Post subject: INTELLIVISION EMULATION
Joined: 1/30/2014
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ROMS OF INTELLIVISION NOT RECOGNIZED BY EMULATOR help me ...ty
Noxxa
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According to this, Intellivision emulation in BizHawk is still very much incomplete and not yet for use. You'll have to wait until development of the Intellivision core in BizHawk is done, or at least in an usable state.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa <dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects. <Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits <adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
adelikat
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Also, the intellivision core isn't being worked on, I wouldn't anticipate that happening any time soon.
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I might just be interested in contributing to an Intellivision emulator. I'm curious to know more about the situation though. Is it still not being worked on? The page Mothrayas linked says it's "licensed as MIT"... Does that mean MIT owns the emulator? Do you guys have all the documentation you'd need to build an emulator lying around? I couldn't find anything too specific, and I've also heard it said that while the existing emulators seem to run the games fine they fail many tests on the "MTE 201 Test Cartridge", which has me curious. I wish I could find one of those cartridges.
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Khaz wrote:
I might just be interested in contributing to an Intellivision emulator. I'm curious to know more about the situation though. Is it still not being worked on? The page Mothrayas linked says it's "licensed as MIT"... Does that mean MIT owns the emulator?
MIT is the license. It's basically legal speak stuff.
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creaothceann
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Is there any progress with Intellivision core in Bizhawk as of late? I've been thinking about TASing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain and Tron: Deadly Discs.
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TheWinslinator wrote:
Is there any progress with Intellivision core in Bizhawk as of late? I've been thinking about TASing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain and Tron: Deadly Discs.
Nope nothing as far as I am aware.
When TAS does Quake 1, SDA will declare war. The Prince doth arrive he doth please.
Alyosha
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Let's play Intellivision! I've started work on this core. Fortunately, it was already in a pretty advanced state before I picked it up, so a lot of the complicated stuff was already done. So far I have controls and the basics of the sprites programmed in, but there is a very long way to go. There is plenty of high level information about how the system works, so getting it into a usable state should be pretty easy. Unfortunately I can't find any info about low level things like cycle timing, so for now this will be high level emulation only and lack the real hard core accuracy of NESHawk and AtariHawk. Right now there is no sound or hit detection, but CPU emulation seems in order and the characters react to the controls, so that's about it for now. Stay tuned!
adelikat
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You have no idea how excited this makes me :)
It's hard to look this good. My TAS projects
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YESSS!!! This is great news to me as well, can't thank you enough for this I'll finally be able to break down some of the first games I've ever played. Seems like good progress so far!
Alyosha
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It's been a pretty productive week of Intellivision work. Hit Detection is now implemented, and scrolling is getting there slowly but is making progress. A good thing is that the CPU seems to be working pretty well and I haven't had to fix anyhting in it so far, let's hope nothign comes up. Armor Battle is now fully functional (except for sound of course) so playability is rapidly improving. I would encourage anyone interested in this to download the most recent dev build and try out your favorite game. At this point I need data to point me in the right direction, so the more feedback I can get the better!
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Alyosha wrote:
There is plenty of high level information about how the system works, so getting it into a usable state should be pretty easy. Unfortunately I can't find any info about low level things like cycle timing, so for now this will be high level emulation only and lack the real hard core accuracy of NESHawk and AtariHawk.
Sorry to derail, but how do people find this information? Are the high level specification(s) just posted online by devs or something? How about low level things? I recall reading that it has to be reverse engineered, but how? Given the physical console, how do people gleam this type of info? Not to mention if that's all that needs to be done (get console, get info, implement it) how come newer console emulation-wise it's relatively poor? Sorry if this sounds very noob-ish.
creaothceann
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The type of CPU is known simply from looking at the motherboard. Very often this is a "off-the-shelf" part from a well-known manufacturer, and not something developed exclusively for a particular console (there are exceptions though). These manufacturers publish data sheets, manuals etc. because they want system builders and programmers be able to use the CPU. From that you can build a CPU emulator, and guess at the RAM map (i.e. which parts of the system are connected to which CPU addresses). For example the 6502 has a "zero page" in the first 256 bytes which are fast to access, a stack in the next 256 bytes, and some fixed pointers at the end of the address space. From that you can assume that there's RAM mapped at the beginning and ROM at the end of the address space. When you manage to get the emulated CPU to run the first few bytes, you can follow the binary game code and see what it's doing. By writing test ROMs and connecting them with the real hardware you can explore the machine's behavior.
Alyosha
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@jlun2: I don't really know myself. Presumably a lot of the high level stuff comes from Dev Kits at some point. For older systems it is feasible to simply simulate the whole thing at a very low level and then just cook up a bunch of tests to get everything timed just right. For A2600 for example the scematics of the TIA are known so you can trace the circuitry directly of what's going on (well, I can't but some people can and have.) I think endrift and others are in the middle of this process with gameboy/gba so maybe they can give better answers.
Alyosha
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I've been making slow and steady progress on Intellivision. Recent improvements inclide: -Collision Detection -Timing fixes -Scrolling and Border effects -Code optimization (back up to 60 fps) many games should be in a nominally playable state now. Some will still have graphical glitches and ones requiring banking won't load, but I think I'll be able to start on that stuff soon.
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jlun2: Take a look at how Ben Heck reverse-engineers hardware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43FfJvd-YP4
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Hey where can I dowonload the latest dev build for this?
Alyosha
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This link always links to the current dev build: https://ci.appveyor.com/project/zeromus/bizhawk-udexo/build/artifacts
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It says I'm missing the needed firmware files to load a ROM, although when i set up jzIntv, all I needed was the execrom.bin and the grom.bin, and it looks like they're both present in the firmwares list. Is there anything else I need to do?
Alyosha
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Do you have both roms in the Firmware folder of Bizhawk? If so then maybe you have the wrong version. PM me if you continue to run into trouble.
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Are you looking at jzintv for guidance at all? I'm surprised that a whole new emulator core would be developed from scratch when an open-source core already exists in the form of jzintv (which is highly accurate in most respects & the standard emulator used by Intellivision developers), but I'd imagine you have a good reason.
Alyosha
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^nope! I haven't looked at any other sources, and I probably wouldn't unless I got stuck. As much as I hate re-inventing the wheel, I also have a very hard time following other people's code, and for simple systems like this one it's way less frustrating and more fun to just look at the documentation and do it myself. Plus the core is already like 50% done when I picked it up so it was convenient to just go with the current code structure. I'm almost completely done with graphics now and most games (that boot) look and play correctly. Next I'll have to tackle banking so I can get more games to test.
Alyosha
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Alright back to work on this! With the help of adelikat savestates are now functioning. So far in my testing I haven't found any problems but if anyone finds any bugs just let me know. Be aware that currently there is no mapper support, so only games with normal rom size (8kb) will funciton for the time being. But if you find any 8kb roms that don't work, please post as those are valuable for debugging. I am working on sound right now. I'm hoping to have it done in the next couple of weeks. Also adelikat really improved the controllers too , so things are really coming together!
Alyosha
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Alright, so I got sound working and fixed numerous bugs, so the core is in a pretty good state now. Any 8kb rom should work and play/sound correctly. Next steps are to get TAS tools working and do banking to get the rest of the games working. Any play testing is welcome at this point to dig up bugs.