Classic99 Updates

[Gazoo]

<snip>

That Sector read/write you talked about was mentioned by someone long ago but I never saw it used.

 

Look at LOAD/SYS or SCSI/SYS or DISK/SYS for the Geneve as examples of reading sectors.

 

 

Gazoo

Edited December 19, 2011 by Gazoo

[RXB]

Ok there it is as I never owned or used a Geneve. Thanks....

[+OLD CS1]

I have an old 2GHz P4 Dell with 2GB RAM and a video card with S-Video on my entertainment system. I decided to try out Windows 8 on this machine, and I am fairly impressed with its performance, though after a a couple of days of sleep/wake/sleep/wake along with Flash-based video streaming and DVD playing it requires a restart.

 

Anyway, I decided to put Classic 99 on it and it runs just fine in my tests of the included cartridges. Though when I left "Car Wars" running for about four minutes Classic 99 simply terminated -- no error, no pop-up, just gone.

 

Full-screen does not work well at all. I cannot recall if that was intentional (removed as Tursi was planning before) or a problem with Windows 8. Just thought I would drop that on ya.

[Tursi]

I haven't changed anything to do with Full Screen, nor am I aware of any crashes at this time. Could be Windows 8, could be you are just hitting a bug. As for full screen, it's never worked well on some systems, so hard to say if it's Windows 8 or not. The 15-bit rendering mode it uses is way, way, WAY out of date though. Should see a nice improvement in rendering performance if I ever get it rewritten.

[TEXAS_JOE]

As silly as it sounds, it might make a difference if you drop the colour depth down to 16-bit.

 

I'm running a linux machine at the moment and Classic99 works wonderfully except you can't copy and paste text into it. (Vice works fine with clipboard as do others, but it's a Wine issue, not a classic99 issue I suspect)

 

My full screen works better in linux than it did on windows .... the mind boggles.

[Willsy]

Full screen works fine on my 32 Win 7 box. Aint tried Win 8 - probably buy a new laptop for that - but I'm gonna run this laptop until the wheels fall off as I love it to death (Toshiba Tecra M5 in case you were wondering).

 

I've noticed that Classic99, out of all the emulators, is the 'hungriest' in terms of CPU utilisation. Is that due to the video rendering routines?

 

Mark

[Tursi]

I've noticed that Classic99, out of all the emulators, is the 'hungriest' in terms of CPU utilisation. Is that due to the video rendering routines?

 

Can't say for sure, I haven't looked at the other emulators. But most likely. Classic99 renders the screen in a device-independent fashion and makes Windows handle the translation to your actual display settings. 15-bit was fastest on my VooDoo2 back when I did it, so that's why it uses that. I believe Classic99's the only emulator that does it that way (since having the emulator render for the screen is faster). These days 32-bit will likely be the fastest as most graphics cards are rendering at that depth internally now.

[RXB]

Classic 99 works fine on my Mac Pro under Windows 7 and I can run 4 at once with no effects on my performance even while using Itunes, IE, Hypercam and Skype.

[+OLD CS1]

It severely impacts my Core2Duo 1.66GHz XP x64 laptop during certain tasks, in particular during paste, and especially when running it at maximum performance. The latter I expect, though it does lock up other tasks in Windows.

 

I can, however, run three or four instances on this computer under regular performance with no problem.

[Tursi]

Don't use maximum performance -- no, I'm not being trite. It doesn't work. On most machines it's slower than CPU Overdrive (sometimes it's not). The problem is that the emulator sort of runs away internally in most cases and gets hung up on itself. I'll get to it eventually. It can even crash the video driver if the vendor doesn't deal with being hit really hard with updates (that's sort of an old problem that is rare today)

 

Paste however, doesn't run the core loop any differently than normal, so I would expect that performance differences noted during paste, especially severe ones, would be circumstantial -- that something else is actually causing the issue. Also, I've had several reports of issues particularly on laptops. Again, I suspect it's the mobile video drivers, because Classic99's performance is really heavily tied to how well the video driver can convert the video frames. That's been an issue since day 1 on Windows, really. I expect that to change when I change the rendering engine, but I haven't started that yet.

[unhuman]

Well - Paste does automatically turn the emulator into Overdrive.... It was a feature request I made and you honored. It rocks.

[RXB]

Don't use maximum performance -- no, I'm not being trite. It doesn't work. On most machines it's slower than CPU Overdrive (sometimes it's not). The problem is that the emulator sort of runs away internally in most cases and gets hung up on itself. I'll get to it eventually. It can even crash the video driver if the vendor doesn't deal with being hit really hard with updates (that's sort of an old problem that is rare today)

 

Paste however, doesn't run the core loop any differently than normal, so I would expect that performance differences noted during paste, especially severe ones, would be circumstantial -- that something else is actually causing the issue. Also, I've had several reports of issues particularly on laptops. Again, I suspect it's the mobile video drivers, because Classic99's performance is really heavily tied to how well the video driver can convert the video frames. That's been an issue since day 1 on Windows, really. I expect that to change when I change the rendering engine, but I haven't started that yet.

 

Well even Microsoft will no longer support XP so everyone will have to move to Windows 7 soon and that will fix many problems as a minimum of 4Gig is required for Windows 7 and single processors running Windows 7 are sloooooow.

Besides Windows 8 will be out shortly and will make minimum of 4 CPU chips the standard. Tied into this is that all video cards will be 1Gig minimum and should handle anything Classic 99 and do.

[Tursi]

Overdrive during paste -- that's true. I guess that could be a cause at that!

 

As for the system, well... yeah, more or less true, but expecting hardware to catch up was never a design goal. Classic99 has always been a little hungrier than the other emulators. I remember back in the early days recommending a P2, and having one site post that with "I hope that's a joke". I went in and clarified that it actually did run fine on a Pentium-133 (and it did), but that my recommendation was higher due to the variances in systems.

[+OLD CS1]

Well even Microsoft will no longer support XP so everyone will have to move to Windows 7 soon and that will fix many problems as a minimum of 4Gig is required for Windows 7 and single processors running Windows 7 are sloooooow.

Besides Windows 8 will be out shortly and will make minimum of 4 CPU chips the standard. Tied into this is that all video cards will be 1Gig minimum and should handle anything Classic 99 and do.

 

The minimum requirements for Windows 8 are 1GHz processor, 1GB RAM for 32-bit and 2GB RAM for 64-bit, and a Direct-X 9 compatible video card. Windows 7 and 8 both run surprisingly well on some older hardware. I have upgraded a number of machines with fairly low specifications to WIndows 7 with a humanly perceptible increase in performance -- over both Windows XP and Vista. You can see my previous post for my equipment specs, which both meets and exceeds these requirements.

 

We have two more years with XP (XP x64 will be retired with Server 2003, as they are the same) and I can pretty much guarantee there will be hold-outs well after that. Pretty much the same types of people who still use either 98SE or 2000 these days. And, of course, they'll bitch and moan when various packages stop supporting them. hehehe Try telling someone running 2000 or older that, no, there are no anti-virus programs which you can run. And when Firefox decided to drop XP SP2 and older, the shyt really hit the fan.

[Tursi]

While doing work last night I realized that I was making use of features I had never gotten around to releasing! So here's a minor update:

 

1) MBX bank switching preliminary (use type '!')

2) Finally, added Retroclouds contribution for loading and saving Breakpoints. Sorry for taking so long!

3) Added debugger option (in menu) Break on Illegal Opcode

4) Added warm reset option - doesn't erase RAM before resetting.

5) Fix NEG opcode - was not setting C

 

http://harmlesslion.com/software/classic99

 

Thanks!

 

[OX.]

While doing work last night I realized that I was making use of features I had never gotten around to releasing! So here's a minor update:

 

1) MBX bank switching preliminary (use type '!')

2) Finally, added Retroclouds contribution for loading and saving Breakpoints. Sorry for taking so long!

3) Added debugger option (in menu) Break on Illegal Opcode

4) Added warm reset option - doesn't erase RAM before resetting.

5) Fix NEG opcode - was not setting C

 

http://harmlesslion....tware/classic99

 

Thanks!

 

Hi Tursi, the menu "Help - About" screen is showing the version you have linked here to be version 361 not 362, wrong version or typo?

Edited July 1, 2012 by OX.

[Tursi]

Thanks for letting me know, somehow I missed a step and the new zip wasn't uploaded!

 

The new archive is smaller than the old one, so if anyone notices what I left out, please let me know

 

Anyway, it's fixed, please re-download.

 

[OX.]

Thanks for the update Tursi

[rocky007]

thanks for update

[RXB]

Yea thank you for update Tursi.

[kl99]

thanks for the update! really appreciating your work!

[Tursi]

Been a bit of a while, eh?

 

CORE:

-Made CPU a class object to support multiple instances

-BUGFIX: 2-word X opcodes which executed a relative jump would use the wrong address offset (fixes Jumpy)

-Fix startup hang when no cartridge selected (like a new install)

 

Video:

-Implemented early (buggy) support for the F18A's 9900-based GPU. This emulation is not considered production quality yet. But you can step and debug code (while the main CPU incorrectly halts). No other F18A registers or graphics is implemented and the updated/unsupported opcodes are also wrong. Experimental/early use only.

 

Disk system:

-Added AutoMap DSK1 option to disk system (lets you run many DSK1 centric titles from any disk index automatically)

-New code to handle global disk option types

-Warn in debug log if DSRLNK is called with any workspace other than GPLWS (>83E0)

-Update VDP heatmap when reading records and programs from disk

-Added some TODOs

-Fix bug checking file type with OPEN on Image files - was causing the TI Assembler to throw a DSR error on COPY of a DV file

 

Cartridge System:

-Added ability to recognize .C, .D, .G and .3 files in the User->Open menu (old format was only C.BIN, D,BIN, etc)

-Also recognizes "(Part x of y)" in the file name and will search for up to 3 parts, because that was a dumb idea.

-Allows filenames longer than 31 characters

-Allows filenames longer than 64 characters in the INI file

 

http://harmlesslion.com/software/classic99

 

[OX.]

Thanks Tursi

[+Lee Stewart]

Indeed, thanks, @Tursi!!

 

However, no sector writes for disk images yet, right?

 

...lee

[OX.]

Any chance of save states and floppy disk image writes in the near future Tursi? These are real biggies and would bring Classic99 on in leaps and bounds.