Hacking CATSFC released

[DanTheManMS]

AAAAAAAAAAAaaaand holy **** I'm a bit drunk. My apologies regarding this emulator. Will try to make sensible responses sometime in the morning.

 

[DiscostewSM]

Great news!
I didn't have time to test it yet, will do so once I get home today. Just one question: Does it support BG Mode 5 (I think it was 5, may also be 4)? That's a mode used in a very few games, like for example for menus in Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3. What it does is basically giving screens double the width. In the previous versions of the SC2DS Emulators it wasn't emulated well, causing every second letter in those menus to be cut out. Is it emulated yet? If it isn't I could help you by giving more information.

My answer to this is: I don't really know, as I didn't write the emulator from scratch and I haven't tested that. But I do know that the emulator was built from the source code of snes9x, so maybe? If the original supercard NDSSFC didn't support it, then the answer is no, I haven't explicitly added support for that; I'll look it up and see what I can find out.

The letters were indeed cut out in the old version. I didn't want to make it sound like an assumption, sorry. There reasons for this is that in most BG Modes on the SNES, a tile is 8 pixels width. In mode 5, however, tiles are always 16 pixels width (height can either be 8 or 16 pixels). This makes it possible to have a screen of double the width without needing more tilemap space in VRAM. The games I mentioned used this mode to put more text on the screen. What I think the emulator does right now is still treating the tiles as tiles of 8 pixels width, therefore skipping a few tiles. Well, what am I telling you this, anyways? I have screenshots somewhere. Look at this:

So basically the solution would be to emulate the width of 16 pixels and then scale the screen width to half, to make it fix on the screen again.

In case you want to look into this problem: I reported the bug (along with a few other bugs and more details) here:

http://forum.supercard.sc/viewthread.php?t...extra=#pid48036

This is going to be a lot harder than it sounds, at least to make it playable. Shrinking a 16x16 tile to an 8x8 tile will effectively mean cutting out every other pixel both horizontally and vertically. I can't imagine any text will be readable after that, but I will certainly see what I can make happen. That said, though, there are other things I want to get done first because they apply to more games and will take less effort to get going to an acceptable level.

Actually, the lower screen shots of both those games are already cutting out every other horizontal/vertical pixel, as those are being displayed at 256x224 instead of 512x448, and I can read that just fine.

 

[ShadauxCat]

Ah. Nevermind then. I thought the bottom pictures were at full resolution, and I was imagining cutting out every other pixel from THAT, which probably would not be legible at all.

 

[Killermech]

I already addressed this one, but I'm coming back to it: I didn't notice this problem. I played Super Star Wars and it ran flawlessly for me even at CPU Frequency 2. I don't know what's different between us, since we are theoretically running on identical hardware in nearly identical running environments, but I simply didn't have this issue. THAT SAID, however, I'm going to be doing as much as I can to improve performance across the board and hopefully eventually get games like Mario Kart and SMRPG to a fully playable level through some hard core code optimization. I can't guarantee I'll accomplish that, but that is my goal.
Now that I know about it, I notice it everywhere in games that ran near perfect before, like playing a shooter at 60fps and 50fps lol.
I tried to find a game where it's easier to notice and I found it myself to be most obvious in Super Mario Kart.

In the titlescreen where the background terrain is moving to the left. Follow its movement going to the left for a minute or so. It will be in near perfect fluidly motion.
Then go directly to CATSFC and follow its movement again. You'll notice a tiny tiny skip in its movement.

This is where I noticed it the most. Follow one of the mushroom's movements on the top row in BAGSFC same as before, for a minute or so. You'll see it moving in almost perfect fluidly motion with an extremely tiny 'static noise' on the mushroom now and then. But really unnoticeable unless you really pay attention to it.
Then switch to CATSFC and you'll notice a tiny skip in its movement compared to in BAGSFC.
I tested this in CPU 5, Fastforward OFF and sound enabled.

I really hope you manage to get SMRPG running in good speed, that would be like a miracle

QUOTE(amaro999 @ Mar 7 2011, 01:49 AM) I was playing with it and I noticed the games were running as it were frameskip 1. What I did, though, was change my microSD for a faster one. Then CATSFC worked without any lag, just perfectly.

Well I'm using a class 6 Sandisk 8GB card as of lately. I switched to my old Class 4 card to see if it was more noticeable there, but it was the same thing. So I really don't think it's card speed related.
Just the fact that you actually noticed it, implies that something was changed from BAGSFC.

 

[Blauhasenpopo]

Thx for implementing Touchscreen support !

The "option" that it recognizes my last played game.....i ment it in another way....if you select a new game then it ever starts at the top of my Gamez List, i would prefer that the coursor stands by the last "clicked" game.

Greetz and thx

 

[naz2x]

This is nice update to the emu, i will test castlevania and superpunch out.

 

[mechagouki]

Tried SM RPG and Secret of Mana last night - SM RPG hugely improved but still not much fun to play, as mentioned above SoM menus are still corrupted - can someone please fix this. Touch screen support is great though!

 

[FrankensteinTank]

Thanx for the update to the emulator. I don't really notice any more or less lag in games that were ok before but I might not be looking that much into it. If anything, I think Super Metroid is running smoother but that could be just me.
However, it is great to be able to run SMRPG with sound, even if you need fast forward on to make it playable and the touch screen support is appreciated. Good luck with the rest of your updates.

 

[RPG Hacker]

This is going to be a lot harder than it sounds, at least to make it playable. Shrinking a 16x16 tile to an 8x8 tile will effectively mean cutting out every other pixel both horizontally and vertically. I can't imagine any text will be readable after that, but I will certainly see what I can make happen. That said, though, there are other things I want to get done first because they apply to more games and will take less effort to get going to an acceptable level.

Yeah, I figured it would be hard to do. It's only the width, btw. Only the width gets doubled. The height stays the same, so the screen only has to be scaled horizontally. And yeah, the pictures on the bottom are already downscaled. Normally they would have double the width. I think they used some kind of filter, though. Otherwise they probably WOULD look kind of weird.

 

[Supreme Dirt]

I saw this thinking it was too good to be true.

It was.

Damn, I need to get a DSTWO.

 

[DanTheManMS]

A bit more info:
The speedhacks helped on the GBA, obviously, and on the PSP as I already mentioned. They apparently also helped on the GP32 console though finding the exact thread there would be difficult since it's all in Spanish. The ARM implementation of these speedhacks can be found in the SNES Advance source code, in the "65816.s" file. As I said before, translating this from ARM assembly to whatever the Supercard SCDS:TWO uses ("MIPS" assembly?) might be a challenge. The GP32 simply used C/C++ for this, creating a version of the emulator that was slower for most games but faster for the few games that implemented the speedhacks.

 

[ManFranceGermany]

Could anyone get Secret of Evermore working with normal speed. As soon as one enemy appears, framerate drops to 0 for me.
And Secret of Mana 2 has the problem that I can't read the text.

Anyone?

)

 

[RPG Hacker]

And Secret of Mana 2 has the problem that I can't read the text.

Look at my bug report further up. The problem is the same as described there: Mode 5 isn't emulated correctly, therefore the text is unreadable. That's because the text boxes in Seiken Densetsu 3 use Mode 5 as well (even though other parts of the screen use other BG Modes due to HDMA).

EDIT:
This is how the screens are really supposed to look on the SNES, btw:

However, since the Aspect Ratio is not correct here the SNES has the possibility of doubling the screen height as well. This fixes the ratio and also makes the overall screen four times the size of a regular SNES screen. As you can see this also makes a few letters look kinda tall and narrow. That's how the developers intended it, though.

 

[Sir_Voe]

Hmm, this topic has fallen suddenly silent. Hopefully all is well.

 

[ShadauxCat]

Working as hard as I can to get the next release done with speed hacks implemented.

 

[Tubby28]

when will you release the next version?

 

[ShadauxCat]

The only answer I can give to that is "when it's done." I promise it'll be released as soon as I finish it and not held back even a moment, but it's very hard to predict how long implementing something like this is going to take because it's giving me a lot of unexpected problems. So "when it's done" is the best answer I can give.

 

[Sir_Voe]

Thanks for the status update. Don't burn yourself out

!

 

[The Catboy]

The only answer I can give to that is "when it's done." I promise it'll be released as soon as I finish it and not held back even a moment, but it's very hard to predict how long implementing something like this is going to take because it's giving me a lot of unexpected problems. So "when it's done" is the best answer I can give.

Take your time

For now the Temp is grateful for your hard work

Also The Catboy say Thanks! I am so happy to see Mario RPG playable!

 

[Tubby28]

ok thanks for your answer and keep up your great work on it