Gens/GS Release 7

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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).

 

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).

 

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.)

 

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.

 

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.

 

...what?

Dude, it's not like the mode would be mandatory. It'd be an OPTION, just like it is in MovieGens. What do you need to do to avoid using it? Absolutely nothing.

Windowed Fullscreen has never caused lag/slowdown for me. Plus, if you're so bothered about non-integral resizing, there could be another option to make it only scale to the next lowest integral size available - for example, with a resolution of 1920x1080, the scale factor would be 4, which would produce a 1280x960 (or 1280x896 for the purists) image in the center of the screen.

Also, it seems you're failing to take into account the fact that Gens/GS already can display in this scaling mode, it just doesn't let you display the window in fullscreen without changing the resolution.

I'm sure MovieGens has this for a reason, and I'm sure I'm not the only one out there with a weird monitor.

There's another advantage it has that MovieGens doesn't make use of - with windowed fullscreen, you no longer need to revert to non-fullscreen to display dialogs such as the open or preferences dialogs. It always annoyed me when the screen would be black for three seconds just because I wanted to change my controls or somesuch.

Speaking of changing controls, there's a bug which I've seen in a lot of emulators which only seems to happen on Vista and 7 - the keypresses aren't marked as "handled", so they get processed by the GUI. So if you want to use the space key, it re-presses the "change assignment" button you just pressed. This one can be avoided by holding down the mouse button somewhere else while pressing space, but more annoyingly and specific to Gens/GS is that if you try and use the 'c' key, it presses the Cancel button, which I haven't found a workaround for. Yes, the response to this will probably be "go change the values in the config file", but why even have the configuration dialog if I need to edit the values in the file?

 

Is Gens/GS using SSE2 or something ? I get "this program has tried to execute illegal instruction error" every time I try to run it... I've got a Tualatin Pentium III here, its only got SSE...

 

Just set the window's border state to "none" and then maximize it; then it'll automatically hide the taskbar/other docked toolbars if people still use those (and, in the case of multi-monitor, the window will simply fill whatever screen it was already visible on). If the window's already maximized, you NEED to restore it before going windowed fullscreen, or it won't work.

I can't think why it would, but this could well be the case - it's a pretty common problem with all emulators, not just Gens/GS.

 

I don't have Spy++. I think it came with Visual Studio 6 which I had years ago, but I really don't feel like digging that up again and installing it =P

 

You can download the Debugging Tools for Windows which includes Spy++ among other debugging tools.

 

I just installed that, and the only program it seems to have put on the Start menu is "WinDbg". Taking a quick glance at the help file which had a list of "additional tools and utilities", Spy++ isn't in that list either.

 

Hmm... Well, here is a "substitute" of Spy++, called WinSpy. Perhaps this can help? Binaries and Source code are available for WinSpy, too...