Upcoming Virtual Jaguar 2.0.0 release

[Shamus]

Real CD support is something that has long been in the works for VJ, and I had it up to the point where it would actually read and attempt to boot a real Jaguar CD but had to put it aside. But it's definitely something that *will* go into VJ at some point.

 

I should add--another guy came along and contributed a patch that reworked the Butch code in VJ quite a bit (he had the ability to test the actual hardware) but unfortunately he built his patch against an older version of VJ--it'll take some work to get it to where it works with the newer version. I'm hoping that he'll come back at some point and adapt his work to the current SVN trunk, but in the meantime at least we have something to refer to.

 

So, the short is answer is, real CD support: Yes. CD image support: Probably not.

[+rdemming]

So, the short is answer is, real CD support: Yes. CD image support: Probably not.

 

Hhhhmmmm, I suppose that if only real CDs are supported, I could just mount a CD-image in DeamonTools or Alcohol120% to present itself as a real CD?

 

Robert

Edited July 6, 2011 by rdemming

[Shamus]

Well, as long as the virtual CD drive works with libcdio, I don't any reason why it wouldn't work.

[Zerosquare]

I believe you don't necessarily have to emulate Butch for CD games to work. AFAIK all games use the CD BIOS, which could be replaced with a wrapper that would call equivalent high-level native CD functions.

[Shamus]

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Jaguar CDs are multi-session CDs, with the game portion in session #2. Not only that, the data is audio data--you don't get to touch that stuff with high level CD BIOS calls. And for stuff like the VLM to work with audio CDs, it needs to read the subchannel data.

 

Believe me, if it were that simple to do, I wouldn't have been trying to find something that actually has low level access to the CD-ROM drive (like libcdio) and just used SDL for all of that and been done with it.

 

While it would be possible to do it the way you suggest, you'd still need low level CD functions for dealing with multisession and audio data, and you'd have to write some custom loading routines... In short, it would be a lot of work to reproduce what's already done by the CD BIOS.

 

Besides that, it would be a hack and I'm trying to avoid hacks like that in VJ--when we inherited the code from Mr. Raingeard it was shot through with them and it took some time to scrub them all out. Did I mention that I hate hacks?

[doctorclu]

So I've been following this off and on, where can find the current compile of the Mac version?

[Shamus]

Post #170 (back on page 7 of this thread).

[+rdemming]

Well, as long as the virtual CD drive works with libcdio, I don't any reason why it wouldn't work.

 

If it works, it would be a great way to encrypt Jaguar CDs in an emulator instead of wasting physical CDs to encrypt them on a real Jaguar.

 

Robert

[doctorclu]

Post #170 (back on page 7 of this thread).

 

Thanks! I used to have this working so trying to figure this out again.

 

I have a G4 1.5 ghz Powerbook. I go to run VirtualJaguar and the the application open and then closes back.

 

I've worked to put this in more or less the root directory. I remember once changing a config file to show where the boot rom is, and a few other things. I've also reinstalled the GCC files for the Mac. What else is there to do?

[Shamus]

Not sure why it isn't working, maybe it's not a universal mac binary? goldenegg would know more about it than I would.

 

Latest rev (r363) fixes a few emulator related bugs (thanks CJ!) and adds key shortcuts to the "Insert Cart..." dialog (press the first few keys of a "ROM" name and the list will jump there). Enter or double-click selects the current "ROM", ESC dismisses the dialog (you can, of course, still press the handy little "Insert cartridge" button on the lower right ). Also, BIOS is now loaded from the "software" directory, there is no separate BIOS directory anymore or paths; still working on presenting what's found to the user.

 

There's probably more, but I can't remember off the top of my head.

[ggn]

r364 Windows.

 

(btw, if people are interested in compiling their own windows builds, I could pack my mingw/msys install. With some small work -enviroment settings mostly- it could be made to run in other machines with no modifications. Of course the archive will be huge )

vj2_r364.zip

[goldenegg]

r365 for MacOS

virtualjaguar-macOS-r365.zip

[Putty]

Ggn. Could you update the compile guide? Rather have it well documented than having to rely on a dev environment thats floating around the web.

[ggn]

Ggn. Could you update the compile guide? Rather have it well documented than having to rely on a dev environment thats floating around the web.

 

No, because a) I can't remember 100% what I did to get my compiler environment working (and I did a lot of things there), b) Stuff gets obsolete so quick that whatever I write won't stay current for long.

 

What I'd suggest is if you want to compile vj, read again my posts on this thread (as I left a lot of hints for Shamus and other people trying to compile), and if you're still stumped then reply to this thread (or PM me if you wish) and I'll try to help.

 

(that's why I keep offering to upload my compiler environment somewhere - everything is solved there )

[Ricardo99]

go for it ggn....then maye I can see the difference between your libcdio and libiconv make files and mine. Might be able to see wth is wrong with it my end.

 

Tried those fixes you pointed to, but the bugger still wouldn't compile. Have a feeling I've missed something at install time with Mingw or Msys.

 

If you can get the install to me, I could stick it on my ftp server for those that want it. If it's ok with you anyway.

 

Cheers, Ricardo.

[CGQuarterly]

Will this new version of VJ do anything to address the graphics issues in games like Cybermorph?

 

Thanks,

 

Chris

[CGQuarterly]

Will this new version of VJ do anything to address the graphics issues in games like Cybermorph?

 

Thanks,

 

Chris

 

Nevermind. I got everything running and Cybermorph looks perfect! I use emulators to take screen shots for my website, so this is awesome. It runs VERY choppy on my computer, though. Is it because my computer is older? What are the approximate system requirements?

 

If I may add a request, can you please add an option to take screen shots?

 

Thanks!!!

 

Chris

[Shamus]

Couldn't tell you what the minimum system requirements are to be honest; you need a pretty fast machine and even that's no guarantee as parts of VJ are unoptimized at present and it's not a multithreaded app. So, yeah, it's stuff we know about, but will be addressed in upcoming versions.

 

As for screenshots, isn't that what PrtSc is for? I suppose it could be added, but probably not until other things are done, like the key config dialog.

[leech]

All I can say is "Awesome" been waiting for this to be picked up again.

 

Unfortunately after getting it compiled under my Arch Linux set up, I was rewarded with a box with a bunch of corruption within the window, and the UI options, when I'd click anything, it would seg fault.

 

So out of curiosity, are you designing this with the QtCreator? I have one of the Nokia N900s and think it'd be epic to get VJ on it, though I'm not sure exactly how well it would run, not to mention is it even possible? Seeing as how it sounds like you've used a lot of architecture specific code, so porting to an ARM architecture would be a pain, if at all even feasible.

 

The QtCreator would allow a package to be cross compiled for Symbian/MeeGo/Maemo/Windows/Linux/Mac. I tried opening the .pro file with it, but it wouldn't compile.

[Shamus]

"IDEs? We don't need no stinkin' IDEs!"

 

And architecture specific code? Are you kiddin' me? I think you have us confused with someone else. When I was looking around for a portable assembly language I finally found what I was looking for: The C compiler. So yes, it should be possible to compile and run on any architecture that has gcc on it (and the dependencies too).

 

And compiling and running under Arch (or any flavor of Linux for that matter) should be possible, but I couldn't tell you what your problem is without even so much as a backtrace. I ain't no mind-reader man, you got to throw me a bone.

[carmel_andrews]

I know this is 'cheating' a bit but in a future revision of VJ, how about including an MLM (or as they call it these days a debugger) or like they did with steem engine make two versions, one with and one without a debugger

 

The purpose of the debugger would be three fold, namely to fix any errors (either game bugs or gfx/sound issues) found in game roms (obviously this feature could only be used by those knowledgeable of 68000/jaguar coding and the jaguar memory map), the other two possibilities are to using the debugger to hack into games, i.e findng infinite lives, energy etc or change/modify the games gfx thus making a new variant of that game and the last possibility would be to using the debugger to actually program jaguar ML games (as long as you had an embedded simple assembler/editor as part of it)

[Shamus]

This is planned, and will likely take the form of a separate build.

[CGQuarterly]

As for screenshots, isn't that what PrtSc is for? I suppose it could be added, but probably not until other things are done, like the key config dialog.

 

Thanks for the reply. Certainly the screen shots thing shouldn't be a priority or anything, but it would be great if you could add it in later. PrintScreen works, but sometimes it's hard to do if you have a game running at the same time. I don't want my shots to say "Paused" across the screen, or anything, so I have to take the screen shot while I'm playing the game. A lot of emulators let you set whatever key you want to use to take a screen cap, and I appreciate that as someone who uses emulators primarily for this reason. Additionally, using PrintScreen means that I have to crop the picture, and that's just one extra step that I don't want to have to deal with every time.

 

Thanks for you consideration,

 

Chris

[ggn]

Right, me little diamonds, here it is - almost half a gig of my abominations . What's in there? Well,

 

• msys, which is a unixey shell for windows
  
• mingw with gcc 4.5.1 (so it's a recent version, kindof)
  
• svn
  
• the source of vj, and all supporting libs compiled and ready
  
• prolly a few more things that I forget
  

 

DISCLAIMER: I haven't done this again and what I'm suggesting below is a good educated guess on what should be trouble-free installation, you're doing this at your own risk of course! I think that nothing bad can go wrong but you can never know with these things - you have been warned! Before I forget, my PC is running Windows XP 32-bit with SP3, and I'm running it as Administrator. Also, I have tortoisesvn installed, which was used for the initial check out of the vj source as the command line was barfing out (after that though I have no probs using the command line version - your mileage might vary on that too).

 

So, what to do? I guess downloading the archive would be a good first step . UnRAR it to C:\ and after a few minutes you will have around 2.4gigs of things under the folder MSYS. It would be possible to relocate this in another location, but I'm not sure I know all the paths to change, so I'd recommend putting it there. Before starting, you ought to add the following environment variables to your system:

 

QMAKESPEC=win32-g++
QTDIR=c:\msys\1.0\home\Administrator\vjdeps\Qt
PATH=%path%;c:\msys\1.0\mingw\bin\;c:\msys\1.0\home\Administrator\vjdeps\Qt\bin\;C:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN\bin

 

If you're adding those to your system, you'll modify the PATH string, just include

;c:\msys\1.0\mingw\bin\;c:\msys\1.0\home\Administrator\vjdeps\Qt\bin\;C:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN\bin

there, not the whole string I have above. If you don't wish to do this, you could edit c:\msys\1.0\msys.bat and add those 3 strings there (I assume adding them at the top of the file should be sufficient). The later method has the added bonus of being 100% portable (yeah I know, I could have added this stuff before archiving my setup, but, well... ). One last thing I should mention, my home folder is c:\msys\1.0\home\Administrator\. This might mean that msys creates its home folder depending on the name of the account you're logging on windows. If what I write below doesn't work, try renaming the "administrator" folder to your username's.

 

After this, you should be able to start MSYS properly by running c:\msys\1.0\msys.bat (put a shortcut to your desktop or favorite launcher if you prefer too). If all went well, the default terminal (rxvt) should start and await for your commands . If all went well, typing 'dir' and pressing enter should give you something like:

 

msys-mingw_setup.sh  vj  vjdeps

 

So, without fear or passion, type:

 

cd vj
svn update
make

 

This goes to the vj dir, fetches the latest source from trunk and compiles it. If all goes well, after a lot of compiler messages the output will stop and you'll see a happy message saying "success!". Well, pat yourself in the back, you've just built vj . It's located in the debug/ directory, and if you like you can use the command 'strip' to remove debugging information (i.e. 5 megs of junk ).

 

Well, that's about it more or less. I really hope this is useful for somebody and it'll run without much fuss on your system. Good luck!

Edited July 11, 2011 by ggn

[Ricardo99]

wow, nice work ggn.

 

Sorry I didn't get back to you, had a bit of a crap day yesterday tbh....nothing to bad, it was just a crappy day.

 

Right...well.....do you want me to still whack this on my ftp server? I might take a bit of flak from the sys admin, but I can sort that out I think

 

Just let me know and once I manage to get IE to actually complete the downlaod I'll pop it on the ftp and post the link.

 

Cheers, Ricardo