added hack to prevent crashing.  Marked as not working.  [Nate Woods]

 

- [MAC] Moved Mac video code off of videomap.c.  [Nate Woods]

 

- [MPF1] Added sound support and other enhancements.  [Giel van Schijndel]

 

- [MSX] Fixed a crash involving cartridge use.  (bug #841) [Nate Woods]

 

- [MSX] Fixed subtle memory corruption bug.  [R Belmont, Wilbert Pol]

 

- [PC] Fixed a crash involving certain types of CGA memory access.  (bug #859) [Nate Woods]

 

- [PC8801] Worked around a regression introduced in MESS 0.96.  (bug #759) [Nate Woods]

 

- [VTECH1] Added support for the 64k memory expansion, and cartridge support. [Dirk Best]

 

User Interface Changes:

---------------------------

- Fixed a file manager bug that prevented the last item from being selected. [telengard]

 

Imgtool Changes:

--------------------

- VZDOS images now supported.  [Dirk Best]

 

- The "dir" command will display "

" for directories.  [Nate Woods]

 

- [FAT] Now supports FAT file systems without an extended BIOS parameter block.  [Nate Woods]

 

Source Changes:

-------------------

- The core is based on MAME 0.105.  This incorporates all features of the update to this core.  [MAME team]

 

- Changed how devices work.  Device command line options are now on a per device basis, and now identify the index within a device.  Therefore, you now might invoke MESS like this:

 

mess mysystem -flop1 foo.dsk -flop2 bar.dsk

 

  Also, drivers now have the ability to specify the string to be used for the command line option.  This allows multiple devices of the same type to be viable.  (bugs #711, #839) [Nate Woods]

 

- Fixed WD17XX side select option; this prevented some copy protection schemes from being properly emulated.  (bug #863) [Nate Woods]

 

- Fixed a bug that caused image creation to crash in certain situations. (bug #858) [Nate Woods]

 

- Eliminated the unknown and unused -listtext and -createdir command line options.  [Nate Woods]

 

- Cleaned up auto_malloc() calls.  [Oliver Stoeneberg]

>> Get it HERE.