Memories of a coder

Well… I just looked at the code this morning and saw that the code looked horrible… So I just reorganised it a bit (included the code of examples), added a few “static” keywords and fixed a few warnings related to new versions of libnds and devkitARM. Nothing else, though. Everything worked fine, so I didn’t have to do anything else…

Link to web with the download information and those things

Special Scenery Beta 2011 edition.

This is what I’ve been working on since last summer, and I think it is a quite good program right now. It is just another GBA emulator, just like VisualBoyAdvance, and it emulates the same: GB, GBC, SGB and GBA.

I’ve used the GB, GBC and SGB emulation code from GiiBii, so GiiBiiAdvance has the same compatibility (a bit more, i’ve changed a bit of SGB emulation code). GBA emulation is, on the other hand, not really high. I mean, lots of roms work, but some of them just show a black screen, or hang when you try to start the game from the menu… Everything of GBA is emulated (except the serial port), but there are bugs I can’t find, I’ll work on it until I get a better compatibility. Of course, it emulates all save chips, but some saves aren’t compatible with other emulators. It will try to guess the save type if it can’t detect it from the rom. It lets you take screenshots, and GBprinter output is saved as a png image. GBcamera is not emulated yet, though, so if you want to play with that rom, use GiiBii.

There is also a quite good debugger, with a dissasembler, memory viewer, I/O ports viewer, tile viewer, map viewer, palette viewer and sprite viewer. They are different in GBx and GBA mode. If you are playing a SGB game, there is also a SGB things viewer. I have to make it easy to dump/save things, right now it only lets you watch. So… here are some screens:

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Special Scenery Beta 2010 version!

The most important change is that it now uses OpenGL instead of drawing directly to the framebuffer, which makes it work a bit faster. I’ve also allowed to use 3x zoom because the screen size is no longer a problem.

Changes:

-Dissasembler fixes.
-Debugger screen now gets focus when reaching a breakpoint.
-Changed to OpenGL, allowed 3x zoom. Fullscreen mode is buggy, sometimes it crashes when returning to windowed mode… :S
-Rumble “emulated” (screen shakes a bit).
-MBC7 fixed (Kirby Tilt ‘n’ Tumble).
-Mapper code optimized a bit.
-Stat bug emulated (Legend of Zerd, Road Rash now work in non-color GameBoy modes).
-GameBoy Pocket screen is now white, you can only change the color of the normal GameBoy screen.
-Sound emulation code partially optimized. Also, it is more accurate now (and it can save the sound output to a wav file, but the code is disabled this version because it needs testing).
-CPU fixes: Zero flag for opcodes RRA / RR A, RCLA / RCL A, etc…
-Added a filter to make colors more “realistic”. You can enable it in the menu, and you can also enable or disable the frame mix filter that comes with GiiBii since first version.
-Discovered why Alleyway didn’t work: GB Printer was enabled Ù_Ú.
-Fixed a bug in ICON_EN SGB command that made graphics have serious glitches in some games (DK2, DK3).

Downloads:

Binaries (win32)

Binaries (linux) You need SDL and GTK+ (and OpenCV for the GB Camera).

Source

Notes:

-Emulation may be more accurate if you put the gb boot roms in the “boot” folder of the emulator (see the readme.txt). They aren’t included with the download.
-You can load a rom by grabbing it to the GiiBii exe file (or using the command line “GiiBii myrom.gb”).
-If you want free roms, go to PDRoms. If you are looking for comercial games, I can’t help you.
-This emulator will be mixed someday with GiiBiiAdvance.

Screenshots:

Hello!

Since GiiBii works really well for what I expected, I wanted to do a GBA emulator. I’ve been working on it since July, and after 2 months of work, here are some results:

“Kirby – Nightmare in Dream Land” and “Need for Speed – Underground 2″

Obviously, there is still a lot to do, most games are unplayable (in fact, NFS runs very slowly, there is a problem with CPU timing, I guess),  have graphic glitches (where is the needle of the velocimeter? ) or just can’t pass from the initial splash screens (if they can show them…).

What is done:

• CPU emulation (ARM and THUMB), but it is still buggy.
• DMA channels (except special modes).
• All BG modes and regular (non-affine) sprites are emulated. No special effects or window effects, though.
• VBL, HBL, VCOUNT, DMA and KEYPAD interrupt requests.
• Disassembler, I/O register viewer (both aren’t finished) and memory viewer.

A capture of the debugger:

Yeah, that’s a Tonc demo.

PS: A new version of GiiBii is comming in a few days .

New version! This time, GiiBii comes with an interesting new feature… It can emulate the GB Camera with camera features! I’ll explain more about this later, before that:

Changes:

-New mappers supported: MMM01 (Taito Variety Pack works,  Momotarou Collection 2 doesn’t…), MBC7 (controls need some improvements…).
-You can set the screen size to 1x or 2x now.
-You can reset the ROM instead of having to exit it and reload the ROM.
-Now the console shows more information when loading a ROM (like the licensee name).
-You can set customized controls for 4 players (yeah, SGB multiplayer works again ^^).
-You can change volume or enable/disable each sound channel.
-Stop mode emulated correctly (but I’ve never seen any game using it, i’ve coded it just by testing on my GBC).
-Added breakpoint support.
-Debbuger font size can be changed (take a look at the ini file).
-A few little bugfixes and improvements…

Downloads:

Binaries (win32)

Binaries (linux) — coming soon…

Source Very messy, camera functions in “memory.c” (nothing special, though).

GameBoy Camera:

This version of GiiBii can emulate camera features of GB Camera just by using a webcam. For getting the pictures from it, GiiBii uses OpenCV, which is cross-plataform, just like SDL and GTK+. GiiBii will try to use as much information as possible from the webcam, and scale it down to the GB size. This is just the first version with camera support, you can expect some improvements in next versions. For example, brightness is emulated very badly… but hey, it “works”. On the other hand, contrast doesn’t work… What I’m trying to say is that you will have to wait if you want a better support. Just remember that this emulator isn’t as fast as it could be, so don’t expect it running as well as the other emulators you’ve tried. Anyway, take a look at what it can do now :

Try taking a picture and “printing” it using GB Printer (which is emulated).

Just a note: It may freeze a second or so when loading the GB Camera ROM (because of the webcam being inited). If you want to enable the webcam window, enable debug messages and it will load when opening the GB Camera ROM.

Uhmmm… yeah… ^^

PS: I’m using OpenCV for getting the webcam data.

Hello again!

This time I’m going to show you a music player… for GameBoy. It’s very easy to use, and easy to compose music for it. I’ve included source code (100% asm) and templates for RGBDS and GBDK. You have to compose the music in a tracker in the PC using a custom mod file included in the download. Available effects and other instructions to modify it are in a text file in the download. Then, you convert it using a special tool which will export the data to a GBDK c file or a RGBDS asm file. Included templates can be compiled by double clicking the bat files, so you can use them for testing your songs as you compose them (I’d use the RGBDS one). For any other information, look at the readme, or ask me. There is an example there, the rest should be self-explanatory.

Download

PS: Is there anybody who still code for GB?

Well… This is what happens when I’m bored and I feel a bit guilty because I haven’t practised anything with pascal (they make us code with Turbo Pascal in university)… I don’t know exactly why I’ve put v0.1 as there won’t probably be more updates… Anyway, download links here, source + win32 binary:

Download

And a screenshot…

Well, it took me some days more to finish this because of some (sound related) bugs  I couldn’t fix, but here it is! GiiBii v0.1, first version of GiiBii for PC. I hope you like it. I think this is the first “official” release of an emulator that supports the GBC boot ROM (not included in the downloads).

Features:
-Supports MBC1, MBC2, MBC3 (RTC emulated), MBC5, HuC-1.
-Sound channels emulated correctly (you can hear “pikachu!” in pokemon yellow, for example).
-”Turbo” mode. Not extremely fast, though… This emulator is not meant to be fast, but to be accurate.
-Supports boot roms (bios). At the moment of writing this only DMG, SGB and CGB have been dumped, but GiiBii is prepared for the other ones as well (they may not work, as they haven’t been tested).
-It can generate screenshots in PNG format.
-GB Printer emulated, images are saved into the screenshots folder in PNG format, too.
-Allows changing the screen palette in gb mode.
-Super GameBoy is emulated, though some commands aren’t coded (sound, default palettes…).
-Debugger and VRAM viewer (debugger is not complete yet).
-Uses SDL and GTK+, cross plataform libraries, so it should be very easy to port to linux, for example (I’ll check it and upload a binary when done).
-GiiBii is open source, it is licensed under the GPL v3 so you can modify it but you have to make modifications open source too.

And finally, the downloads:

Binaries

Source

Well, this is the first “real” post.

I’ve been working on a port of GiiBii (my gameboy emulator) to PC for about 3 weeks. It has been a bit difficult, as I used libraries that are only available in Wii (libogc, asndlib…), and I wanted to make the port using only cross-plataform libraries (as I want to make linux binaries).

The first thing I have to decide was the graphics library I could use in PC. I decided that SDL was a good idea because it also gives a low-level sound api, just what I need to improve the audio system of my emulator (yeah, the Wii version uses a really bad system and there are glitches many times). When I managed to get it to compile, I started porting the emulator. I deleted a lot of code and, after commenting a lot of parts like sound, input, Super GameBoy emulation, I managed to get it to compile. Then I started to fix that parts. When I finished with the input and the SGB ones, I decided it was time to begin with the GUI.

I looked for a library to make it.  I found out that GTK+ was a good one, and I started to put together GTK+ and SDL. When it was ready, I started to code the GUI. GTK+ is a bit difficult at the begining, but when you get used to it, you can see that it’s really useful. After a lot of hours of work, I finally made a little menu with almost all options that you can see in the Wii binary and rewrote the debugger.

This is the result:

Cool, isn’t it?

I’m rewriting the sound emulation part at the moment. I think that in a week or so I will have finished it (and some parts of the menu) and I will release a beta.

Bye!