Sinclair emulator

This emulates a number of platforms to various degrees, see here.

• General

+NEW: Added digital sound VLM-5030 chip (based on MAME)

+NEW: Added audio TMS36XX chip (based on MAME)

+NEW: Added DAC audio (based on MAME)

+NEW: M6809 - Supported a flag that indicates when processor is doing a opcode fetch or simple data load

+ENHANCE: Now sprites (even the big ones) can have non standar sizes (for example 8x16)

+BUG: YM2203 - Fixed a bug closing the emulator

+ENHANCE: Updated to Zipforge 4.04

+BUG: Video 2X works again (only for arcade)

+ENHANCE: Added video effects Scanlines and Scanlines 2X (only for arcade)

• Phoenix

+NEW: Added music sounds (songs)

+NEW: Added digital audio (shoot, ship explosion)

• Commando

+ENHANCE: Fixed background

+BUG: Controls are crazy, and I don't know why

• Yie Ar Kung-Fu

+NEW: Added VLM-5030 digital audio

• City Connection

+BUG: Fixed X axis inversion of sprites

• Pooyan

+BUG: Fixed sound

• Jungler

+BUG: Fixed sound

+BUG: Shoots did not shown at the bottom of the screen

• Burger Time:

+NEW: Added driver with sound

• Express Raider

+NEW: Added driver, missing YM3526

• Super Basketball

+NEW: Added driver with sound

+BUG: sprite problems (looks like a M6809 bug)

+BUG: Audio from SN-76496 don't stop (looks like a M6809 bug)

• Lady Bug

+NEW: Added driver with sound

»» Download / Information

Lxdream is a Linux based Sega Dreamcast emulator.

June 20th, 2008 by nkeynes

Small fixes

Posted in Development

Mostly just finishing/unbreaking things I'd broken in recent changes, so there's nothing terribly exciting to report at the moment.

 

Changes:

 

Fix launching from the Finder (odd command line arguments and all)

Move the background into the main scene structure, so it's actually included in the min/max z (the lack of which was causing missing backgrounds in some situations). Massively simplifies things at the cost of needing colour unclamping support for correct output in all situations.

Change internal colour format to float from unsigned char - surprisingly doesn't have much impact on performance, but makes a few things much simpler to implement

Finish integrating the run-time limiting properly so that it's no longer a big wart on main.c (and works properly on OS X as well)

Refactor the GD-Rom selection menu to be a bit more generic and add a cocoa view for it

»» More information

Here's an interesting read for you programmers:

[i've started writing this a few days after the last post. I was still waiting for some things to develop, but I'm a bit out reach at the moment, so this might take some time. So this post isn't as finished as I hoped it it would be. But these "news" already started to smell funny.] In the first 3 parts I explained how I could modify the Gamecube board inside the Triforce to dump the plain game images. This requires disassembling the whole unit, attaching a Gamecube BIOS replacement, requires a USB-Gecko and requires the Triforce region to be compatible with the game.

 

Another idea is to dump the GD-ROMs, then decrypting them, which should yield an identical image. Now ripping GD-ROMs with a PC-drive is rocket science. And it seems that I'm just not made for constructing rockets. I managed to dump a part of the data, but after that, I had a terrible accident (basically, the magnetic thing which holds the CD in place slided away, still rotating, making a terrible sound, and scratched my GD-ROM bad enough that the, already bad-quality, Triforce GD-ROM reader wouldn't access the disc anymore). So I can't even play VS2002 anymore . But the dumped data already yielded interesting results: repeating 8 byte patterns, a strong indication for a block cipher in ECB mode. I described before that when I dumped uninitialized RAM, it also looked like this, indicating that the decryption happens when reading the data from RAM, and not before. My first idea was: DES (but in fact it could have been any other 8b/8b blockcipher).

 

After breaking the PIC "security", I got hold of a "8 byte key", which is written directly into a hardware register. At first, it didn't seem to work out. Decrypting the repeating strings with that key yielded only garbage. A day and a discussion with MrSporty later, I ran a test over my key: DES-keys in fact are only 56bit instead of 64bit, so every byte contains one bit of parity (each key byte should have an odd number of bits set). Magically, my key did have that property. And another key, provided by MrSporty (who hacked the PIC security ages before I did even know how a Triforce looks like), also had this property. This couldn't be random luck - I've tried various endianness swappings again, with both the key and the data. Finally, a result: When byte-reversing both the key and each 8-byte block, my repeating data decrypted to … ALL ZEROS! Yay!

 

A test with other data showed that in fact this was the correct algorithm. With the key from the PIC, it's now possible to decrypt GD-ROM dumps done with a PC CDROM drive (or a Dreamcast). Isn't that great?

 

Speaking of this, we've managed to replicate both the previous hack (using the Triforce to read out the plain data, as well as sniffing the key) at some other person (not sure if he wants to be named here, though). Thanks!

 

On the emulation side, I've drastically improved the media board emulation. It will now handle all the communication (basically a shared memory buffer and a doorbell), emulates the loading progress, I can go trough the system test menu, query the serial number etc. What's still missing is the JVS IO stuff. If anyone happens to have some non-Japanese JVS documentation, please help!

 

Unfortunately I'm currently 9000km away from my Triforce, which makes testing things a bit harder.

»» More Information

Thanks to MameWorld for the news!

NeoDS is a Neogeo emulator for the Nintendo DS.

v0.2.0 6/19/2008

* Key configuration

* Pause key

* Put DS to sleep when lid is closed

* Save SRAM and NeoDS configuration to flashcard

* Fix crash when switching roms on certain flash cards

* Fix palettte bank swap bug on tile layer (metal slug 1 hud)

* Improve accuracy of vcounter, and vposition interrupts (fix freeze in Samurai Showdown 3, fix graphics in Blazing Star level 2, probly others)

* Fix issues when using dldi and slot2 ram from same flashcard (like supercard lite)

* Fix graphical corruption that occurs after a while when using slot2 ram

»» Download / Information