xdaniel

8...

Twenty-second~

Oh yes, fond memories <3 It doesn't help that, starting with Windows 95, the system started right into Windows instead of having to start it manually... C:\>cd sc2000 C:\SC2000\>sc2000 DOS4GW Extender (blahblah) ... I rarely even used the win command

Ah, so we now have the pre-upgrade posts with proper linebreaks, and the post-upgrade ones without them? Was about to post that a post I made 15 hours ago was now missing them Gonna go fix them in that post then~

Seeing how consoles are covered in another thread, I was wondering what everyone's first computer was? Either the first one you owned, or the first one you used, say a family PC or whatever? Disregarding the Commodores, my first "Wintel" PC was a former server of some kind I got from a local computer store, maybe for my birthday, somewhere around 1997 or so. And I remember most of the system specs to this day - what a geek I am, huh? You don't need to list them off if you don't know or remember them, don't worry Am486 DX2-50, 50 MHz 20 or 24 MB RAM Some VGA video card with 256 or 512 KB RAM, probably by Western Digital or Cirrus Logic 2x 800 MB IBM SCSI 5 1/4" full-height hard disks (one as high as two CD-ROM drives stacked) Adaptec AHA-1542B SCSI controller (there was also a 1542CF, but I think I only got one of those by chance much later) No CD-ROM drive, got a 32x Teac SCSI drive a year or so later Everything in an AT big tower with a huge power supply Some 13" or 14" VGA monitor Some AT keyboard and serial mouse MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 SimCity 2000 <3 I wish I could find a picture of those specific hard disks, but you can find some of similar ones if you google for "hard disk full-height" or something.

It must've been either my original NES, Master System II or Atari 2600 in the mid-90s. I had all three of them sometime back then, but I can't quite recall which one was first right now. The first gaming device in general I've had was the family Commodore 64, I guess, which I just sort of inherited... Man, I could list a bunch of systems right now - from the A500, to the Game Boy and SNES, to my first PCs -, but I really can't get the earliest ones in order. Then again, that was, what, 16, 18 years ago?

Some more technology-related happiness: I was given a new-old PDA by a friend, who wasn't using it anymore but saw how I was using my own "old workhorse" (iPaq 3850, 206 MHz ARM) pretty much daily, at the very least for keeping notes and using the calendar. The thing is a Dell Axim X50, 520 MHz Intel XScale, integrated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc., etc. - and it feels like it's several orders of magnitude faster than my old one. The iPaq struggled with playing certain MP3s from a local SD card, while the Axim right now is happily playing 320 kbps MP3s being shared via WLAN by my desktop! Not to mention, its Wi-Fi chipset is actually capable of connecting to my router, as opposed to the PCMCIA card I (tried to) use with the iPaq. Opera Mini is running very well on it too - it's loading and displaying the mobile versions of certain websites very quickly, and is even kinda able to render the content-heavy normal ones of ex. some news outlets here. I really can't thank him enough for this beauty! EDIT: EDIT 2: That's it for the night...

Spent a little bit too much at today's flea market... - Starwing (SNES, PAL, complete) - Battletoads in Battlemaniacs (SNES, US, loose) - F-Zero X (N64, PAL, complete) - Beetle Adventure Racing (N64, PAL, loose) - Gran Turismo Concept - 2002 Tokyo-Geneva (PS2, PAL, complete) - Game Boy Advance, AGB-001, in Glacier(?) (European, loose) Didn't yet test any of those games - because I actually spent most of the day, gasp!, not at home - but the GBA's working despite having had a leaked battery. From the looks of it, it only started leaking a relatively short while ago, so all the system needed was some scrubbing away at the affected contacts. Will probably still open it up one of those days to clean it thoroughly. And the screen is as horrible as I remember, but it's kinda nostalgic too... the days I wasted playing Mega Man Battle Network 3 under my desk lamp <3

Ahh, I thought they got lost during the upgrade or so, sorry! Thanks for getting them imported again!

Long time no see, yep, it's been ages since ZSO... Well, welcome to The GCN!

I don't wanna be the guy, but... well, losing signatures and profile information isn't too bad, but our private messages? May I ask that we're informed of such things in advance the next time such an upgrade happens? In fact, I had no idea that we were going to lose anything, come to think of it. Did I just miss the message, was it not planned for that to happen, or what was it?

Well, in fact, a similar thread was posted just some 4 hours ago: http://www.the-gcn.com/topic/1254-dolphin-emu/Basically, if you can't make it faster by changing the emulator's configuration (Dual Core, JIT, etc. enabled, maybe speedhacks and such), you'll need to buy some new hardware, mainly the CPU and/or video card I'd say.

Just for the record, in your Dolphin configuration... - Enable Dual Core - Enable Idle Skipping - JIT Recompiler - DSP HLE Emulation ...are all checked/enabled? Besides that, there's some hacks in the graphics settings that you can mess around with, which might speed things up a bit (but also break games). And as for upgrading hardware, from the specs he linked to it's a notebook, not a desktop PC

Just downloaded and updated to DaedalusX64 R755 myself and... nah. No idea how much N64 emulation can still be optimized and such, but I'm not expecting any breakthroughs in speed anytime soon - I mean, the previous version of the emulator I had was from 2 or so years ago, and this new one - built just over month ago, I believe - isn't any faster, at least not in OoT, plus it's got a bunch of graphic glitches. Mario 64 is probably playable with sound if you don't mind frameskip at 2-3, F-Zero X is... uh, well, running sorta well at frameskip 1 (but forget about any sense of speed, not to mention you just slide all over the place with that tiny analog nub, and there's even more graphic glitches), but beyond those... I dunno.

Btw, anything accessed via http://core.the-gcn.com/index.php (note the index.php) still shows the SOPA-protest-style "upgrade in progress" page, while the same URL without the filename redirects properly.

Now that I got that font issue sorted out - "Segoe" doesn't exist on XP, copied them over from my W7 laptop; tho I'm still wondering why Firefox decided to fall back onto Lucida Console or whatever it was -, this is looking very nice. Some of the text is a bit dark IMO like the usernames above posts, but I really like how everything, understandably excluding the Ura Project, is integrated into one layout with one theme now. Nice job!

I'd imagine very few here will understand most of what I'm about to rant about, but here we go... So... well... just look at it: http://www.commodore..._AMIGAmini.aspx That's no Amiga - no matter how much they might've paid to be allowed to slap its name on that - that's just two Mac Minis stacked together, coupled with a really ugly Linux distro that's apparently supposed to resembe the (IMO equally ugly) Workbench 1.x! Couldn't they at least have used WB 2.1 as their model for the GUI? Then again, then it would simply be a gray-ish Linux desktop and there would be even less of a resemblance to the Workbench... Also, the cheapest configuration of that thing you can buy already costs $1495, a bit over 1100€, for a Core-i3 3.4 GHz, 4 GB RAM and a 1 TB SATA HDD. I honestly haven't kept track of Mini-ITX barebone systems, so I can't tell if this is reasonable or not, but it feels really expensive for some reason. I'd rather get something cheaper, maybe with a bit less power or so, and - if the name on the badge is that important - an actual Amiga in addition to that! Say, an A600, they're cute little machines as well. They have some compatibility issues with certain software written for the A500/A2000 as far as I'm aware, but still - just slap in some CompactFlash-to-IDE adapter and an 8 GB CF card, hook it up to your TV, install WB 2.1 and load it with games! Man... I really hate stuff like that, just putting a famous name onto a badge and then selling something based on that name alone. If they'd at least, I dunno, do it in the spirit of what made the original what it was (if that makes any sense), but this... this just screams "cash-in!" to me.

My MIPS is bad so this is more like theory, based on my general and other assembler knowledge... Give the function a pointer to a struct of values instead of all the values separately. So instead of, say, X, Y, Z, RX, RY, RZ, Name, Something, SomethingElse, give it 0x01234567 and make sure you have X, Y, Z, etc. stored at 0x01234567. Hope that makes sense? There must be a CALL opcode or similar that does push the return address onto the stack, and an equivalent RET opcode to fetch that address from the stack and put it into the PC. Or, well, if CPUs like Z80 and 6502 have that, I'd assume a R4300i (or whatever the exact model was) has, too. Probably not all that helpful, huh...

The memory editor could in theory edit the ROM itself because ROM bank 1 (each ROM is segmented into banks of 0x4000 bytes) is always mapped at 0x0000, and it's known which bank is mapped to 0x4000. However, things like tiles or palettes can be loaded into RAM from pretty much anywhere, and without any indication where they came from, not to mention the many games that use compressed graphics that get decompressed into RAM. Thus, no, permanent editing of ROM contents will never be supported.

Tile viewer not yet working in monochrome GB mode, will do that next.

All the above, as well as F-Zero GX and Sonic Adventure 2 Battle.

Alright, a status update of sorts... To get to the main point right away: The existing interface and especially the debugger maybe aren't complete and utter crap, but they certainly have some stupid problems. A few things on top of my head... The main window resizing code is bloated and doesn't even do its job correctly in some cases, ex. when switching to 1x window size The memory editor doesn't update itself correctly; only updates the I/O register area when single-stepping through the code, not when tracing or running the game normally Not directly interface-related: storage of configuration/saves/etc. inside the emulator folder as opposed to ex. XP's Application Data or Vista/7's AppDataRoaming So yeah, because of those problem, bloat, dead code and the like, I set out to rewrite the GUI portion of SharpBoy: Only the main window, options dialog and memory editor are "done" so far, but things are looking up. Plus, while also going over some of the emulation core, I've also fixed some bugs in it - namely that the MBC3's RTC didn't actually update itself in-game (thus making the clock in ex. Pokemon GSC stand still or only update erratically), and some (probably) less severe timing errors which resulted in things like IRQs firing a scanline too late and such - and started cleaning it up, too. There's dead or commented-out code everywhere, even I as its author was surprised by the amount of it... EDIT: Next piece of debugger functionality implemented, and it's one that didn't even exist in the original SharpBoy - a GBC palette viewer.

Zelda: Oracle of Ages Castlevania Adventure B.C. Kid ...for 12€ total. OoA's label doesn't look too nice anymore, Castlevania's got an annoying rental sticker on the back, but I can at least do something about the latter.

The old Maya file =/= the alpha forest's collision. I do think, tho, that Twili put together his own program to export it to an .obj model or whatever. I might see about adding .obj exporting to Wind Viewer, can't say yet.

Gonna leave this here for Kargaroc and his problematic archive: