Cross Platform development?

[Punch]

 

I got reminded of Mednafen and it's actually pretty decent for debugging purposes. Suddenly this became fun to do (!!!). So many bugs left to find, lmao. But as you can see the underlying logic is working semi correctly and building for the NES still works properly as it should.





EDIT: LOL I think I've figured out why there's a black stripe across the full screen fill and why the first column is also black: I'm probably writing the most significant byte of the tile first. Another bug slain, 9999999 more to go.

[TheOldMan]

I got reminded of Mednafen and it's actually pretty decent for debugging purposes....

Yes, it is. Make sure you go to the mednafen site and print out the debugger docs, so you
have it handy. There's a lot of nice things you can do with it.
And, as far as I'm aware, it's actually almost perfect emulation; if you see glitches when testing
in mednafen, you will almost certainly see the same glitches on real hardware.

If you don't understand, chances are I won't either
But I'll take a look.

At one time, I had a link to how the signal timing for NTSC video worked; how many pulses there were for various things, how long they needed to last, etc. I just didn't feel like working out exact timings in terms of how the pce did it.
I do remember being puzzled by how the values got set (in the bios routines), until I walked through the actual code. IIRC, they are set based on the center of the screen. So, in theory, it should be possible to come up with a higher Y resolution; I'm really interested in something other than nnnX240, but haven't found out how. Yet.

Maybe I'll look back into that soon.

And, for the record, I'm not an electrical guy. I'm a programmer. But sometimes you have to know these things. Or at least, sort of understand them when you google them.

[Punch]

Bugs fixed! Just need to un-dummy the PCE version of the sprite handling routines and RLE compressed backgrounds. (and get rid of that ugly ass palette for once)

I hope the game gets to this stage soon:

I got reminded of Mednafen and it's actually pretty decent for debugging purposes....

Yes, it is. Make sure you go to the mednafen site and print out the debugger docs, so you
have it handy. There's a lot of nice things you can do with it.
And, as far as I'm aware, it's actually almost perfect emulation; if you see glitches when testing
in mednafen, you will almost certainly see the same glitches on real hardware.

I'm wondering if there are ways to load labels from the .sym file PCEAS generates into Mednafen. That would be useful (instead of having a second monitor with the file open searching for addresses lol.) I already have a nice cheat sheet printed out.

If you don't understand, chances are I won't either
But I'll take a look.

At one time, I had a link to how the signal timing for NTSC video worked; how many pulses there were for various things, how long they needed to last, etc. I just didn't feel like working out exact timings in terms of how the pce did it.
I do remember being puzzled by how the values got set (in the bios routines), until I walked through the actual code. IIRC, they are set based on the center of the screen. So, in theory, it should be possible to come up with a higher Y resolution; I'm really interested in something other than nnnX240, but haven't found out how. Yet.

Maybe I'll look back into that soon.

And, for the record, I'm not an electrical guy. I'm a programmer. But sometimes you have to know these things. Or at least, sort of understand them when you google them.

That's true, to this day I have no idea how to calculate exact Vblank time on the NES. I always use some conservative approximation (and you probably know how bad this is since it's so limited in that regard). Maybe it's time to actually try to understand that kind of stuff.

[TheOldMan]

I'm wondering if there are ways to load labels from the .sym file PCEAS generates into Mednafen.

Unfortunately not. I generally keep the .sym file open in an editor (well, actually the .lst file) and
flip to it when I need to. That way I can 'follow along' while debugging, and see the addresses for
any variables I might want to check.

Maybe it's time to actually try to understand that kind of stuff.

Yeah, but right now i'm finishing something else up.
The first thing I need to do is find the exact clock frequencies for the pce. From that I can start
working out the times for the various NTSC signal parts. (In terms of the pce clock(s) )

[esteban]

ASIDE: I fully support this awesome project (the brick game), because I know it will be a stepping stone towards BLODIA SPECIAL CD (forget about cross-platform, you want to target—as in limit—your potential audience to 3-4 humans and one really bored parrot).



/aside

[Punch]

ASIDE: I fully support this awesome project (the brick game), because I know it will be a stepping stone towards BLODIA SPECIAL CD

Edit: also, project stalled due to:

A: trying to find a good scheme to make data overlays since PCEAS complains whenever I add something larger than 32k instead of just spilling over the data to other 8kb banks
B: my keyboard's space bar is busted (again!)