Oh yes! Since today Giana’s Return features WARP ZONES… of course we can’t tell where they are Every WARP ZONE allows to jump over 3 levels, which should be timesaving a lot.
February 10th, 2008, 17:03 Posted By: Christuserloeser
I've uploaded a fully tested and working Dreamcast version of Golden Axe Remake to DCEvolution.net:
It's a full remake and enhanced version of the arcade game - Golden Axe.
This game was initially made for Windows by Chinese OpenBoR coder utunnels. I merely did a huge part of the RAM related optimizations for the Dreamcast port and also recorded the music modes.
utunnels helped a great deal with the Dreamcast version too. He vastly optimized the script language in OpenBoR and did many other engine related code optimizations to allow the game to run on the Dreamcast's 200Mhz CPU and 16Mbyte RAM. (In the future we will use the DC's 8Mbyte Video RAM and 2 Mbyte Sound RAM too! )
February 13th, 2008, 20:50 Posted By: Christuserloeser
-Description-
Golden Axe Remake is an enhanced version of the arcade original. This game was initially made for Windows by Chinese OpenBoR coder utunnels.
utunnels also helped a great deal with the Dreamcast version. He vastly optimized the script language in OpenBoR and did many other engine related code optimizations to allow the game to run on the Dreamcast's 200Mhz CPU and 16Mbyte RAM. (In the future we will use the DC's 8Mbyte Video RAM and 2 Mbyte Sound RAM too! )
My part in this release were the RAM related optimizations to the mod itself. I also recorded the music.
-Download-
There were problems with the previous download but it seems I got it working: The problem was FireFTP!
I uploaded it using Windows Explorer now and it seems it worked fine as the file size finally is correct this time.
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This is something that i´ve been working on, but stopped because i need to study for exams. It´s a snowbros2 (toaplan2) driver on franxis mame4all 5.1 in dreamcast (with chui´s port code).
The sprites doesn´t show: i disabled them because (i think) they "eat" all the memory while mame decode gfx.
I think that using some functions of mame 0.37 will make the game work fine.
If anyone want to help/see the code/get a binary/dance like robot just SCREAM...AWehAUWhEUhaUeh...
I’ve started fiddling with the vertex shader, which has been fairly educational. It hasn’t actually fixed any of the bugs yet, but I’m hoping it will eventually give much better rendering accuracy. (Thanks to dknute for some good suggestions on the z-buffer problem) Unfortunately turning on the VS (even with a trivial program) gave me a big performance hit on my (admittedly relatively old) hardware, so it remains to be seen whether this will be viable for said hardware.
Also did some work to get osmesa support up and running, which is mostly done now but doesn’t quite work correctly (there’s some weird texture bugs, as well as the occasional projection matrix screwup). Unfortunately it’s also _really_ slow on any kind of real scene, so I’m not sure how much effort it’s worth spending on it at the moment[0].
Currently I’m working on reworking the renderer to use vertex buffers (or client-side arrays in the absense of VBO support), which are purported to be outrageously faster than immediate mode. We’ll see if that’s true, but even if there’s no big difference, the resultant data structures should be a lot easier to work with for processing purposes (saves traversing the tilebuffer repeatedly).
After the dust settles on that, the next priority is to fix the known outstanding blatant render bugs:
* Bug #29: Texture coordinate problems.
* Obviously wrong colours in some scenes
* Issues with misplaced (or incorrect geometry) in some scenes (the pre-render data is demonstrably correct in these cases, so it’s either a misread of the scene data (probably), or cases that need to be handled specially).
* Various hw specific issues with certain texture types (my favourite thus far is a scene that breaks on both ATI and NV but in quite different and distinct ways…)
And then on to shadow volumes (interesting), RTT (easy), pixel-level transparency sorting (hard) and all the other fun stuff ^_^.
[0] It should be possible to take just the sw rasterization engine out of mesa, and blow away the front end more or less completely. This would be a fair bit faster than it is currently, but it still probably won’t be fast enough. It also looks to involve quite a bit of work as well.
It turns out that the lc2000.iso link that was posted (btw, thanks for that! ^_^) is an earlier version of linux-dc (it identifies as running the 2.4.0-test8 kernel) than the one I’d been testing with, and it exposed a few issues that needed fixing. These are now fixed in svn, except for the keyboard issue, for which source [0] would be very helpful if anyone has it?
Unfortunately this does mean I’m still looking for the original dreamcast-linux-010605.tar.bz2 (and the associated pre-built CDI and NRG images) - so if anyone has them, or knows where to find them, please let me know. I’m quite happy to host them locally, at least until the bandwidth runs out ^_^.
Btw for the BSD fans, there was supposed to have been a live netbsd disc floating around somewhere (the link from gxemul is dead) - has anyone seen it?
Edit: Nevermind, the NetBSD 3.1 image is actually included in the main netbsd mirror… having a look at it now.
Changes
* Fix LDS/STS FPSCR/FPUL instructions to raise FPU disabled exceptions (wasn’t very well documented in the original SH4 manual)
* Fix IDE dma read looping forever if the disc was removed or failed in the middle of the operation
* Fix crash when changing maple peripherals (this one was just boneheaded)
[0] The image itself does have quite a bit of source on it, but I can’t find the associated linux-sh-dc kernel patches against 2.4.0-test8. Which, of course, is the bit I actually need…
Updated 13 Feb: I don’t need the 2.4.0 source patch anymore - turns out its not a bug, that version was just hard coded to expect the keyboard on the 4th maple port, and I had it on the 3rd. Although, it would still be good to see it for the sake of the history.
Still working on the render rewrite which is now in the lxdream-render branch (which may or may not even compile, and certainly won’t work at the moment).
The frontend stage to extract the poly+vertex data out into a nice array format is working now, and it runs in just about negligible time. Current task is to execute the rendering from the vertex buffer, which should be pretty straightforward. So… once this is done we should have a renderer which is a) much cleaner/extensible, b) much faster, and c) about the same or even less code.
If only all software engineering was like that ^_^.
Trunk Changes
* Fix inverted mouse button sense
* Fix incorrect error response size for maple get_condition buffers
* Fix keypad keycode translations
* Fix SLEEP timing fubar introduced in 0.8.3
A funny thing happened yesterday… we found one out of 10 bonus holes, which actually did not have an exit defined. If we would imagine the game has gone public with that bug, urghs We could have probably renamed the game to “Stuck with Diamonds” then
well… we are currenty working heavily on world number 4, which is also know by “lava world” at the moment. there were improvements in the tileset again. we now have a prefinal lava world, with one level converted. if everything goes straight, we have a new video next week.
Hi all i finally got around to sorting out the RSS Feed for the Whole DCEmu Network, you can now check out http://www.dcemu.co.uk in the right column or http://feeds.feedburner.com/dcemunetwork, you now have access to hundreds of news items per day from the worlds best homebrew network.
Hopefully should also help people who are still suffering those damned DNS Issues with the sub domains
Real Life(tm) has been a little bit hectic lately, so there’s isn’t much to report for last week for lxdream. The render split is mostly done now, and will probably be merged back to trunk this week (as soon as I reintegrate the trans poly sorting). Unfortunately I didn’t really get any performance improvements out of it (well, I was probably a little hopeful there), but at least I didn’t lose any performance either, and it was worth doing for other reasons. Once that’s merged I’ve got a few small non-render issues to sort out, and then I’ll get back to the annoying rendering bugs…
In other news, dclinux 010605 is now hosted locally (as long as the bandwidth holds out), including a self-booting NRG image (thanks to The Gypsy), check it out on the wiki. Note that you’ll need the latest svn trunk to boot the nrg image properly.
And finally, I see that MAME now has a mostly complete AICA driver, thanks to ElSemi, kingshriek, dknute & R.Belmont. *jaw drop*. That… will _really_ help ^_^.
Trunk Changes
* Fixed a couple of d’oh-level SH4 bugs (thanks to dknute for pointing them out)
* Quick hack to get the dclinux nrg booting. Full update to follow soon.
If you have any problems with it, go back to T9/1. This version is pretty broken (lots of unfinished modifications) but I want to know how badly
Again, too many changes to list. Some bug fixes (to SH4 recompiler as well). PAD plugin now enforces 5% dead zone in analog stick center position - this should cure "cursor keeps running away" problem in some games. New AICA/ARM code (back to interpreter for now) sounds much better, no DSP yet. More messages will now appear in English, in future it will be possible to support many languages (via translation files or something like that).
There's new system of identifying GD-ROMs and MIL-CDs - it's main purpose is to enable MMU where necessary. The database is far from complete though, so some GDs will not be recognized. Please report those, but do make sure to provide proper title, MD5 sum computed by Makaron, region, and whether it is Windows CE game or normal one. DO NOT REPORT PIRATED SOFTWARE. I will ignore/delete such reports on sight. Same goes for dubious ones, with spelling errors and such.
If you happen to stumble upon WinCE game that is not recognized you'll need to enable MMU manualy in the ini file. And let me repeat that again - MMU requires a damn fast CPU. 2,4GHz Core2 Duo is the absolute minimum - the faster the better.
The multi-threaded GD reading is not yet finished. You might want to enable it anyway, see GDROM.ini for that, but be advised that some games will refuse to boot or hang with this option enabled. Most should work.
Every WARP ZONE allows to jump over 3 levels, which should be timesaving a lot.
