toxie
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Minor update for the Nuance emulator, 0.6.1: https://sourceforge.net/projects/nuance-nuon-emulator/files/latest/download Some optimizations and some timing improvements. Also made some progress understanding the T3K timing issue (leading to the hangs), but unfortunately still no progress fixing it. ?
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There are no really fancy features needed: Its simple SSE2 CPU code (which every PC out there nowadays should have, and otherwise the application should crash anyway) and simple OpenGL code, so also nothing fancy needed. As for the dumps: Its enough to just decompress these files (or mount them to a virtual DVD drive and then copy from there) and put the Nuon folder from there (i think that was what it was called) somewhere on your HDD.
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Very weird. So far i tested 3 setups (2 mid range laptops, 1 highend desktop), all did work well.
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As i pretty much hit a brick wall with these weird hangs/crashes on Merlin Racing and Tempest 3000, here the current status/release: https://sourceforge.net/projects/nuance-nuon-emulator/files/Nuance_060.zip/download Please read the Demo/GameCompatibility.txt (especially for the workarounds for Tempest 3000 to make it work a bit more reliably) and the readme.txt for the keyboard mappings. And of course, this is all done in honour of the original author of Nuance, Mike Perry! I mainly continued all of this to not let this great piece of technology of him bitrot even more.
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Just a small update: Project still alive but want to sort out the random hang in T3K first before going for a release.
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Maybe it already works? Didn't try that one yet.
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If i can manage i'll try to record a video soon. For those brave enough, the updated code is all in the svn mentioned in the first post. Later-on, as said, i'll package up a new release, but first want to finish up my todos.
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Fortunately, he was a really really good coder, also a lot of the code was already 'complete'. There were just some bugs that one could 'spot' by staring at things and some timing/multi-threading based issues he did not notice back then, as simply computers were too slow, so it 'mostly' worked anyway without crashing/hanging most of the time. It's still not perfect by now, but enough that i also finally could start a game of T3K from level 1 and play for quite a while! (although still involves a bit of 'luck' to be able to select level 1, or a rather fast desktop PC )
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Thanks! In the meantime i made some progress, i think i finally understood where the majority of hangs come from, the question is just how to fix it 'properly'. With a not-so-whacky fix i could play through complete shareware Doom, so yay! Unfortunately, f.e. Merlin Racing and T3K react more 'chaotic', so while they hang less often, they still hang from time to time. ?
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I will announce a new release version here as soon as i think that i fixed (and did not break anything new ;)) enough.. I still have the hope to find some more fishy code and hopefully get rid of the hangs.. ? The thing that bugs me with T3K gameplay so far are the missiles vs the spikes.. That's tricky for sure..
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Stunning update on Nuance: I just finished my first level of T3K on my not-so-awesome/mid-range laptop, with non-stuttery sound and reasonable framerate.. Old bad news: There are STILL some bugs in the emulator hiding somewhere that make most games hang at some point, and in T3K one also first needs to visit the vector test to prevent this hang from directly happening on level select.. Also lots of other bugs fixed and (at least) Ballistic and Merlin Racing now display fully correctly.
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*ping* for my questions above.. Thanks!
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Hi! Let me quickly introduce myself before i start with my actual topic: I fell in love with Tempest back in the Jaguar days, and am still a fan til today (along with all other Llamasoft spinoffs that were released over the years). I also collect old consoles and games, but still miss one of the preferred NUON players to ever have enjoyed T3K. ? So, back a decade ago, i fooled around with Nuance, the emulator, and now wanted to check back on the status of emulation. To my surprise, there are NO new emulators whatsoever. ? But, also to my surprise, the source code of Nuance was released on http://www.dragonshadow.com/ So i thought: why not give it a try and make it somehow compile again: Out of the box it did not work, as it missed some old libs, but thanks to the net, i could find versions that are close enough. And after some more time, i could make it compile and also work on my setup! So here it is: https://sourceforge.net/projects/nuance-nuon-emulator/ And in the meantime i also made some more cleanups and fixes and optimizations, which lead to some bugs being fixed with (at least) Ballistic, T3K and Merlin Racing. Unfortunately, (at least) Merlin Racing and T3K still crash or hang during actual gameplay, and i don't know if i can actually make these work at some point, given that i don't have the experience of the passed away author. But nevertheless, if this helps to get things going again with NUON emulation, then i'm glad to have helped. There are still some things i want to do, especially with regards to optimizations and some fishy code, so there will at least be some more updates to the code until i need to pass this to somebody else. Now some request: Does somebody know if Merlin Racing or T3K gamplay ever did work with some version of Nuance, with some special cfg setting combination maybe? Cause i thought i played T3K back in the days with it, although it was at <5 fps for sure. EDIT: Oh, one more thing: Does somebody know if someone else also already started with tweaking the released source, so that we could combine our efforts? I couldn't find any indication myself though.
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