ZX Spectrum emulator

[Jazz00006]

=S trying it out now..... o wait, blerg, how does one run it? its not a pre-defined ext, and i cant find it in, open with > *

[theli]

i'm not really sure what are you talking about ...
try it with this file

[BigMac]

well does this run greyscale files on color models?
Keep ROCking on!

[theli]

i'm confused ... what greyscale files are you talking about?

zxbox runs in greyscale on greyscale models and in color on color models ....

[BigMac]

I was asking if i could run a greyscale program on a color target
Keep ROCKing on!

[theli]

zxbox fully emulates ZX Spectrum 48k.
so any program you can run on ZX Spectrum 48k you can run in zxbox.
it doesn't matter on what supported target are you running it on.

[miner49er]

I've managed to get it running on my H300.

Please don't see this as too negative but it's really too slow to be usable at the moment. I've tried manic miner and kokotoni wilf, mm starts but is too slow to play and kw doesn't seem to start.

there must be a way to speed this up?

I mean, I was playing speccy games on my P133 at full speed.

If I can help then, please ask.

[theli]

well, i can play Chuckie Egg on my mini at more then 100% without frameskipping ( > 50 FPS )...
as i know speed on iPod Video is about 70-80% ...
i can't tell it is unusable

so what is speed display when you turn on option "display speed" ? and try it with frameskip 0,1,2,3

[theli]

as for kokotoni wilf ...
zxbox runs this tape of it
ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/games/k/KokotoniWilf.tap.zip
fine

[miner49er]

Kokotoni wilf shows 30 fps and stays on a green screen.
manic miner, runs at max 60fps with frameskip of 4

Oh, one major fix would be able to press >1 buttons simultaneosly - can't jump left or right on mm.

maybe, I'm missing something - does it require the latest rockbox to be build, mine is a few weeks old.

[evilnick]

Oh, one major fix would be able to press >1 buttons simultaneosly - can't jump left or right on mm.

This *might* be a hardware problem on the iRiver h**0 players, the way I understand it, you can only press PLAY+another button, so if you map PLAY to jump then in theory you should be able to jump sideways.

Of course, I'm usually wrong!

[theli]

hm .. it shows 60 % and 30 % ? (these are not FPS if they are %) rather slow ...
you confused me ... first versions really showed rendered frames per second number ....
but now zxbox shows actual emulation speed disregarding number of frames rendered
though as you say you changed frameskip i assume you are using more or less up-to-date patch ...
btw, are you using the latest patch posted?

as for buttons - i also think this is a hardware problem because zxbox reads states of all buttons each frame and i can easily jump sideways on my iPod mini in Manic Miner/Rainbow Islands/Chuckie Egg/Bubble Bobble

Kokotoni wilf stays on a green screen.

did you tried that tape link to which i provided?
are there any messages before it stays at that screen?
actually .. there can be a bug regarding file extension ... can you rename tape from KOKOTONI.TAP to something like kokotoni.tap ( 'tap' with lower letters )

[pabouk]

Oh, one major fix would be able to press >1 buttons simultaneosly - can't jump left or right on mm.

This *might* be a hardware problem on the iRiver h**0 players, the way I understand it, you can only press PLAY+another button, so if you map PLAY to jump then in theory you should be able to jump sideways.

Yes, it is a hardware problem.
There are several possible workarounds:

- PLAY button and HOLD switch are independent so you can detect any PLAY / HOLD + other button combination.

- The remote can be used and any combination of one button on the remote + one button on the main unit can be detected.

- Although you cannot detect more buttons pressed simultaneously you can detect transitions. For example:
1) Sequence REC, REC+RIGHT, RIGHT gives this sequence of values from ADC:
    E0, 87, 87
2) Sequence REC, no-press, RIGHT gives:
    E0, FF, 87
It is possible to detect whether the REC was being pressed when you clicked RIGHT although it could be CPU hungry to read ADC often enough.
3) Unfortunately the reversed sequence cannot be detected as RIGHT, REC+RIGHT gives:
    87, 87
Also REC release cannot be detected while RIGHT is pressed because RIGHT value - 87 overrides REC value - E0.

[theli]

zxbox has just been commited and became a part of RockBox ....
as i own only one target i may have introduced some errors...
i f anyone wants to test (latest cvs buils already includes this) please report problems here.
thanks .

[theli]

i've added some basic documentation to wiki here:
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/PluginZXBox