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I've made a few more improvements to NESHawk. I cleaned up the code a bit and refactored some execution, so it got a little faster, and the code base is also in a better form for future testing as needed.
Also I noticed a bug in my ppu code, which was apparently impacting test 2 and 6 in test_apu_2. Having fixed that bug NESHawk now passes all 11 of those tests, so that's good.
I continue to look for things that can possibly impact console testing as well, but so far nothing promising has come up.
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Also remember that the A2600 core has settings that control the output of the video window in Atari->Settings (NTSC/PAL) Top line /Bottom line. So you can open a game and make the cropping correct before dumping it. Not sure if this is what you want or not.
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feos wrote:
Just remembered. For encoding we have to crop top and bottom by 16 pixels each. Why are they even there if we need to remove them anyway?
Well, screen size for A2600 games was software controlled. Most games had 192 scanlines, but some had more (Tapper for example had 210.) The defaults are set for the maximum extent I believe.
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natt wrote:
Alyosha wrote:
My opinion though is that at some point we really should be raising the standards of accuracy for NES submissions, especially with Mesen becoming available, otherwise we'll never advance console verification.
Would that mean no more FCEUX?
Yes. If Nestaco improves in accuracy and/or Mesen gets some TAS tools I think it would be time to deprecate FCEUX (and quicknes as well.)
That's just my opinion, but I do think we're getting to that point.
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dwangoAC wrote:
Today I stumbled on Nintaco (http://nintaco.com) which is a new cross-platform open source cycle-accurate NES and FDS emulator and I was really floored with how many features it has. The main interface looks fairly standard:
...
This leads to an obvious question - if it proves itself as a reliable emulator that's in many ways more feature rich than even FCEUX, what's the possibility of allowing the emulator and its movie files to be accepted on the site for submissions?I have to say, before I saw this I wasn't thinking to myself "What the world needs is another NES emulator" but now that I see what it purports to have support for I'm rather intrigued. What are your thoughts? Discuss. :)
Not cycle accurate yet, it fails some of the more difficult tests, but it defniitely has some cool features.
My opinion though is that at some point we really should be raising the standards of accuracy for NES submissions, especially with Mesen becoming available, otherwise we'll never advance console verification.
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I've been making some progress on NES audio lately. NESHawk now sounds correct in the APU_mixer tests (which previously sounded very poor) and I implemented correct behaviour to pass a few more of the test_apu_2 tests.
It doesn't really sound any different to me in actual gameplay, but the tests say its much closer to the real hardware, so maybe someone with a good ear might be able to tell the difference.
Currently only test_apu_2 tests 2 and 6 fail, but it's not clear that both of these should pass in the default ppu-cpu alignment. Tepples on NesDev had tested these previously and found that they randomly pass or fail on a real hardware, strongly indicating an alignment problem. Mesen passes both of these tests incidently, so this might be a good opportunity to test for emulation differences.
I've also fixed a number of buggy games recently, although probably no one is actually interested in playing them but hey they work at least.
There is still quite a bit left to do for test ROMs and mapper compatibility, but it's getting there.
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ruadath wrote:
adelikat wrote:
ruadath wrote:
When TASing Game Gear games, BizHawk 1.12.2 TAStudio throws a NullReferenceException and crashes (including BizHawk) every time an attempt to save the project file is made (although from what I can tell, the save does go through).
Please fix.
Works for me on 1.12.2 and latest master. Please provide more info
Just checked again. Apparently using the save method from the drop down menu works, but Ctrl+S causes a crash. Help?
Can you try again in 1.13?
I'm pretty sure I fixed that. The error was that Ctrl+S was trying to do two things, in TAStudio it was saving, but in EmuHawk it was trying to save save ram, which if non-existent caused the null reference exception.
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Seems to be working to me, although it took 5 minutes to get into the game...and then I walked backwards over the edge and died and it told me to insert side 2, I'm glad I had a NES growing up.
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It's getting there. Here is the sound after the third round of commits.
If I could get the buzzing sound worked out, I'd be happy with it.
For future work it might be worth it to just integrate the reSID library, since it's at least much closer to the real thing then the high level FFT + attenuation I'm using now, but I'm not interested enough to do it.
Link to video
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Oh yeah, I guess I should spare people the pain of waiting through that horrible and long boot up sequence XD
(I forgot how tedious that is when you don't already have a savestate where you need it)
Link to video
NOTE: This is only a first draft, and should improve a bit by the final version, but don't expect it to sound like VICE (unless Saxxon comes back and codes it up)
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I've been working with SID filtering a bit. I have a first draft committed in master, so anyone interested can try it out in the dev build.
Things seem to be working at least somewhat well. Gianna Sisters wind sound is much better then in 1.12.2.
The rather basic FFT implementation I used though really isn't up to the task of emulating the filtering in a low level way (the way reSID does in VICE), but with a few more tweaks I should at least be able to get close.
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adelikat wrote:
I think this technique is cool as hell. Pausing to speed up load times, I love the counter-intuitive.
For me this isn't controversial at all. Also, I get the impression this is something that could be done to other SMS games as well?
Yes, any game that increments a counter outside of an interrupt loop potentially is vulnerable to this. MESSUHGAH originally pointed it out on Batman. If they had simply incremented the counter within the loop this would not occur at all (since NMI jumps to $0066 and IRQ jumps to $0038)
Also it's just good luck that we see this behavior at all. Emulators that start frames at vbkank (as even other bizhawk cores like NEShawk do) would execute the NMI but then immediately enter IRQ before anything goes awry.
Time to improve some SMS runs !
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@MESHUGGAH: Seems plausible, but I'd still like hardware confirmation to determine that this is just a programming oversight and not something else emulator related.
jlun2 wrote:
Have you tried asking on reddit? I'm not sure which subreddit would work, but maybe https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/ ? This forum seems rather obscure in comparison.
