ZX Spectrum emulator

[pabouk]

Thank you for your work and congratulations for accepting it into the CVS It is a great plug-in.

I would like to share some ideas for improvements:

1. It would be much more usable if you can map the PLAY key on iriver H100 series for controlling games. There is one very good reason for this: PLAY is the only button which could be detected in combination with any other button. For example Manic Miner is unplayable on H100s now because it is not possible to jump to the right or left.

2. The Custom keymap function should not probably map some virtual keys like: up, down ... fire/jump but it should map the real keys of the hardware target like: UP, DOWN ... NAVI, PLAY, RECORD.

3. It would be great if you can also map the buttons of the remote. For example on H100 series it again has the advantage of possibility to detect simultaneous button presses.

4. The VKeyboard is missing some keys like SYMBOL SHIFT and CAPS SHIFT. There should also be possibility to generate simultaneous presses of several keys and it would be great if there are some predefined simultaneous presses like on the keyboard of ZX Spectrum+.

5. Optional antialiasing on screens with a lower resolution than 256x192. Yes, I know that it would be considerably slower but the text is sometimes unreadable on H100 series .

6. Zoom on screens with a lower resolution to show the pixels 1:1. For example on H100 series it would be useful if you could control the zoom when the switch HOLD is activated i.e. NAVI - zoom/unzoom, joystick - move the slice.

7. Possibility to save the keymap, joystick and probably other settings separately for every tape or snapshot.

One bug report from iriver H120: It crashes after several seconds when the sound is turned on. Also the sound is played in loop if you enter the menu or even if you quit the plug-in.

[chomp]

i think the first thing to do to have quick feedbacks about this eulator is to do a key map for all supported hardwares with rockbox because i personnaly own an ipod nano and i can't test ti because i'm blocked at start menu of games because i don't understand how to map keys  

[chomp]

oh ! i don't know if it's normal, but on my ipod nano 4gb the emulator definitively don't work, when i press a button , nothin occur, i have tested with chucky egg and pacman and star war 3D....   so what's wrong ?

[pabouk]

In Chucke Egg you have to "press" 'S' and then '1' to start the game for one player. You must use the virtual keyboard to generate the key presses. The virtual keyboard is in the menu which shows up after pressing hold on iPods.

[theli]

Thank you for your work and congratulations for accepting it into the CVS It is a great plug-in.

I would like to share some ideas for improvements:

1. It would be much more usable if you can map the PLAY key on iriver H100 series for controlling games. There is one very good reason for this: PLAY is the only button which could be detected in combination with any other button.

as a fastest solution we can just change navi to play.

2. The Custom keymap function should not probably map some virtual keys like: up, down ... fire/jump but it should map the real keys of the hardware target like: UP, DOWN ... NAVI, PLAY, RECORD.

You mean menu strings?
Yes, i can change this for all targets.

3. It would be great if you can also map the buttons of the remote. For example on H100 series it again has the advantage of possibility to detect simultaneous button presses.

i already thought about supporting the ability to map as much buttons as you can on targets...
for now there are only 4 just because its the number availlible on all of targets.
this will require some work.

4. The VKeyboard is missing some keys like SYMBOL SHIFT and CAPS SHIFT. There should also be possibility to generate simultaneous presses of several keys and it would be great if there are some predefined simultaneous presses like on the keyboard of ZX Spectrum+.

i think i can add this buttons though simultaneous keypresses will require vkeyboard rework as for now its just cut down version of rockbox's virtual keyboard with custom layout

5. Optional antialiasing on screens with a lower resolution than 256x192. Yes, I know that it would be considerably slower but the text is sometimes unreadable on H100 series.

thats not about aa... it just that scaling just skips some lines and columns so that picture fit screen...
aa won't help.
.... possible solution will be your next request

btw, what is the speed on h100? for now it uses grayscale lib but i can write 4bpp driver for it (on iPods it gives a great speed boost.. though only 4 colors)

6. Zoom on screens with a lower resolution to show the pixels 1:1. For example on H100 series it would be useful if you could control the zoom when the switch HOLD is activated i.e. NAVI - zoom/unzoom, joystick - move the slice.

i'll think of way this can be implemented

7. Possibility to save the keymap, joystick and probably other settings separately for every tape or snapshot.

i thought about having the ability to add own keymaps to 'custom keymaps'...
for now they can easily be added into source

One bug report from iriver H120: It crashes after several seconds when the sound is turned on. Also the sound is played in loop if you enter the menu or even if you quit the plug-in.

yes. this is not target-specific ... sound suppport is still unfinished (anyone wants to help?) it can crash any target unfortunately...

though i'm now working on Atari 2600 emulator i will work on this issues too as i want this to be usable as much as possible (with my programming skills ). any help is welcomed

[pabouk]

1. It would be much more usable if you can map the PLAY key on iriver H100 series for controlling games. There is one very good reason for this: PLAY is the only button which could be detected in combination with any other button.

as a fastest solution we can just change navi to play.

Yes, it is good and fast solution.

2. The Custom keymap function should not probably map some virtual keys like: up, down ... fire/jump but it should map the real keys of the hardware target like: UP, DOWN ... NAVI, PLAY, RECORD.

You mean menu strings?
Yes, i can change this for all targets.

Yes, I meant the strings and possibility to map all available buttons of the target as you wrote below.

5. Optional antialiasing on screens with a lower resolution than 256x192. Yes, I know that it would be considerably slower but the text is sometimes unreadable on H100 series.

thats not about aa... it just that scaling just skips some lines and columns so that picture fit screen...
aa won't help.

With aa it will not skip the lines and columns but it will count them into the resulting picture. There is a good description of antialiasing in Wikipedia. The simplest approach with just averaging of the content of the destination pixel would be fairly sufficient. I think I could prepare some basic functions.

btw, what is the speed on h100? for now it uses grayscale lib but i can write 4bpp driver for it (on iPods it gives a great speed boost.. though only 4 colors)

The speed is not great... It is about 45%, with frameskip 4 it is 51% and in the fast mode 60%.

any help is welcomed

I hope I will find time to install the development environment and to get involved more although I am not a good programmer.

[theli]

With aa it will not skip the lines and columns but it will count them into the resulting picture. There is a good description of antialiasing in Wikipedia. The simplest approach with just averaging of the content of the destination pixel would be fairly sufficient. I think I could prepare some basic functions.

i think that better looking scaling will get us near 10% speed

The speed is not great... It is about 45%, with frameskip 4 it is 51% and in the fast mode 60%.

i think not using grayscale lib will give about 100% then... i'll try.
you can come to irc so we can try this, cause i don't own h100

I hope I will find time to install the development environment and to get involved more although I am not a good programmer.

me neither

[chomp]

In Chucke Egg you have to "press" 'S' and then '1' to start the game for one player. You must use the virtual keyboard to generate the key presses. The virtual keyboard is in the menu which shows up after pressing hold on iPods.

thanks but this don't works to. when i press a key on the Vkeyboard nothin happens !
others bugs:
- when i start a game, there is no backlight
- when i go to the menu (by switching old) it takes about 3-4 secondes before i can move in the menu or press a key....

 

[theli]

thanks but this don't works to. when i press a key on the Vkeyboard nothin happens !
others bugs:
- when i start a game, there is no backlight
- when i go to the menu (by switching old) it takes about 3-4 secondes before i can move in the menu or press a key....

 

load tape, wait for running at bottom string "press s to start.."
press 's' using vkeyboard ( upper S means space )
wait for string "1,2,3 players" to appear and press '1' with vkeyboard

as for backlight i think i just can make it enabled during playing .. any objections?

hold issue is not related to zxbox

[chomp]

no objections for me  
thx i'll try this now

[chomp]

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA  
i'm a dummy !
exactly what i do:
i launch the tape, when it show "press S .... " i switch HOLD, go to VKeyboard highlight "S" and press select (i have try buy pressing Play or Menu to) and nothin happens !
edit: it was "s" not "S" , that's why....
so i finally go ingame but i can't move the character....  

[theli]

so i finally go ingame but i can't move the character....  

that's probably because keys are mapped to kempston joystick by default and Chuckie Egg uses keyboard input.
Change this in options->map to kempston

[chomp]

okay.......... and do you know a website where i can find inlaycards for zx spectrum games

[theli]

okay.......... and do you know a website where i can find inlaycards for zx spectrum games

http://worldofspectrum.org/
like this one:
ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/games-inlays/c/ChuckieEgg.jpg

[chomp]

okay, that will help me, many thx for all your help.