[SegaLoco]

I vote for remove the checkbox. That is an evil little bug if it locks up all of GNOME. What happens on non-gtk desktops like KDE?

[Puto]

I've finished adding Unicode support for RAR archives. Unfortunately, rar.exe doesn't support Unicode filenames properly, so I had to rewrite it to use UnRAR.dll instead. It's no big loss, though. I will include UnRAR.dll in future releases of Gens/GS.

The Linux version still uses the Linux `rar` program, since the Linux version supports UTF-8 correctly.

Doesn't that violate the GPL?

[Spanner]

I've finished adding Unicode support for RAR archives. Unfortunately, rar.exe doesn't support Unicode filenames properly, so I had to rewrite it to use UnRAR.dll instead. It's no big loss, though. I will include UnRAR.dll in future releases of Gens/GS.

The Linux version still uses the Linux `rar` program, since the Linux version supports UTF-8 correctly.

Doesn't that violate the GPL?

Gens violates the GPL anyway due to Starscream IIRC.

[GerbilSoft]

I've finished adding Unicode support for RAR archives. Unfortunately, rar.exe doesn't support Unicode filenames properly, so I had to rewrite it to use UnRAR.dll instead. It's no big loss, though. I will include UnRAR.dll in future releases of Gens/GS.

The Linux version still uses the Linux `rar` program, since the Linux version supports UTF-8 correctly.

Doesn't that violate the GPL?

Technically no, since UnRAR.dll could be replaced with an open-source version that uses the same interface. (It's runtime linked, not compile-time linked.) Using the rar binary on Linux is also okay, since that doesn't link anything at all. :P

With regards to Starscream, it will be replaced in an upcoming version.

For the PulseAudio issues, I'm going to set up an Ubuntu 9.10 installation on another system I have to try and debug it. PulseAudio in general is annoying, but Gens/GS shouldn't lock up the whole system if there's a problem.

In other news, Unicode support for Win32 is essentially done. I've merged the win32-unicode branch to master.

[SegaLoco]

Would it be too much work to port audio over to alsa or oss, or is pulseaudio not the same concept?

[Conan Kudo]

Would it be too much work to port audio over to alsa or oss, or is pulseaudio not the same concept?

Using ALSA directly is generally not possible anymore, since PulseAudio is usually configured to wrap around ALSA interfaces as well.

OSS isn't even included in Linux anymore, so that is out of the question.

[Mad Echidna]

Oh god not a Linux audio discussion <_<

Any program that uses ALSA will still do so, and that sound will go to the Pulse sound server via the ALSA wrapper. Tweaker's issue proabably has nothing to do with Pulse.

[Vague Rant]

Speaking of Linux and audio, although this may affect all builds: run Gens, uncheck Sound > Enable, close Gens, run Gens. The checkbox is enabled again, but sound is still disabled. If you uncheck it, sound stays disabled. Check it again and sound is enabled.

[LocalH]

Gerbil: You need to implement full border emulation - it pisses me off that no major Genesis emulator does so. Just render your 320 pixel wide Genesis window within a 352x240 frame, and fill the unused area with the border color for that scanline. I haven't really played with Gens/GS, so I don't know if you correct the aspect ratio in H32 mode, but if you do, you're still rendering to a 320 pixel wide buffer, which means that it shouldn't be too hard to handle the border.

I'd also like to see emulation of the CRAM garbage seen in the bottom border on most commercial games - one more step to having an emulator that at least produces authentic-looking output (since full accuracy would take something on the level of Nem's Enigma).

This post has been edited by LocalH: 10 December 2009 - 12:56 PM

[GerbilSoft]

Gerbil: You need to implement full border emulation - it pisses me off that no major Genesis emulator does so. Just render your 320 pixel wide Genesis window within a 352x240 frame, and fill the unused area with the border color for that scanline. I haven't really played with Gens/GS, so I don't know if you correct the aspect ratio in H32 mode, but if you do, you're still rendering to a 320 pixel wide buffer, which means that it shouldn't be too hard to handle the border.

I'd also like to see emulation of the CRAM garbage seen in the bottom border on most commercial games - one more step to having an emulator that at least produces authentic-looking output (since full accuracy would take something on the level of Nem's Enigma).

The problem with 352x240 is that it probably won't work in fullscreen. However, I suppose I could make it an option, though that won't be done for a while. Specifically, the VDP code needs to be ported to C. (The VDP code right now is hard-coded to assume a pitch of 336 pixels. The extra 16 is for sprite overflow handling or something.)

With regards to the CRAM garbage, right now the borders are drawn in the video backends, not the actual VDP code. This will be changed once I do the VDP rewrite, so I could potentially add the CRAM garbage functionality there. (I think I know what you're talking about - when I had my MD connected to a VGA projector using RGB, there were some random colored dots at the bottom of the frame.)

Also, on that note, I currently have an old Mitsubishi 14" RGB monitor available that I can use for MD testing. (Supports composite, RGB [15-36 kHz], and TTL [MDA/CGA/EGA].) My SegaCD isn't exactly in working condition, though. (The tray's messed up - I need to fix that sometime.)

[LocalH]

Idea for that: Render to 352x240 internally, but then bilinear resample it to 320x240. This could be tied to an "NTSC Aspect" option sort of like Snake does (except Snake does it wrong - instead of horizontally shrinking the image, he vertically expands it, breaking those who run in 320x240 and use filtered mode to make H32 mode look good as well). Then you can use that 320x240 image like you normally would.

You're correct on the CRAM garbage. I'm not actually sure if it's CRAM-only, I think Nem has done some research into this area. You see more of it when games like S1 and S2 fade the palette in or out (see S2 intro sequence on hardware).

[GerbilSoft]

In progress for Release 7.1:



An external VDP debugger. Currently, it only shows the palette, but I will add more stuff later.

[Hayate]

I tried this earlier today, and it occured to me there's two things you need to add to make it beat Movie Gens. Obviously, the first one is TAS tools, which I recall someone saying would eventually be made as a plugin. But there's something I believe is more important than that, which is Windowed Fullscreen. If you haven't tried it in Movie Gens or whatever, it's how VisualBoyAdvance does fullscreen, and essentially it means that your current resolution is preserved and the image is nearest-neighbor stretched to fill the screen. That means two useful things. Firstly, menus don't get squashed up in a tiny 320x240 (or 640x480) resolution. Secondly, it doesn't stretch wrongly on widescreen. But most importantly, it doesn't cause things to mess up in obscure setups - like my use of DVI which my graphics card doesn't seem to like, so it switches back to VGA when a program changes resolution. (I also had a monitor that refused to display 640x480, but that sucked, so I don't use it any more. The same point applies though.)

This post has been edited by Hayate: 28 December 2009 - 06:08 PM

[nineko]

ew, no please.
I don't know Gerbil's opinion on this, but preserving your resolution is one of the worst things you can do. For one it would lead to nonintegral resizing almost for sure, with the related consequences: much higher CPU load, and high chance for the image to look like crap.
I already have problems to accept the 2X filter (if the resolution was 320x224, why should you play it in 640x448?), but more than this is just plain bullshit. I die a little inside each time I see a video on youtube recorded by someone who MAXIMIZES the emulator window and runs a screen capture at a ridiculously high resolution (and of course at ~5 frames per second due to this).

No thanks.

[SegaLoco]

2nd'd. If you really want to do that, code it yourself . Try to make an mdp if that many people want it, depending on how much freedom an mdp gets that is.