Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: Nemesis - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

Sintendo, on 10 May 2013 - 05:02 AM, said:

The current codebase uses Mercurial (which I prefer), so it won't be hosted on github, but another service like bitbucket.org is a possibility. Bitbucket is only free for up to 5 users though.

Honestly, I might just stick a Mercurial webserver up myself. My current setup is to use Mercurial for the code base, with JIRA for issue tracking, and Fisheye to integrate JIRA with Mercurial. I host these services privately on my computer currently. I might just host a public Mercurial server on my own hardware, with public read access. I'll have to decide if I want to allow public read access to the JIRA system, or protect it behind some kind of authentication.

Aesculapius Piranha, on 06 May 2013 - 04:00 PM, said:

There are three things I need to do before the sourcecode release can be done:
1. Decide on the license terms
2. Figure out how best to handle third party libraries. There are a half dozen or so libraries, and I've had to modify the build scripts for a number of them in order to get the outputs I need. I have to check the license terms for each one to see if I can distribute these modified versions, and also to see if I'm allowed to distribute pre-compiled versions for ease of use.
3. Do some final sourcecode cleanup. There are a couple of breaking changes I want to make to the device API before other people start using it. I also want to make some formatting changes to comments.

Right now I'm focusing on bugfixes and minor improvements for the next release. I'll probably focus on getting the sourcecode release out just after the next release. No hard and fast ETA at this point, but it won't be too far away.

Yeah, my webhost is down, happened a few hours ago now. I'm hoping they'll be back up soon.

winterhell, on 30 April 2013 - 09:54 AM, said:

Is that true even when a 3 button controller is loaded? I'll take a look, see if there's anything unusual going on here.

winterhell, on 30 April 2013 - 09:54 AM, said:

There's no control over filtering right now, and no advanced filtering options. I'm relying on the graphics hardware to perform bilinear filtering to scale the image to the correct size.

You might not actually want nearest neighbor filtering though. One thing you may not realize is that in H32 mode, the VDP effectively has non-square pixels. These can't be represented on a normal PC monitor. If you want to keep the correct image aspect ratio in H32 mode, you need to perform some kind of resampling. The real video signal is also inherently "blurred" in the horizontal direction too, and many games rely on this blurring effect. You'll see a lot of games, like Aladdin, that use dither patterns extensively, and rely on the analog nature of the video output to blur these pixels together to produce an apparent even colour. In reality, a filtered image is more true to the hardware than a simple dump of the raw pixels.

All that said, there is a need for much more extensive image filtering options. I'm planning to allow shader-based filters to be applied to the image output, so basically any kind of filtering you want could be added, and new filters could easily be written by anyone and loaded in. If this is something you really want to see happen, feel free to add it to the suggestions page.

winterhell, on 30 April 2013 - 09:24 AM, said:

I think you'll find that's actually correct. A six button control pad is being loaded by default, and this is one of the few Mega Drive games that doesn't behave correctly with the 6 button control pad I believe. On the real hardware, you can hold down the "Mode" button when powering the system on to make it act like a 3 button controller to work around this problem. I haven't fully emulated that feature of the six button pad yet, so for now, you'll have to either load a 3 button controller instead, or just struggle through with the 6-button pad. To load a 3 button controller, go to "File->Manage Modules", unload the 6 button controller, and select the 3 button controller module and load that instead, mapping it to the first control port.