HACHIBITTO - An MSX2 Fantasy Console

plasturion · Friday at 9:30 PM

wavemotion said:
I didn't even know that was possible! I'll add it to the list of stuff I probably should have known 6 years ago

Well official version by mtheall that support DSi wi-fi connection is only 2 years old, previously there was some forks but I didn't use it too or couldn't make it work. ftdp v3.2.1 works like charm with any ftp client like TC, transfering data never breaks on my side, very comfy and safe i guess. : )

wavemotion · 2026-09-26T15:38:26+0100

I finally got the standard Japanese Disk controller working. This means no more CDX-2 'Brazillian' driver (which honestly served me well but was not fully compatible with some late-era games). This should get all the later big RPGs like XAK II, Fray and more running! Those late-era games often bypassed the standard BIOS and called directly into the disk controller to speed up handling and the CDX-2 controller has a different interace. Technically games on the MSX should NOT bypass the standard BIOS interface for just these kinds of compatibility issues... but reality is that 99% of the Japan game-makers market was not Brazil.

That's huge... though it once again came at a huge cost of debug effort and sanity lost.

I haven't seen any regressions on disk games with the new driver so hopefully we're good here.

Version 0.9c has been checked into my github site.

I can't figure out Lubek and MSX-MUSIC. But at least that plays with the standard PSG music.

Cris1997XX · 2026-09-26T15:47:43+0100

wavemotion said:
I finally got the standard Japanese Disk controller working. This means no more CDX-2 'Brazillian' driver (which honestly served me well but was not fully compatible with some late-era games). This should get all the later big RPGs like XAK II, Fray and more running! Those late-era games often bypassed the standard BIOS and called directly into the disk controller to speed up handling and the CDX-2 controller has a different interace. Technically games on the MSX should NOT bypass the standard BIOS interface for just these kinds of compatibility issues... but reality is that 99% of the Japan game-makers market was not Brazil.

That's huge... though it once again came at a huge cost of debug effort and sanity lost.

I haven't seen any regressions on disk games with the new driver so hopefully we're good here.

Version 0.9c has been checked into my github site.

I can't figure out Lubek and MSX-MUSIC. But at least that plays with the standard PSG music.

Can you add support for 2xPSG? There's hacks for a bunch of games that make them sound much better, they'd benefit from the DS' stereo sound too

wavemotion · 2026-09-26T16:05:20+0100

esv_83 · 2026-09-26T17:49:08+0100

Another game that now works is *The Lost World* (1998) (UMAX)—it looks amazing on my DSi XL.

wavemotion · 2026-09-27T12:09:51+0100

I just uploaded version 0.9e with two changes.

2xPSG is supported - though it's not as great as I hoped. Most of the games that take advantage of it are classic games with a bit extra sound effects but it comes at a cost since the original games were already taxing the system so the hacks tend to run at lower framerate and cause some graphical jitter. But it was easy to add... and some games really do sound a lot better. Turn it on in Options.

But the much bigger change is the Screen 7 Alpha blending. Screen 7 is a bitch on a stick - it's a full 512 pixels across and the poor DS only has 256. So there has to be loss... in previous Hachibitto versions, what I did was simply drop every other pixel. This causes artifacts especially with text rendering where the dropped pixels can really hurt the visual look of thin vertical lines. It also means that cool color techniques (such as used in Xak) don't render properly (shadows on buildings and dithered blue backgrounds). So my new scheme uses the DS hardware to alpha-blend two frames together - one of the frames renders the even pixels and the other the odd pixels. This isn't a miracle - it means some text will blur a bit but the results seem to be a huge improvement. Original rendering on the left and the new alpha-blending on the right. The best part is the alpha blending comes at almost no CPU cost since the DS can do this natively with a HW Alpha Blend of two buffers. I'm not convinced it looks better on ALL Screen 7 games (Snatcher seems to be better for pictures and a little less better for text) so it's optional ... but the default is to blend.

@Cris1997XX - I just updated to 0.9f with fixes for Vertical Scrolling in Screen 2 legacy modes. I didn't even know that was a thing... but apparently it's what the Smooth scroll hacks of Star Force and Star Soldier are doing. This should fix both (though there is a single pixel line of graphical artifacts under the Star Force score... I'll try to fix soon... or someday).

HACHIBITTO - An MSX2 Fantasy Console

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