ADAMEm/SDL news

[Geoff Oltmans]

After a long break and some prodding from someone using the emulator (intvdave on here) I've been tinkering with the emulator again. Just thought I would update the group on the current status of what I've been up to.

There is an annoying bug where the emulator will hang after about 30 minutes. I'm hot on the trail of a fix for this. This is due to a rollover condition in the video interrupt routines. I should have this addressed in the next couple days.

Dave's using a nifty Coleco Vision/Intellivision -> USB HID adapter which allows you to use those joysticks as any normal USB controller. I have modified the joystick handling routines to scan the entire range of buttons that a normal Coleco Vision controller supports (the two side buttons, the keypad, and the two additional buttons found on the Super Action Controller). I'm also working out a joystick config file that will allow you to remap the buttons however you wish. I also intend to allow you to 'shift' the keypad buttons by using the 'aim' button (the right button) on a real Coleco Vision controller. The idea is that some of the emulator controls could be used (Game Reset, Computer Reset, Pause, etc) to the keypad after the aim button is held down for a period of time, say 3 seconds or so. These changes are by no means tied to that specific USB adapter, but I think its fair to say that it's pretty cool to have the option to be able to use the actual Coleco Vision controllers with the emulator!

I have a revamped/improved sound emulation driver, with some rudimentary support for the Yamaha PSG found in the Eduardo's Super Game Module. It supports the three additional voices + noise, but only square tones currently, you can't control the envelope for each voice yet. A test image someone posted on AtariAge will discover the "chip" and run, but I don't have any other software to try on it yet to really test it out that much.

I'd like to incorporate Doug's changes to support a second hard drive found in rev 1.81. I don't have sources for this so Doug if you're listening could you send your changes to me?

Lastly, I've been doing some cleanup in the driver itself removing some cruft. I also need to update the documentation and get this thing under source control. Doug I know has tinkered with it a bit and it would be nice to have the source where multiple people can work on it. I know Doug, Dale, and I discussed this several years ago and we set something up to use svn on adamcon.org. I use XCode for development on OS X and it has some team sync features that support svn, but I haven't really messed around with like I should. I am familiar with git, perforce, and star team, but svn, not so much.

Once I finish up the merge and documentation related stuff I'd like to make this release 1.9. Should be soon.

[LoTonah]

This is fantastic news! Please let me know if you need testers.

 

Oh, and a pesky request: cut and paste from other apps into the emulator?

 

Thanks, Geoff!

[telengard]

This sounds great, and I think I have the same adaptor and was trying to get it working on 1.81 and wasn't having much luck. Looking forward to this release!

[Geoff Oltmans]

Haven't lurked in a while... not much new on the emulator front to report... it's been a busy year! Open apologies to intvdave for leaving him hanging. May have to start tinkering again!