How is Harmony for newer games vs Uno?

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Yes, actually I am surprised that hardware development is moving that slow. But then, it is a small community.

[Keatah]

There are surely faster and better ARM processors available now. But do the games and developers need them? And is it worth it to redesign Harmony/Melody?

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Usually developers take everything they can get.  

[Mr SQL]

2 hours ago, batari said:

I think flashcarts and (2600 games, for that matter) are kind of like this, as there isn't a strong push to obsolescence after a few years. In a way, these flashcarts won't ever really be "obsolete." I mean, it was actually more than 12 years ago that the first Melody board was developed, and 9-10 years since DPC+ was developed, yet we still call these games "new."

X2 even my 1981 Arcadia SuperCharger will never become obsolete as a flashcart because it plays all of the classic 2K and 4K Atari games as well as the 6K SuperCharger games opening up a large library of hundreds of titles.

 

All the newer carts are backwards compatible with this library as well as the 16K and 32K Atari games - being able to support 64K games and ARM extension games is desirable too and I currently have to switch between multiple flashcarts to play all of these games.

 

 I think the fragmentation comes when an isolated format or extension is developed that is hard to play everywhere, I also think we're seeing both classic technology and DPC+ being pushed a lot further with some of the new releases.  

[+batari]

6 hours ago, Keatah said:

There are surely faster and better ARM processors available now. But do the games and developers need them? And is it worth it to redesign Harmony/Melody?

There are faster ARM chips with more memory, yes. But I think you get diminishing returns pretty quickly with faster and faster chips, and the cost ramps up pretty quickly. Not to mention the greater pin count (or needing to use BGA chips) increases assembly cost, and other considerations.

[+stephena]

Also, extending Stella to support newer ARM versions may not be feasible.  We don't have 100% emulation for the current ARM chips; going to something newer will make things that much harder.  I mention this since I think a lot of developers are using Stella to at least prototype their games, to speed up development with not having to use hardware all the time.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Of course any ARM game or hardware developers are more than welcome to support the Stella team and improve ARM emulation.

[+batari]

10 hours ago, stephena said:

Also, extending Stella to support newer ARM versions may not be feasible.  We don't have 100% emulation for the current ARM chips; going to something newer will make things that much harder.  I mention this since I think a lot of developers are using Stella to at least prototype their games, to speed up development with not having to use hardware all the time.

I think that Stella support for any new cart board is one of the most crucial elements in its adoption by developers. Using only real hardware to develop games can be pretty cumbersome.

 

Though the current emulation core for Melody covers nearly all use cases, there have been a few instances where the C compiler wanted to use libraries that aren't currently supported in emulation, which led to code working on Melody but not in Stella. At some point I want to find a lightweight ARM emulation core and help fill in these gaps in the emulation as the libraries in question can be useful for programmers.