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Sonntag - 02.11.2008


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ParaJVE v0.6.0 um 14:57:44 von kallez
Parabellum's Java Vectrex Emulator names ParaJVE wurde aktualisiert. Hier die Neuerungen:
    * Added several command line switches & parameters to ease offline invocation & integration in third-party launchers.
    * Fixed some errors in the 6809 CPU emulation core (flag V incorrectly computed by INC/DEC instructions)
    * Added VecVoice emulation, as well as a...

    » weiterlesen



Freitag - 13.04.2007


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ParaJVE v0.5.0 um 04:51:50 von kallez
Parabellum's Java Vectrex Emulator names ParaJVE wurde aktualisiert. Hier die Neuerungen:
    As promised, the latest release is now available for download. Since its content and changes have already been described in the previous posts, I won't bother writing some release notes here...

    Just grab the build of your choice, and have fun with your preferred gamepad! :o...

    » weiterlesen



Donnerstag - 29.03.2007


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ParaJVE WIP um 08:09:01 von kallez
Zum in JAVA geschriebenen Vectrex Emulator ParaJVE gibt es folgende WIP News:

Joysticks & Gamepads calibration

The panel dealing with the controller tests and calibration settings is now nearly completed, so here is a brief description... This dialog is made of 3 main parts :
  • The Tests component (the joystick picture at the top).

    It lets you check your settings in real-time. Pressing a button on your physical controller will highlight the associated button in the picture. Also, the joystick axis marker will follow the movements of your stick.

  • The Analog Response Tab

    Here you can tweak the response of your joystick's analog position, by editing the mapped axes curve.

    It is embodied using a Catmull-Rom curve (a kind of cubic spline) whose control points can be dragged around with the mouse.
    The X coordinate is the raw value (as polled from the physical device), whereas the Y coordinate represents the mapped value (the final value used by the emulator).



    Also, two grids display both values, in real time.

  • The Sensitivity Tab

    This part is not implemented yet (this will be a rather trivial & fast job). It will eventually let you adjust the sensitivity of the mapped axes (through 2 sliders), ONLY if they work in relative mode.

    Relative mode components, unlike absolute analog components, provide an input that represents a distance from its previous position (If the device never moves, it will always return 0). For instance, a mouse or a trackball are relative devices, while gamepads have absolute axes.

Well, excepting for the sensitivity bit, everything else is fully functional : calibration settings loading/saving, connected devices selection, as well as controllers menus and configuration dialogs...

It all means the release date gets even closer now! :D



Dienstag - 20.03.2007


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ParaJVE WIP um 08:00:02 von kallez
Zum in JAVA geschriebenen Vectrex Emulator ParaJVE gibt es folgende WIP News:

W.I.P.

All right, it's been nearly two months without any update to this development log, so it's time to keep you informed...

I've worked on three major axes in the last few months : the startup code, the Mac-OS X packaging, and the integration of the controllers physically connected to the computer.

Startup Code

I've had several reports of people experiencing an emulator freezing upon startup. Although I failed to reproduce this behaviour on any of the computers I could perform tests on, this bug is likely to be related to race conditions between the threads during initialisation ; hence I've rewritten the launching code.



It is now much more synchronized (which means a tad slower), thus robust. Also, you'll be greeted with a (*ahem*) nice loading screen while te overlay texture is being read and initialised.

As I cannot check whether it fixes the hangs or not, I can only hope that it will do the trick!

Mac-OS X Packaging

Thanks to RayXambeR's feedback and support, I've finally managed to come up with a proper Mac-OS X packaging.

The previous releases for Mac were merely made of a ZIP archive (much like the other platforms distributions), that wasn't very Mac-friendly, and that usually needed the user to be confident with the terminal console to be launched successfully.

From now on, the Mac version will be distributed as a TGZ archive holding a true Mac-OS X application ; thus it can be run by simply clicking its icon!

Controllers Mapping

Due to popular request ("popular" meaning at least 3 different person ;o) I'm adding support for the physical controllers within ParaJVE.

Any controller supported/recognized by the computer should appear in the list of devices that can be (virtually) plugged into the two emulated game ports. This will let you use your favorite joystick or gamepad to play with ParaJVE (as if it was a real Vectrex joystick).



At the time being, the code that handles the controller mapping is completed and fully functional. I'm currently working on some kind of calibration dialog that would let the user tweak the response of the analog controllers (I'm not sure if it will make it into the final release).

This is it, the next release is not too far away now ; more information and snapshot should be posted soon anyway.


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ParaJVE WIP um 12:42:44 von kallez
Zum in JAVA geschriebenen Vectrex Emulator ParaJVE gibt es folgende WIP News:
    Error in the Linux packaging

    Just a quick note to inform you that there's an error in the Linux packaging, that prevents ParaJVE from working (it terminates silently as soon as you click "Run Game"). Thanks to Jörg for reporting this bug!

    If this happens to you, all you ...

    » weiterlesen


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ParaJVE v0.4.0 um 13:19:49 von kallez
Parabellum's Java Vectrex Emulator names ParaJVE wurde aktualisiert. Hier die Neuerungen:
  • Updated the embedded JOGL library, to make ParaJVE work with the latest 1.5 java runtime (update 10).
  • Included the game Star Sling 4K (Turbo Edition), by Vectorzoa.com
  • Changed the way the game ports are handled. Now you can plug/unplug different peripherals into both ports through a special menu.
  • Added peripheral emulation : PS/2 Keyboard Adapter.
  • Implemented direct DAC write to Sound Resistive Network. Now you can hear the CPU generated sounds (in "Spike", for instance).
  • Implemented VIA6522 SR Mode 101 (Shift Out Under T2 control).
  • Fixed a regression introduced in 0.3.2 where the command line argument -GAME=xxx was not handled correctly.



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ParaJVE WIP um 09:55:46 von kallez
Zum in JAVA geschriebenen Vectrex Emulator ParaJVE gibt es folgende WIP News:

Broken with Java 5.0 update 10

Right, the holidays are now over, and it's time get back to vectrex emulation coding (a task I completely put on hold during the past 3 weeks - hence no progress).

Well, 2007 starts with a bug report from Samuel - thanks for the report, d...

» weiterlesen


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ParaJVE WIP um 16:16:06 von kallez
Zum in JAVA geschriebenen Vectrex Emulator ParaJVE gibt es folgende WIP News:
    Right, it's been nearly a whole month without any WIP update, so I thought I'd give you some fresh news... Yep, ParaJVE is still in active development!

    Well, active may not be the appropriate word at the moment, as other things strongly diverted me from coding as much as I'd like, but s...

    » weiterlesen



Mittwoch - 08.11.2006


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ParaJVE v0.3.2 um 16:56:32 von winfy
Parabellum's Java Vectrex Emulator names ParaJVE wurde aktualisiert.
Hier die Neuerungen:

  • Implemented the analog mode built in Vectrex joysticks.
  • Parasite dots removal : tweaked the heuristics to remove even more dots.
  • Added a feature to automatically build any ROM from its assembler sources (using AS09 by Frank A....

    » weiterlesen


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ParaJVE WIP um 12:34:23 von Hammel
Die Homepage des in Java geschriebenen Vectrex Emulators ParaJVE wurde mit folgende WIP News aktualisiert:
    Ah ah !!! I lied again...

    ... when I said there would not be any update before long : I'm about to release a new minor version soon, that will include two new features :


    * Vectrex analog joystick support (through mouse mapping). HyperChas...

    » weiterlesen


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ParaJVE v0.3.1 um 09:01:24 von kallez
ParaJVE ist ein Vectrex Emulator, geschrieben in JAVA. Die Änderungen sind:
  • Included more homebrew game roms,
  • Added a "display rotation" settings in the gfx menu (0°/90°/180°/270°),
  • Implemented fullscreen support, selectable at startup (it looks like it won't be available under Linux, unless you use a 1.6 JRE),
  • Fixed the annoying High-F...

    » weiterlesen


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ParaJVE v0.3.0 um 13:38:55 von kallez
ParaJVE ist ein Vectrex Emulator, geschrieben in JAVA 1.5.
    This release comes with additional homebrew game roms, and now embeds an HTML documentation for each game ; but it does not include any new (brighter) overlay yet, since I did not have the time to work on that.

    Anyway, as said previously, the big feature of this version is the sound emulation. Although I'...

    » weiterlesen


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ParaJVE WIP um 14:36:14 von kallez
Zum in JAVA geschriebenen Vectrex Emulator ParaJVE gibt es folgende WIP News:
    Dolby Surround Pro Logic ... -not-

    Better late than never, ParaJVE now comes with a proper sound emulation!

    Since I finally managed to get rid of the off-putting bug in the PSG code, the sound now seems to work quite accurately in the emulator. If there are any residual bugs they're not that obvious to spot (at least, nothing that can be heard easily).

    Sound routines debugging proves to be especially tedious (IMO), and as I rapidly got tired of crawling through huge arrays of numbers -- Sampling 3 channels at 44kHz brings quite a lot ;) -- I had to implement some kind of visual tool to try and comprehend them in a more intuitive way.

    Once coded, the new "samples monitor" immediately pointed out the problem, as you can see in this screenshot:



    The yellow/white lines reflect the samples average, while the blue ones are the current maximum. The top channel (yellow) is the overall mixing of the 3 PSG channels (white)

    Quite obviously, the problem came from some kind of saturation in the channel's output at some point... After looking for the probable root causes in the code, it turned out to be a pathetic sign mistake, buried somewhere in the periods computing... With this single line fixed, the sound output for the same "soundtrack" magically became:


    Which clearly makes me happy ... oh well ... call me geek if you want ;)

    Right, there's still some work to do on the audio : adding user options (enable switch, sampling rate, overall volume, ...) ; fixing the timing problems (the sound plays at the game's speed, which is too fast - see the previous post) ; the speech in Spike is not implemented (not planed yet) ; etc...

    But all in all, with this part working, I feel that the next significant milestone has been reached. And as I'm quite satisfied with the current emulator status, a release should not be too far now...


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ParaJVE WIP um 07:37:35 von kallez
Zum in JAVA geschriebenen Vectrex Emulator ParaJVE gibt es folgende WIP News:

What have I been up to recently, concerning ParaJVE? Well, lots of small things have been done, that may not necessarily shows right now, but that will come in handy in the future. Most notably:

  • Fixed a couple of bugs in the emulator's memory mapping :


    • Before, if the emulated program accessed an area of memory that does not exist on the real Vectrex, the emulator's VM would terminate execution - with a self explanatory "invalid memory access" exception, mind you ;)
      It appears that the Vectrex is quite relaxed regarding these accesses, so I finally redirected all the nonexistent memory address space to a NullMemory handler that returns 0 on reads, and discards writes.

    • Fixed a stupid bug where the emulated program could write into a read-only address space (ROM and CARTRIDGE areas) - Yes, there are ROMs around that have bugs causing this kind of behaviour ;) ... Needless to say, this was fixed in 2 minutes once the problem has been diagnosed.

      Which leads us to the next point...

  • As I needed some kind of tool that would allow an easier diagnosis of crashes in the emulated program, I implemented a back-trace feature, along with its GUI.

    When back-trace recording is enabled (slows down the emulation a bit on "not-so-fast" computers), any crash in the VM immediately opens the back-trace window, that shows the history of executed instructions, along with the registers/stack content.



    In the end this module will also make a neat debugging addition (coupled with other stuff like breakpoints) when I'll start to implement a vectrex developer debug toolbox in ParaJVE.

  • Since the overlays rendering obviously appears way too dark, I started to try and make my own versions (Starting from an opaque picture of the overlay, I'm creating a picture made of several layers with different transparency).

    The few ones I completed look much better, so it sounds like I'll finally have to make them all (which is very time consuming, as I'm not that proficient in using GIMP) - Thus this task has been postponed...

  • The next version will include the games documentations, whose browsing will be triggered by a menu in the emulator... Thus I had to convert all the text docs into HTML. After having converted one by hand, I figured out rather quickly that it would be much more easy if this was performed by an automated program instead ;)

    Hence the conversion tool was coded in a rush, and all the HMTL documentations are now ready for inclusion. Maybe I will add them as standalone download package as well, since some people may be interested in grabbing these HTML docs alone.

  • I've started to ask several homebrew authors if I could include their games in the next version, and they kindly agreed -- so expect Thrust from Ville Krumlinde, Nebula Commander and Revector from Craig Aker to be embedded in the next packaging.

    As a consequence, I made a few modifications to the configuration file to support new information about the available games (release date and version, author's name and homepage URL, documentation path, and so on). Of course, the game selection dialog will display these pieces of information, but it's not implemented yet.

  • Last but not least, I lately started to work seriously on the sound emulation (based on a C source form MESS/MAME).

    I now have something that is roughly working, outside of ParaJVE (The sound "commands" & time stamps were previously recorded within ParaJVE, so that they can be played back later by the offline sound emulation routines).

    But for unknown reasons, the sound routines stop to work correctly as soon as they are embedded in the emulator. It seems that I'm having timing/threads problems again, but it needs more investigations.

    And to finish, just an additional remark :

    I am well aware of the FPS problem that plagues the current version (eg. The FPS counter displays 60, but the games runs like it's 80 or even more). Although I don't consider it to be a top priority task at the moment, I'll eventually try and fix that sooner or later. :)


Danke an Emu#Dreams für die News.



Montag - 11.09.2006


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ParaJVE v0.2.0 um 14:42:32 von kallez
ParaJVE ist ein Vectrex Emulator, geschrieben in JAVA 1.5.
  • 10/9/2006 - Version 0.2.0
    Added overlays, rewritten GUI, added persistent configuration. Now embeds the game roms for easier installation.

  • 18/7/2006 - Version 0.1.0
    INITIAL PREVIEW RELEASE of ParaJVE



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