Gens/GS Milestone 6

Thanks. Unfortunately, Gens/GS as it is right now is guaranteed to not work on PowerPC, since several components are written using x86 assembly language. This includes the 68000, Z80, and SH2 emulators, as well as the VDP emulation code.

I'm working on porting it over, one step at a time. The first step is to get Z80 emulation ported to C, since the Z80 is the easiest CPU to emulate. This is why I requested an MD port of ZEXALL (see this), so I can make sure that I'm not screwing anything up.

 

I probably forgot to include a call to the menu sync function when dragging & dropping the ROM image. I'll check that later today.

EDIT: Fixed. (local commit d71ad50e5c5948c2c9c0bff9a200b68c4e641bac)

 

I've made my git repository public. You can access it at http://gs_server.gerbilsoft.ddns.info/cgi-...s.git;a=summary .

Current branches:
- master, aka trunk.
- libcdio, where I'm porting ASPI to libcdio.
- mdZ80, where I'm porting the Z80 emulator to C. (This won't be done for a while.)

 

I checked it out. It looks like a straight port of the asm version, though with a few minor changes. I'm designing mdZ80 to have a better structure, so it will be easier to maintain.

 

That usually happens if you don't have the proper video drivers, are out of video RAM, or if you're using VirtualBox. (VMware/Win2000 works correctly.)

 

I added a new Controller Configuration dialog for the next release.

Old one (as seen in m6):


New one:


The new one lets you see what the current configuration is before reconfiguring. It also lets you reconfigure it one button at a time, and restrict input to a specific input device.

Edit: I originally intended for the "Input Device" dropdown to let you limit devices for changing the key configuration, but now I think that might be unnecessary and confusing, since it only affects new configurations, not existing ones. However, listing the available input devices is still useful, so I'll probably change it to a listbox and move it underneath the controller ports.

 

It's useful for debugging. I guess I could enable/disable it based on the —enable-debug configure flag, but for now it's always enabled.

 

Another update to the Controller Configuration window:



I added two new buttons: "Change All Buttons", which lets you change all buttons at once (kind of like how it worked before); and "Clear All Buttons", which clears the configuration for the current controller. Clearing the buttons is useful for disabling the second player. (I may add an option to "unplug" a controller later, but that requires low-level code changes.)

 

Yet another new random thing I added to Gens/GS for Release 7:



Basically, it's a plugin that implements the functionality found in LOst's "sGens" version of Gens. It currently works best with Sonic 1 and Sonic 2. Sonic 3 and S&K do work, but some values aren't read properly. Also, the "Zone" and "Act" labels were never updated in sGens, so those don't work in the Sonic Gens plugin yet.

 

Miscellaneous update: The VRAM overwrite bug has been fixed. Zero-length DMA requests now correctly corrupt VRAM.

I added a configuration option to re-enable zero-length DMA requests (hence disabling this bugfix), but specifically added no GUI for it, since the VRAM corruption is how the real hardware behaves. Some older Sonic hacks may need the option, though.