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 · Saturday at 3:38 PM

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 · Saturday at 3:47 PM

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 · Saturday at 4:05 PM

esv_83 · Saturday at 5:49 PM

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

wavemotion · Sunday at 12:09 PM

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).

wavemotion · Monday at 5:08 PM

Version 0.9h uploaded to github. This is very close to a 1.0 release.

SCC fixed (noise was present on some games).
Disk Write fixed (games like Randar would not load previously).
Tons of smaller fixes, accuracy improvements and cleanup.

We finally got to a point where it's highly unusual for a game not to load and run on Hachibitto. Honestly, wasn't sure we would get here

wavemotion · 2026-09-29T17:11:33+0100

Version 1.0 is released!

https://github.com/wavemotion-dave/Hachibitto

I added Arkanoid paddle controls for the two games that use it (Arkanoid I and Arkanoid II).
Faster game loading - I was computing the SHA1 twice and on big games that was taking extra seconds.
More clenup and optmization - especially targeted at improving the DS-Lite/Phat experience (reduced more jittery screens in Screen Modes 6/7 and MSX MUSIC is now available for DS-Lite though it comes at a pretty high cost of CPU power).
I put together a minimal readme.md file on the github page

esv_83 · 2026-09-29T19:49:33+0100

Thanks for this new update. I wanted to ask if you can make a keyboard just like the one in fMSX3DS.

wavemotion · 2026-09-29T22:22:18+0100

esv_83 said:
Thanks for this new update. I wanted to ask if you can make a keyboard just like the one in fMSX3DS.

The 3DS has a lower screen resolution of 320 x 240 pixels... and all I have is 256x192. And they appear to be using every pixel

esv_83 · 2026-09-29T23:41:55+0100

wavemotion said:
The 3DS has a lower screen resolution of 320 x 240 pixels... and all I have is 256x192. And they appear to be using every pixel

And what if the keyboard were split, adding the option to access the other keys—like in SugarDS, where you can access the remaining keys on a different screen?

wavemotion · 2026-09-30T00:04:30+0100

esv_83 said:
And what if the keyboard were split, adding the option to access the other keys—like in SugarDS, where you can access the remaining keys on a different screen?

Using one of my other emulators a a logical argument for changes to this one... Adaptation, Improvisation... good.

Actung!! I had to put out a hotfix and the new release is 1.0a. This hotfix patches a Config Save issue that was largely affecting the DS-Lite/Phat but I'd appreciate anyone running the 1.0 to update to the 1.0a to avoid any problems.

HACHIBITTO - An MSX2 Fantasy Console

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